Art Media Pop Culture Trash

[Cisz]

Welcome to the first installment of.. whatever..

>> Fujiya & Miyagi - Ankle Injuries <<

Hypnotic, dice, hard work and dedication, and really big pixels.

[Guest GkJ-mo]

wtf?

[Karawasa]

There should have been a sixth dice, with a six on it as well...

[Cisz]

Welcome to the second installment of.. weird.. things.. or.. so..

>> Chemical Brothers - Let forver be <<

Michel Gondry at work. Kaleidoscopes, 70ies video feedback, morphing during movement, real sets, fake images, disorientation and broken beats.

[Guest GkJ-mo]

could you explain what this actually IS and what you are trying to achieve and whether the videos are made by you?

[Cisz]

I just happen to be interested in modern art and film making. I've taken some classes on the subject. And recently I found out that some people around the forum share my interest.

[Guest Sancdar]

There should have been a sixth dice, with a six on it as well...

But then it wouldn't be a Yahtzee!

[Cisz]

..bla bla.. ..third..

>> New Order - Krafty <<

Inverse rotation, stable focus, moving background, underweight, virtual camera.

[Guest GkJ-mo]

*blink* i will pro'lly never understand the sense of the socalled "modern art"

[Cisz]

You will. Just read the first part:

Have you seen krafty? Have you seen the matrix? (Example scene.) Or Nine Inch Nails - Only? Or Puff Daddy - Public Enemy 2000. Moby - We are all made of stars, and Cylob - Rewind, and this scene fron "The Cell" all have something in common.

They feature an unusual camera work, I call it inverse rotation.

Normally a camera is used in a way that mimics a human observer. It stands still, about 1.7m above the ground, is turned around a vertical axis or shifted parallel to the floor, usually in facing direction. Sometimes it's shaken a bit to imitate footsteps.

Sometimes the camera focuses on an object, like a person or a face. This is achieved by moving close to the object, or by zooming in (closeup).

Sometimes the camera gives an overview of a place, like a flat or a room or a field. The camera is moved away to give an overview of the room, or it pans - that is, it turns around a vertical axis, as if a human observer turns the head from one side to another (total).

Not so with inverse rotation. Here the camera is not rotating but moving on a circle around an object while allways facing towards it. Like in the closeup, the camera focuses on an object, but the background is still visible and part of the shoot, like in the total. Unlike the total, the background is seemingly moving, as the camera constantly changes direction, so the surrounding room gets distorted and blured and seems to disintegrate, while the object, allthough it seems to rotate, stays akwardly still in the center of atraction.

Krafty is an extreme example of this, allmost the entire video is done in inverse rotation. (A very close examination reveals some pans, and normal rotations around different axes.) The surrounding room get's a weird feeling about it, as it appears very 3D and orientated, as it is shown like in a pan in a total shoot, as in an overview, but at the same time looses some of the orientation by moving sideways to fast. Normal human vision is not like that, as the camera movement makes the room seemingly move around the observed object.

____End of part 1____

If you wan to know more about the technics behind this, read on:

This kind of camera action can be achieved by lots of methods. You can grab the camera and walk around the object, while allways changing direction to keep it in the center of attraction. you can use tracks on the ground, layed out in a circle, and drive the camera around the object on a wagon. You can mount the camera on an arm, as in Rewind or "The Cell". Or you can drive the camera sideways on a straight track while panning to keep the object in the center and maybe zoom in and out a little to compensate the size change (I assume that was done for Robbie Williams Rock DJ).

Or you can use a method similiar to the one in "The Matrix". They used a big number of photo cameras and aranged them on a staircase like path. Then they activated them in the right order, with the right delay, so that the resulting photos would look like the frames of a film when put together (this is the scene as it looks with the photos shown as a film). This is of course a fake, no film camera was involved and the nonexisting camera didn't move at all. Now the post production team uses morphing technologies, 3D rendering and modelling, and liberal photoshop correction, to remove all strings, wires, cameras and other unwanted stuff, and to fill in extra frames until the result looks super smooth (look here). This is even more fake, as the resulting frames are like 80% painted and rendered computer gfx. The original photos are more like a sketch for the frames that make up the resulting video. And finally a backgounrd is filled in to get the final scene. And gues what, the background is mostly cgi too. The method is called bullet time, because you can make the photo cameras shoot in a very fast sequence, so the resulting film, with all the extra computer generated frames, will look like an extreme slow motion, so even bullets seem to creep.

A company called timeslicefilms uses a similiar technic. Here is an example. They don't have the delay bewteen the cameras, so all fire at once and the result is more like a single photo taken from "all sides at the same time". But as in bullet time, most of the resulting frames are cgi. They use small cameras mounted into rings like this.

Now I have a homework for you: Whenever you watch a movie, or a video, or a tv ad, look for inverse rotations, bullet times and timeslice effects. You will notice that you have been surrounded by them for ages, you just didn't notice until today.

You don't have to thank me.

[Guest GkJ-mo]

erm... sorry, its not like i'd actually be watching movies at all...

[Cisz]

That I actually don't believe. You don't have a TV?

[Guest GkJ-mo]

im really serious about that one, i dont have a TV.

[Guest Sancdar]

Eh, I watch almost all of my TV on my computer anyhow. Movies too <_

[Cisz]

Gkj-mo - I'm not letting you out this easily.

You don't have acces to media? Books, magazines, internet, games, posters?

[Guest Sancdar]

I hear he's actually living in prison!

[Guest GkJ-mo]

sher i have... what kind of question is this?

[Cisz]

So you are using media and part of you're perception is indirect. Often you don't see reality itself, but medial repesentations of it.

As a result I predict that your medial observation of reality is highly influenced by the technical rules of said media. For example, anytime you see some sort of film, video or the like, you will be confronted with some sort of camera work, like angle, clipping, movement. Agreed?

[Guest Sancdar]

What if he's blind, eh?

[Cisz]

Then I will have to move over to sound design.

[Guest Sancdar]

I'm actually Helen Keller, sorry.

[Guest GkJ-mo]

when speaking of visual media (speaking of moving stuff) then it's made for one of 2 purposes:

- pure entertainment, in these things (read: movies) the story and/or dialogues are the important part

- education, here the only thing really important is the spoken text

in either thing i dont really care about camera movement or presented background

[Cisz]

Exactly. Thats an opinion I have heard over and over again in media classes.

So let me ask you some polemic questions. Is suggestive, manipulative or propagandistic media harmless, if you watch it just for fun?

@Sancdar - So let's go to a sculpture exhibition.

[Guest Sancdar]

when speaking of visual media (speaking of moving stuff) then it's made for one of 2 purposes:

- pure entertainment, in these things (read: movies) the story and/or dialogues are the important part

- education, here the only thing really important is the spoken text

I don't think either of your conclusions is true. If only the dialogue and overarching story of a movie were important, there would be no reason to present it as a visual experience. Rather, you could listen to just the audio or even read it in script or novel form and be satisfied. Somehow, people still flock to the theaters. The sets, camera work, and actors themselves contribute substantially to the feel of a movie. If you've ever seen a high school production of a play compared to a professional version, you've got a feel for the difference that two of those things makes. If these nuances of film weren't so important, directors wouldn't have jobs.

Even in educational films, the way the material is presented is often as important as the material itself. For this purpose, we have educational computer games, or children's books with morals distilled throughout the story. I suppose a better example would be examining a specific documentary. Last night, I went to a pre-release screening of Michael Moore's new documentary, Sicko. This is an examination and comparison of health care systems in the United States, England, France, and even Cuba. The information presented is rather one-sided, and far less complete than what I could learn from doing research on my own of health care practices (and indeed, I have had occasion to do some in the past). However, this documentary will reach millions of people, who would not otherwise look into the matter. Not only that, they are PAYING to be shown substandard information. This is clearly not a film for pure entertainment. It has no real story, or plot. People really are paying to learn things that they could learn for free at a library. The manner in which material is presented is incredibly important, possibly even more than what that material actually is.

So while you may not consciously care about camera placement and movement, pacing, lighting, or any other cinematic techniques, they do impact your entertainment or educational experience.

[Cisz]

The next one is..

>> Royksopp - Remind Me <<

Schematic, abstract, clear, objective, functional, life.