Artist Statement - Hyper-reality

(no my project does not have an actual title. they never do. ^^; I do not think in titles, only full lines.)

Whenever I am in an old building, a place that has been used for many years, I feel a very strong sense of time, and wonder what the lives lived within it were like, who the people were, what the places meant to them. For this project, I decided to take the opportunity to visually reveal what I would normally only feel or imagine. While I had initially considered various points of view of different people who had living in a space, I decided to pare it down to a single person, as it lends a more intimate, personal feeling. My good friend Haruna Tsuchiya danced as a ghost for a previous video project of mine, so my first thought was to ask her for a reprise of the role. I knew I did not want the standard sort of floating white sheet for my ghost, I wanted her to have more personality, to be more of an echo of one life lived in the place.
Various circumstances led to the setting of the video being inside and around the building that was formerly the Fredonia Normal School, built around 1900 and remodeled in the 1980s for apartment housing. Where once students roamed the halls with friends and worried over exams, eager and ambitious as myself, there are now placidly plastered walls and the tastefully muted decorations of tenants. Though I was unfortunately unable to gain access to the oldest, least remodeled portion of the building (due to structural safety issues), I was able to at least peer in the windows there. Also, having the bulk of the footage shot within the areas now lived in added an extra layer of history, allowing me to shift perceptions from how the place seems to lives there currently and seemed to lives passed.
I firmly believe that there is more to reality than what is seen, so it was by drawing on this that I created my hyper-reality, hoping to reveal clearly to others the glimpses of lives past that are usually only felt in vague emotions.

because everyone needs to see

cross-posted because it's amusing me ENDLESSLY right now.

CLICKIE!!!1!!!1!

lmfao.

revised proposal

Definitely doing ghosts, I'm really excited about the idea. Of course, it won't look much like what's currently in my head, but that's partly because the room in my head looks rather like the one I drew for capstone. XD Anywhichway..

Shooting footage of an old building - haven't decided exactly which yet, but currently thinking of the Opera House in town, or maybe (maybe!) the old campus building on Main St in town... Ideally, I'd like to use an old place that's still commonly used, that people walk through every day and continue to add layers of life and experience onto. (But, if there's a chance I can get into the chapel of the old college building..that'd beat out everything omg. <3 Wish the old movie theatre were still there, that would've been perfect...) As the video walks through/looks around the location, there would be faint glimpses of things which aren't currently there - an unfamiliar face reflected in a glass, someone fading quickly in and out of visibility, an object on a shelf that's not quite opaque... I want to give the sense of there being more within a place than we are usually able to see, to provide visual queues to what a place was in the past.

I also had suggestions to maybe show glimpses of what people once saw in the room, like them taking over your vision for a moment, a flash of how it used to look altogether maybe, and I like that too, I might do that as well.

I already have a volunteer among my friends to be a ghost, who danced in a video for me in the previous video class and was beautiful and perfect, so I'm really excited she's offered to help again. <3 (Tom's volunteering too, he just doesn't know it yet. XD ) The difficulty is in finding people that wouldn't look out of place in a past time period.. which's just as well, as I don't want to overdo it, either.
I have pleeenty of old objects sitting around (though I realise I should've grabbed a few more while home, hmm), antique shops are my friend.

Sound.. might actually be a first crack at what I've in mind for capstone - a bit of air movement, soft whispers, scraps of melody, or it might just be one of those elements, depends how the footage winds up looking and what's in my head while I'm shooting it.

proposal for hyperreality

I'm still sifting through a couple of different directions with this, but I think what I'd like to do is something involving a visual representation of things which are not usually visible. Initially I was thinking something along the lines of auras, but those aren't really of particular interest to me, and I realised ghosts could be quite nice to work with. Not like white sheets floating in mid-air, but more subtle things, flashes of light or glimpses of a faint face in a mirror, perhaps even transparent versions of objects which no longer exist. I would not film this in a cemetary or anything, but someplace more every day, probabaly an older building, but one that's still used on a daily basis. I'm really intrigued by the concepts of history, memory, and prior meanings which places and things once had to people who are no longer present. At the risk of a bit of overlap with my capstone, they're ideas I'd like to work with a bit more, and video allows for explorations of the concepts in different directions than what I'm able to do in my capstone. While Beneath the Dust relays more specific stories, this project would aim to convey more of the emotional, psychological feeling of things past in some form remaining in a place, providing a more immediate emotion.

link day!

a cheerful little flash commenting on fashion, peer pressure, and the stupidity of the human race.

google is not content to take over the earth, but has also set its sights on mars.

and, because tom's too antisocial to even use a blog, I'll take on posting this link. I'm not usually much for political conspiracy theories, but uhm.. this makes some damn frightening points, that we *really* should've picked up on, but didn't. shit. seriously? yes it's long, but worth it - watch the first five minutes at least, that brushes the surface (and does far more convincing than I ever could, I stayed up mad late with tom watching it rather than sleep, which says a lot).

(on a less political but equally thought-provoking note, I highly recommend this movie. well except the god bits, they got a little too arrogant for me. but other than that.. it was pretty fantastic.)

Apple-M!

I am so drained right now.

I did not put this project off. I had everything done but burning to dvd on Monday, with the extra time I tweaked a bit and re-exported. I have been in the lab past midnight for the last three nights. I fought trying to get the dvd program to encode my videos for five hours last night, trying everything I could think of.

So now that we know about apple-M, I'm re-exporting everything yet again (though it was all uncompressed before, dvdstudio still wouldn't read them, or would read some but not others), which'll take about another three hours, before I can even get back into the dvd program.

And I am not the only one who has officially spent more time trying to publish to a dvd than was spent filming and editing everything.

And here I was all excited to not have to put everything on dv tape again... that was nothing compared to this.

...on the bright side, the white board's looking pretty sweet about now, and I put together a whole list of random little things we've all learned throughout the hell of this week. And I know far too much about that goddamned program. And I feel so much closer to everyone else who's lived in the lab this week, there's that wonderful camaraderie built of shared trauma.

But I cannot even move.

...on another bright side, I am actually almost looking forward to spending 6 hours working on each of the two drawings I have left for my capstone. Only I have to go back to the lab at 6 again and start the third video track re-exporting, then whenever that's done, go in and make the freaking dvd.

If I'm not done tonight, I swear.....

render time

So I may have found the reason for my ridiculous render times of late. (Aside from the fact that I have been known to edit frame-by-frame, and have far more layers than anyone would ever think of using...though on this project, I don't seem to be that much in excess.)

It was the freaking compression encoding, which's what was messing everyone up getting the movie files into final cut. I turned compression entirely off when I went to start re-exporting my after effects files just now (had a few things to tweak and fix that hadn't shown up in previews), and holy hell IT'S GOING SO FAST!!!! Like in less than a minute, I could see part of the blue bar! It was taking like five minutes to get that far for me before. It's like, between a fifth and a fourth finished now, and granted this track doesn't have much done to it, but IT'S ONLY BEEN ELEVEN MINUTES.

*bouncing joyously all around the lab*

So anyone else having mad ridiculous render times... try that. ^^; wow.

I may have been making new versions of the happy mac render sign for no reason...

...nah. They're still so cute. <3

touch me and I will rape you in your sleep

I made a fantastic note to leave on a computer left alone to render while waiting on a 2... no, 3... no wait, more like 6 hour render of my own. It is here. (It is huge because photoshop said this size was a letter paper size. It's a little not, but it only needs shrunk a tiny bitlet to print happily.) Feel free to use. There will also be a spare copy or two probably floating around the lab.

I meant to post this last night, but Tom finished working earlier than I'd thought. (Well not really, really I was amazed how hard and long he worked at it... it shows, his looks sweet.)

The extention to Friday is perfect, I just need to fix some nitpicky things..rather, they're fixed now, did that before class, but now I've got to reexport everything.

Hope no-one'll need this comp for the next two days... and here's hoping my harddrive doesn't mind being used for over 24 hours straight. hmm.

Also here's hoping quicktime will re-compress and export my files nicely, it hasn't been yet. sigh.

DAMN YOU TOM AND YOUR STUPID LUCK.


edit: After one night of amusement, the rape sign is officially retired, Matt just lectured that it's inappropriate for a professional class, however funny it might have been late at night. He is, of course, right, but we still think it's funny. Will be making and posting a second version soon. (Wanted to try out different messages anyway, hee.)