RSS feedMy Every frame has its purpose post got me thinking about how to produce video without my head influencing my editing decisions, so that the resulting video is a real snap shot of life or at least me without my videoblogging persona.
I have a few personal rules by which I videoblog, and one is that I use the same MiniDV tape over and over until it wears out, which forces me to be strict with the amount of footage I shoot, and how long I leave it before I edit. I also try not to keep track of what is where on the tape, which also helps enforce the “edit now” edict.
So I wrote a program to generate 10 completely random edit points, which I then used to log clips from my 60 minute work tape. For reference, although they’re totally useless to you, the random edits were:
- 25:08:00 for 39 seconds
- 39:53:00 for 34 seconds
- 33:37:00 for 57 seconds
- 55:41:00 for 27 seconds
- 21:46:00 for 34 seconds
- 08:55:00 for 7 seconds
- 26:01:00 for 44 seconds
- 42:48:00 for 48 seconds
- 17:15:00 for 6 seconds
- 34:41:00 for 19 seconds
There’s some interesting selections, including some footage from projects outside of my videoblogging, and I’ve masked the faces of the police who I shot (read: videoed) on Christmas day. Apart from that, I accepted everything that was selected by the random number generator, including the passer by saying “Keep an eye on the fascists, dude!”, which I so wanted to include in a vlog, but didn’t know how.
If you’re using the same recycled tape technique, then why not post a video of your own, using the same edit points as above, and tag it in mefeedia as randomedits.
The enclosed video is what I assume is the world’s first completely random computer generated videoblog post. Read into it what you will, because there certainly aint no narrative.
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