week 4

I ran into a couple speed bumps this week. I ordered a couple different mounts for the camera 2 weeks ago expecting them to show up pretty quickly but I didn't get them until today leaving me no time to put them to use. I do have them now and can't wait to put them to use this week.

Before I was pretty much using duct tape so secure the camera on the skateboard and car so these new mounts will help stabilize the picture and allow me more confidence that my camera will be safe on a car or other moving vehicle.

I was able to get much better shots on the skateboard using the duct tape and better lighting. I was planning on getting some different shots outside on the streets and in other skateparks but the weather stopped that pretty quickly so I will make sure to shoot as much as possible as soon as the ground is dry again. Here is a quick mix of the shots I got last night .



This week I plan to shoot more, record sounds and edit a soundtrack with them to apply to eyecon. I hope to get enough footage to start editing it all together in final cut and after effects to get closer to finishing.

Week 3

I spent this week refining my idea and I feel like I've finally honed in on a concrete way to arrange my project and show different aspects of motion through video. I shot a bunch more video with the Gopro and ordered a couple new mounting options that will make the final product a lot easier to get right. So far I have just been compiling video and haven't edited anything together yet, but I made this mockup in photoshop of how I see the final product looking with screen grabs from some of the video I shot.

Each cluster of videos, 4 in this mockup, will have a different subject with the camera filming forward, backward, left and right while mounted to the moving objects. In this one I used a truck, skateboard, snowmobile and motorcycle. Im still playing with what modes of transportation to use for the final product and am open to more ideas. I also mocked up a picture of lights in motion with a slow shutter speed as the background to emulate the futurist paintings and might have a slideshow of photos like that for the final video product. I used one I found on google for the background and then went and shot my own at a skatepark afterwords that I like a lot more.

I want to try it out this technique at different places to get different streams of light in motion. When it all comes together their will be multiple views of different motions playing at once.

Week 2 Progress

I shot more video with the Gopro, both under a skateboard and under my car to similar perspectives of motion and watching the wheels turn. I need to work on the lighting with the skateboard and making a better mount that will handle more movement. I also came into the lab and played with eyecon to get a feel for it and how I want to use it for the sound aspect of my project. After looking through some of the works of the futurists and their treatment of motion even with static forms like painting like these ones. 

I want to explore effects in final cut and after effects that might give it the blurred ripple effect like in the second painting and apply that concept to parts of my video. Overall I want to keep shooting and hone in on exactly how I want to represent motion in my video piece.

Progess Report #1

So far I have been playing with the gopro camera and the camera on my phone to come up with a more definite idea of how to portray motion through the video installation. I have filmed some short test clips with the camera mounted on the bottom of a skateboard showing the ground go by, the wheels spinning and the side to side motion of the trucks turning. I also want to mount it to the wheel of a moving car to get the camera to rotate around with the movement of the vehicle. I want to get as many clips of different types of motion as possible and then edit and refine my final product from there.

FINAL VIDEO

Waafa Bilal Lecture

Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi artist, and an Arts Professor in New York. I was somewhat familiar with his work before, having heard about his exhibition where he locked himself in an apartment in which people could shoot paintballs at him over the internet. He spoke about his different works over the years. He is an interactive and video artist. He is known for his controversial work Domestic Tension, or “Shoot an Iraqi,” which was the interactive installation that I had recognized his name from. The piece consisted of a paintball gun that could be controlled by people who logged into the internet. Bilal lived in the gallery in Chicago for a 30 day period and people could shoot at him with the gun 24 hours a day. The point of the work was for Bilal to experience what a regular Iraqi does in time of war, which is just about every day now. Bilal also spoke about another controversial work called Virtual Jihadi. In it, Bilal took a computer game called Quest for Saddam and altered it. The game was called The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi. In the game Bilal made himself a suicide bomber and is recruited on a mission to find former President Bush. The work was pointed at bringing attention to the Iraq war and racist and stereotypes in video games.
Bilal spoke about his latest piece called 3rdi.me and it was very interesting. He has took a camera and surgically implanted it into the back of his head. The camera is set up to take a picture every minute and upload it online. He did this work for a year beginning on December 15, 2010. He captured photos of what was behind him. In this work he tried to express the issue of privacy. The photos were uploaded online and his location was shown on the website by GPS. This was interesting because he turned himself into somewhat of a cyborg voluntarily. It shows how we are connected to technology, and in the future we are going to be connected with technology physically whether we like it or not.

Lecture : Miss Representation

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s film Miss Representation was an informational documentary about the current state of feminism in the United States and the representation of women in the media. The first thing that came up on the screen during the movie was “the media is the message and the messenger” which set the tone for the entire film. Statistics presented in the film, like that fact that of 78% of women hate their bodies and spend between 12 to 15 thousand dollars a year in beauty products tie in perfectly which what we have been learning about in this class for the entire semester. 

The documentary made apparent to young girls, “you can’t be what you can’t see,” referring to the lack of women in upper level jobs. The film said that women have to work twice as hard and earn half as much as a man while doing jobs twice as difficult. As a male with a prior understanding of the situation from my Race, Gender and Media clas, Miss Representation was an informational awareness video to the public about feminism in the United States. It was really an abbreviated crash course into what we looked at through the entire semester in class in my other class, with pictures and videos. The public has turned women to believing they can only be beautiful in a specific way and successful in life with certain career limitations. Women are unfairly treated in the United States and when given the opportunity to be on television, they are forced to present themselves in a sexually revealing way in order to appeal to the male audience. Overall I thought the film was very well made and reinforced the ideas that I was already introduced to by applying them to real people.