Category: film/video

JumpCut

JumpCut is another new player in the “creative online community” business – the idea is to not only upload, share, and discuss, but also edit, collaborate and remix images and video online.

You can automatically import sets of images from flickr, too.

After having a quick play around with the editing interface, it seems pretty powerful and elegant. It’s set up to make quite sophisticated slideshows, with control over individual image duration (by manually entering values, though) and transitions, so it would also be relatively straightforward to use JumpCut to make and publish a very simple digital story using stills and an uploaded voiceover track.

OtherFilm Festival

On the OtherFilm Festival – 23-26 March
www.otherfilm.org

Otherfilm Festival is a four-day festival of expanded cinema, installation, sound ecology and Super8 workshops, and music/moving image performances. We start from a point of view that sees ‘cinema’ differently, as something that’s open to re-imagining; something that’s crying out to be liberated from predetermined structures and experiences. This year’s festival features a dazzling array of film and sound performances which expand traditional notions of ‘cinema’, installations which elaborate on the idea of ‘the screen’ and workshops which will introduce participants to ideas of acoustic ecology, as well as shooting, processing, editing and projecting Super8 and 16mm film.

To celebrate the role of Australian filmmakers in the international history of expanded cinema, Otherfilm are delighted to welcome Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, pioneering film artists and authors of the long-running avant-garde film journal, Cantrills’ Filmnotes. Arthur and Corinne will treat Brisbane audiences to a rare expanded cinema performance involving voice and body movement, objects, specially crafted screens and avant-garde film. The curators gratefully acknowledge that the Cantrills’ visit has been made possible with generous support from the Centre For Public Culture and Ideas.

This year’s Otherfilm Festival will be held at the College Gallery, Queensland College of Art, and the Globe Cinema, Fortitude Valley 23-26 March. Opening and Closing Night events and workshops (including materials) are free; Globe performances and screenings will be $6 or $10 for both nights.

Curators: Danni Zuvela, Joel Stern and Sally Golding
email: info[at]otherfilms[dot]org or see website for more details: www.otherfilm.org

iPod video

One of many interesting discussions about the affordances, limitations and possible uses of the video iPod is happening at Adrian Miles’s blog. As I say in the comments, I’m quite positive about the implications of the iPod for small-format, visually humble and sonically rich cinema – like what my team had in mind with the prototype digital story we produced in the masterclass last week, or this kind of videoblog post. Once I get clearances sorted, I hope to post a version of our “story” (which is not so much a story as an impression, since it didn’t have a script and instead used remixed location sound and stills) soon.

A frequently overlooked, but incredibly important innovation from that point of view is that the new iPod records audio at 44.1 khz, which is CD quality, instead of the lame 8 khz the previous models limited you to. Not only that, but it records in stereo, which makes an enormous difference for recording anything other than lecture notes.

I want one.

Who wants to buy me one for Christmas? Sigh. I’ve been blessed with gadgets from heaven…

[edit]: Nice article on the new iPod in relation to audio recording at iLounge, and another lengthy discussion at music thing.

The film of tomorrow

From scratch video, via Trine:

The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation…and it will be enjoyable because it will be true and new…The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.

-Francois Truffaut
published in Arts magazine, May 1957; see also this article.

I wonder if “tomorrow” will ever arrive? I know I’ll leap out of bed full of joie de vivre (and, apparently, speaking in an outrageous French accent) if it ever does.

Anyway, an appropriate quotation to bear in mind as I head into a 10 day interdisciplinary digital storytelling masterclass led by Daniel Meadows.

Ears before eyes

Among the very few good books (cultural/film theory-wise) on the auditory in “audiovisual” media, is Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, which I just flogged off a friend’s desk. The book’s lyrical foreword by Walter Murch is a more than sufficient antidote to my recent frustrated conviction that media and cultural studies are almost profoundly deaf:

We begin to hear before we are born, four and a half months after conception. From then on, we develop in a continuous and luxurious bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the trumpeting of her intestines, the timpani of her heart. Throughout the second four-and-a-half months, Sound rules as solitary Queen of our senses: the close and liquid world of uterine darkness makes Sight and Smell impossible, Taste monchromatic, and Touch a dim and generalized hint of what is to come.

Birth brings with it the sudden and simultaneous ignition of the other four senses, and an intense competition for the throne that Sound had claimed as hers. The most notable pretender is the darting and insistent Sight, who dubs himself King as if the throne had been standing vacant, waiting for him.

Ever discreet, Sound pulls a veil of oblivion across her reign and withdraws into the shadows, keeping a watchful eye on the braggart Sight. If she gives up her throne, it is doubtful that she gives up her crown.

The opening point being, of course, that cinema reversed this ordering of the senses – cinema “gestated in Sight, and was born into Sound”; further, Sound is often effaced but sooooooooooooooooooo very important and constitutive of the experience of cinema. Interesting (but maybe not surprising) that Sound is primal, submerged, visceral, feminine; Sight is insistently apparent, mercurial, masculine. Looking forward to reading on.

60 second story

The 60 Second Story Competition is an excellent idea, especially in encouraging people to use the video recording capabilities of mobile phones. Reminds me of my MMS haiku idea (3 images, 3 captions with correct no. of syllables and all – voila!) Anyway….

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.

Some of the submissions are already online.

home-made historiography

Found this buried in an old draft entry: it comes from Historiographic Axioms of Home Movies by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Karen I. Ishizuka. It’s good stuff: Patricia Zimmerman is the most right-on writer on home movies I’ve encountered so far.

“1. Hollywood films are the home movies of global capital.
2. Home movies provide a site to perform exorcisms on the international crisis for public memory. They motor a return to the real, the referent, the body.
3. Home movies present facts which are fictions and fictions which are facts
4. Home movies are not empirical evidence. Rather, they stage psychic tracings, disturbances, dreamscapes, pantasm, colliding registers, contiguities.
5. Home movies are neither images nor representations. Instead, they are mediations of fragmentary, incomplete symptoms of the breakage of the psyche and the breakage of the text. They are inscribed by and in conversation with historical trauma(s).
6. Home movies constitute microhistories of intersections between local, regional, national, global movements and fluidities. They narrate the nation differently and in difference(s)
7. Home movies exceed linear causal historical explanation. They necessitate the continual formation of an archive of contiguities and collage that opens to the future. They require multilinearities and multispatialities.
8. To work with home movies is to mine and excavate to reclaim visual artifacts from the quotidian in its specificity. These disparate and incomplete objects necessitate a retheorization of film history into a more polyvocal and contrapuntal model.
9. Home movies are an unseen cinema of public memories and historical traumas, visual artifacts that define the fixities of object status. Public memory is that which moves beyond the private to the collective. It speaks beyond the self in compound knowledge with others in a dialectic between the past and the future.
10. Home movies require a shift from time to spaces. They engage a historiographic mapping process of the incomplete and fragementary archives of an imagined past.
11. Home movies are psychic vectors, texts and histories without closure, overflowing with dynamic contradictions.
12. Home movies are not fixed objects. They are condensations, imaginaries, dreamscapes that are fluid and changing as they interact in other spatial formations.
13. Home movies speak through their gaps, fissures, silences, vacancies, elisions.
14. To understand the signification system of home movies and their historiographic meaning, it is necessary to move from the causal and the linear to the multilinear, continguous, and polyphonic.
15. All home movies and amateur films are acts of death, loss, trauma, decay and mourning. Their ghosts call out to us to be made real, remembered and named.”

Calling all mobile movie moguls

It’s always good when my “why doesn’t someone…” whining (as in, “why doesn’t someone do something to encourage people to see mobile phones as low-cost media production tools?”) proves to be redundant…

Siemens and the St Kilda Film Festival announce the 2nd Micro Movie Award.

To be held as part of the St Kilda Film Festival in Melbourne Australia between May 24 ? 29, 2005
Prize AUD$5000

The Siemens Micro Movie Award is an international competition for making short films using a mobile phone.

The Siemens Micro Movie Award was presented for the first time at interfilm Berlin in November 2004 and created enormous interest and excitement amongst filmmakers and audiences alike.

We are now inviting film schools and filmmakers in Asia, Australia and New Zealand to take part in this exciting competition.

Siemens provides the participating filmmakers/ schools with a mobile phone (SX1 model) which has an integrated camcorder. The finished films are to be no longer than 90 seconds and as many films as possible may be produced and entered before the entry deadline. There are no restrictions with regard to cutting and editing. However, the film sequences in the finished piece must obviously be longer than any subsequently integrated animation elements.

After all entries have been received, approximately 10 films will be nominated as finalists for the competition and they will be shown on screens located in cinema foyers during the St Kilda Film Festival. They will also be shown on the large cinema screen.

The audience chooses the winner who will be awarded a prize of AUD$5000.

The 10 finalists will each receive a Siemens Video Phone and participate in a film Workshop with a notable Australian Filmmaker during the St Kilda film Festival.

Call for Expressions of interest

If you are interested in being part of this new era of filmmaking contact us immediately
Send your C.V./Filmography to filmfest@portphillip.vic.gov.au or

St Kilda Film Festival Siemens Micro Movie Award
Private Bag 3,
St Kilda 3182, Australia

Numbers of mobile phones are limited, but we will also have some mobiles available through the St Kilda Film Festival Office and available for free hire at OPENChannel

The finalists of the first MicroMovie AWARD at interfilm Berlin can still be seen at www.micromovie-award.com.
The deadline for submitting films is March 18, 2005, forms etc from the festival website

But amid the hype about the linear progression of cinema to smaller and smaller screens, remember that the small-scale moving image has a rich pre-cinematic (and pre-professional) past.