RSS feedCategory Archives for Blog/Vlog theory
In Lives on hold, I wrote about how photographs from the early days of photography, were posed, and gave up little about the people contained within. Andreas unfortunately interpreted this as meaning video is the first medium to capture the everyday, which is unfortunate, and certainly not what I meant.
Take, for example, the following photo, of a public demonstration against child labour (from the Library of Congress), probably taken on 1st May 1909. In what should be a serious concern for the protestors (child labour), against the backdrop of a rather important day of demonstration (Labour day), the two women look happy, perhaps proud, while at least three people are more interested in the fact that a photo is being taken than anything else. Only one person, a small boy at the front, perhaps exposes his real emotion, unaffected by the presence of the camera. While this is a snapshot of time, and shows some real people in real historical clothing, that’s about all it shows. It is a snapshot of a moment, but the moment that is captured is “several people emotionally affected by the presence of a camera”.
Much like measurement in quantum mechanics, most photos of this period are affected by the presence of the camera, with most people either posing emotionally neutral, or having their emotions affected by the act of “capturing the moment”. This in effect creates a false impression or representation of the moment.
Andreas suggested The difference [between photography and video] is simply that the photography freezes a blink of an eye in time, while the video records a series of blinks. This is of course technically accurate, but again not what I was referring to in my original post.
My point is that early photography is more posed and more a false impression of real life, because the camera generally affects people in the shot. Thus most photos of people of that time are distorted both emotionally and structurally, because the camera was a fascinating new invention. That tradition has continued to today, in that people still change their emotional and postural state whenever a still camera is nearby.
Video is generally ignored by people when they are the subject of it, or if not, at least the series of blinks [of an eye] do show moments of real emotion in a real moment of time. With photography, we as subjects still tend, completely out of habbit, to pose emotionally neutral or unrealistically happy, whenever we see ourselves being photographed. My family photo album is full of me smiling away throughout my life, when generally, my personal experience is much more the opposite. I’m not saying that still photos are posed and that video is not, but that video has more opportunity to capture people snapping out of their put on photographic poses.
That is what I meant by my original post.
Now, not only does the presence of a measuring device (the camera) affect the measurement (the photo), but the use of black and white (and sepia) as the display medium, also gives us a distorted view of reality. Colourised versions of black and white films show people wearing an array of multicoloured suits. Did the restoration technicians research the actual colours, or did they simply choose whichever colour they thought would look good? In black and white photos, we assume that people of the 1930s all wore grey. Did they? Was their world such a depressive grey wash, or has the emotion of The Depression coloured (sic) our perception of what life was really like at that time? The video enclosed with this post could be perceived as a dark and forboding ocean on an alien world, which is not exactly the impression that the residents of Bawley Point would like to give prospective visitors to their quite beautiful surrounding beaches.
Will we ever be able to preserve a snapshot of time, independent of the affect of the camera? Perhaps not, but the ubiquity of the video camera, and its ability to capture a series of blinks, will come a long way toward betraying false posing and should portray real people doing real things with real emotion. It is not black and white (sic), but it does give us a better opportunity than the still image camera.
Is this a videoblog? (random post selected from May 2004)
There’s a new ad for Australia out, which is about to be shown in foreign markets like the U.S., trying to convince people to come and visit this fine country. The ads were specifically designed to convince people already wanting to come here, that now is the best time to do so. The ad is funny, not because it is a comedy piece, but because it is so stereotypically ocker, a parody or caricature of Aussie life, an image of regional Australia which 80% of our population have never seen, and which most tourists who only do our capital cities, will never see.
The ad’s caused a bit of controversy here, because the tag line at the end is a girl on a beach saying “so where the bloody hell are you?”, the “bloody” supposedly being offensive language. But I find it offensive because Australians wouldn’t actually say that. Any Australian using “bloody” would surely say “where the bloody hell are ya?”. And anyway, this is all just a watered down version of that more traditional Aussie “where the fuck are ya?”. That’s the funny part, its a parody of us, and the joke is on the rest of the world who think it may not be.
So I decided to rip the ad and do my own audio track for it, doing a more realistic version. But guess what, the version posted on the Sydney Morning Herald site is a wmv streaming file. Safari on the Mac downloads it and pops it into Windows Media Player, but as we all know, there’s no way to save a stream in WMP. So I open it in Windows IE and of course the same thing, there’s no way to save it. Its streamed, so you won’t find it in the temp files directory either. I tried a few freeware apps to rip the stream, but I think they’re using some referer checking to protect the URL. The file is actually an ASX, which is a WMP playlist file, containing the URL for the media, but in this case, the URL is actually for a WMP reference file, which in turn points to another URL. Here’s the .asx URL: http://media.smh.com.au//player/playlist.mpl/18150_4.asx?pl=18150.4
Surely someone else has a copy online. Maybe the web site they’re promoting has it? That would make sense right? So I went to www.australia.com, which is embarrasingly user unfriendly. When you actually find the video, it redirects you to a branded site by a company called Vividas Europe Limited, which not only forces you to download special player software, with a file suffix of .tmp commonly used by viruses, but under XP at least, it prompts you for a security warning. This is from the company whose mission statement, from their yearly report, is to:
deliver the power of full screen, broadcast quality, video to the computer without software installation
They could have saved themselves setting up an entire company, if they just released the video as straight QuickTime or Windows Media Video.
Which begs the question: the ad is supposed to promote Australia to the rest of the world, so wouldn’t you want the video to be distributed as much as possible? Wouldn’t it make sense to make the thing fucking downloadable?!!! And why does the video have to be all alone on a separately branded page? Those days are over, its all just media, embed it right in the page for fucks sake. The design is an embarrasment to Australia.
So, if you know how to rip the file, please let me know, because I still want to dub the audio. Only now I have quite a few more ideas of what to add…
Following on from Every frame has its purpose and Random edits, is this video the capture of important fleeting moments, never to be repeated yet archived for eternity, or is it a waste of footage, out of context frames of video with limited or zero value?
Paul McGeough takes us through a chilling video made as propaganda by Iraqi insurgents. WARNING – Ths content may disturb some viewers.
Today is the first day of my second year of videoblogging. 156 videos in my first 12 months, that’s a video every two and a bit days.
To celebrate, I’ve decided to start shooting in widescreen. I’ve been gradually increasing the resolution and quality of my videos for a while now, and this just seemed like the next logical step. It wasn’t until I shot in widescreen that I realised why people probably aren’t using it more.
For starters, autofocus. What’s the point in being offset within the frame, if you’re out of focus? The solution is to either not to use distant backgrounds, or to set the manual focus before shooting, which means you can’t then pan out to an autofocused background. Thus more edits. Maybe if the camera had an easier way to shift the camera’s focus point with a simple finger or thumb press?
The second problem is that with my camera at least, while widescreen is encoded anamorphically, the CCD records in letterbox, effectively zooming in each shot. The result is that you need to hold the camera slightly further out than a regular 4:3 shoot, which for me was pretty much at arms length, causing my arm to tire more quickly.
An Interview With jadelr and Cristina Cordova
An interview with Chasing Windmills.