DVD Box
I am currently thinking of designing the box for the mountain biking DVD. I have been looking on the internet for inspiration from existing boxes. In general all of the boxes pick up on the wild nature of the sport. They do this by having some insane picture on the front of a 100ft jump. However I don't have those kind of images and would like to use ones of my own. I have thought of using a still of the video but having done that before, it doesn't really work and can end not looking very sharp! here are some examples of the stuff on the market... I definatly think this first one is the best mind.
After looking at these, and thinking about what images i have of mountain biking im not sure if i should use my own or just use them off the internet. i wil do some experiments and see what looks best.
Video - what a perfect day
As you know, I have been waiting to video my mountain biking DVD for a few weeks now and on Sunday it finally happened. I had basically been waiting for the weather to be good and for my brother (the subject) to not be busy. The location is 'Coed (forest) Llandegla' in north east Wales. Roughly one hour from my home in St.Helens. Basically I picked this location as it is close to home, has a good range of terrain and beautiful scenery. I arrived around 10 o'clock on Sunday morning and the sun was cracking the fire track. The bikes where is the boot of the car and my brother and I where edging to get out on our bikes. As we rolled up the 2killmoiter drive way to the shop and car park, we began to see a queue of cars about 20 deep. Now this is very unusual for Llandegla as it is only really a small place and as we always go during the week, we have never seen it busy. We contemplated going somewhere else because we imagined there to be a mountain biking event on we hadn’t heard of, hence the traffic. However, we proceeded and eventually found a parking space. Set up the bikes and decided how I was going to go about filming.
In Llandegla there are four roots of which to choose to ride on. There is a family root, 4km, beginner root, 8km, intermediate root, 18km and a black run; 2km. usually we take the intermediate trail as does 98% of the people who go to Llandegla; however on Sunday this would have been an impossible task to film. The forest, for safety reasons works on a one way system with mounting bikers going above 30Mph on some sections. Especially as it was so busy, this would have been too dangerous to film on. The tracks are very small, windy and as I want footage filmed up to three times, it wouldn’t have been possible to back track to re-film. However, we where now there and needed to make my DVD. So we decided to do the family root which doesn’t sound very exciting, but it was the best and safest option for filming.
We started the trail and already we had superb places to film, wide tracks and not very busy. The hardest bit was coming up with some good shots to film. I ended up with a mixture of long shots and fast shots that I will edit together to make a nice DVD. Well that’s the plan...
Duplicate Sound Recording
I have just recorded the duplicate sound clip of 'This recording will be said a number of times, then overlapped' 10 times and then overlapped them. It actually sounds quite cool, but Surprisingly you can near enough tell exactly what I am saying. I think that when I record the actual mountain biking video, having the three sound clips together will sound really good. Not only will it enhance the visual experience but I am hoping it will emphasize the fact that the video is overlapping.
Recording the sound
For my experiments I will have to come up with a script or atleast a sentence to say a number of times, probably ten. I will then make each sound clip the same length of time but obviously because I will have said the sentence at different speeds this will give it the organic sound I'm looking for. I think I will most probably say...
'This recording will be said a number of times, then overlapped'
Sound recordings
One thing I have to consider when overlapping my video is whether I overlap the sound from multiple clips too. For this I am going to experiment with some sound recordings and overlapping them. I think it will also be quite interesting to see what will happen when I overlap multiple recordings. Will you be able to tell what I am saying after I overlap 10 pieces of sound??
Drumming experiment
I have recently recorded a video for one of my friends of him drumming. I purposefully left the camera in the same position for all of the video. With this I have edited it in Premier and cut it into 1 minute chunks of different pieces of the video. I then had seven clips which I again over laid and changed the opacity. This looks really cool but as I have kept the camera in the same position only the drummer is moving. He looks blurred but it is still easy to see what he is done in general.
With the mountain biking video, instead of videoing it a number of times and overlapping them I thought it might be an idea to video it just the once and offset the video clips for a similar effect. I have done experiments on this with the drumming clips and the video just looks fuzzy, it doesn't actually look very good. So I want to actually video the subject at least three times.
Mountain Biking Video
My new idea is a mountain biking video. I am interested in mountain biking, it is an interesting subject and I have readily available resources to film this so its all good.
I will use my brother as the subject and most probably the location will be Coed Llandegla in northern Wales. Llandegla is a man made mountain bike track which has an interesting pool of different backgrounds from open space to deep in the wood and from fire track to single track so, hopefully there will be enough going on.
I hope to film this next weekend, well I am actually filming it next weekend so I hope the weather holds off :D ...
I want to set up the camera for each shot and leave it in the same position. Then I want my brother to ride past at least 3 times and then I will over lap this using premier. Hopefully it will look cool and organic.
New Idea
I have recently thought that I would scrap the second/first curtain flash release stuff as I couldn't think of a good enough subject to take images of.
however I have been playing around with the idea of overlapping video and audio in the search for a unique look to a sequence of each. I am more interested in the video side of things and have already done some experiments with that.
the experiments I have done where, me writing on a piece of acetate, RE-DEVELOP as that is the chosen word for my project. I written that 10 times, each time keeping the camera in the same position but using the different hand movements and organic style of writing as the interesting part. I made each clip 7 seconds long and started with one, then two.. Etc, and each time I added a clip I divided the opacity of 100, by the amount of clips over laid. This created a really nice aesthetic and by the 7th video, you couldn't read what I was writing. This is kind of what I expected but it turned out looking better than expected.
I am going to create more experiments using the same technique but I will write re-develop on white pieces of paper and see if it stands out more and how different that final piece is.
Examples of F&S Curtain Flash Release
Curtain Flash Release
Today I have started to have a look at first and second curtain flash release as it is something I have never done but have always had an interest in.
both first & second curtain flash release is done using a combination of long exposure photography and using the flash.
first curtain is when a long exposure shot is ready to be taken and as soon as the shutter is open the flash goes off. For the rest of the exposure there would a very low light source being captured by the sensor. With a moving subject this would create a look where you would see the object stationary in part of the shot and the rest of the object during its long exposure would have lines from a faint light source. Second curtain flash release is the same but the flash goes off just before the shutter closes at the end of the exposure.
This shot shows First curtain
This shot shows second curtain
Digital Double exposure
In film and photography, double exposure is a technique in which a piece of film is exposed twice, to two different images. The resulting photographic image shows the second image superimposed over the first. The technique can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects to a scene that were not originally there. It is frequently used in photographic hoaxes.
It is considered easiest to have a manual winding camera for double exposures. On automatic winding cameras, as soon as a picture is taken the film is typically wound to the next frame. Some more advanced automatic winding cameras have the option for multiple exposures but it must be set before making each exposure. Manual winding cameras with a multiple exposure feature can be set to double-expose after making the first exposure.
The problem with double exposures, is that if too much film is exposed over the 2 shots, the picture will turn out overexposed. Medium to low light is ideal for double exposures. Also, it is important to use a tripod for double exposures. If the setting of the two shots do not line up almost exactly, you won't get the desired effect and the background will be blurry looking, as well as the target.
Double exposures are not the limit, as multiple exposures are possible, but the photographer should try not to overexpose the film.
Another way to superimpose pictures is digitally, using a software photo editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. Simply alter the opacity of the two images and line them up over each other.
The Apollo 8 Saturn V builds thrust after ignition of the S-IC first stage F-1 engines on December 21, 1968.
Note that the Moon is double-exposed - it was neither visible at the time of launch nor in the crescent phase at this time.
Double Exposure
I have also had the idea of looking into Double Exposure with both medium format and digital photograpghy. i have been looking at some examples of double exposure that i will post on my blog that have been really very interesting, also photography is an area that i am very interested in and enjoy doing.
About Reich
Steve Reich (born Stephen Michael Reich, October 3, 1936) is an American composer. He is a pioneer of minimalism, although his music has increasingly deviated from a purely minimalist style. Reich's innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out), and the use of processes to create and explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures and phasing effects, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially that of America; The Guardian described Reich as one of the few composers to have "altered the direction of musical history". Process Music and Minimalism Reich's early forays into composition involved experimentation with twelve-tone composition, but he found the rhythmic aspects of the twelve-tone series more interesting than the melodic aspects[1]. Reich also composed film soundtracks for The Plastic Haircut and Oh Dem Watermelons, two films by Robert Nelson. The soundtrack for Oh Dem Watermelons, composed in 1965, involved basic tape work, using repeated phrasing together in a large five-part canon. Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose loosely structured aleatoric work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, It's Gonna Rain used recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by the Black Pentecostal preacher Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the sermon to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged. The 11-minute Come Out (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by an injured survivor of a race riot. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase "to let the bruise blood come out to show them." Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns. A similar example of process music is Pendulum Music (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing feedback as they do so. (Pendulum Music was recorded by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.) Reich's first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967 Piano Phase, for two pianos. In Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines. Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed Clapping Music (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long phrase and the other performer shifts by one quaver beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later. Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.
Steve Reich
i am mostly interested in the 'its gonna rain' piece that Reich has produced. my idea is that i want to create a video of this but using overlapping images such as me writing Re-development onto a piece of paper say 100times and overlapping that to see what the outcome would be. About the Its Gonna Rain piece: The source material of It's gonna rain consists entirely of a tape recording, made in January 1965 at San Francisco's Union Square, of an African American Pentecostal preacher named Brother Walter speaking about the end of the world (Grimshaw [1]) and the accompanying background noises, such as the wings of a pigeon taking off. The piece opens with the story of Noah and repeats the phrase "it's gonna rain" before looping this sentence. Reich uses two tape normal Wollensak taperecorders with the same recording, originally attempting to align the phrase with itself at the halfway point (180 degrees), but due to the imprecise technology in 1965, the two recordings would fall out of synch with one tape gradually falling ahead or behind the other due to minute differences in the machines and playback speed. Reich decided to exploit this phase shifting wherein all possible recursive harmonies are explored before the two loops eventually get back in synch before the end of the piece. Reich created another similar composition the next year called Come Out, in which the same process is done with the phrase, "come out to show them".
ReDevelop
Definition taken from: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=redevelop
- Develop for a second time, in order to improve the contrast, colour, etc., of a negative or print.
Formulate or develop again, of an improved theory or hypothesis.
