Presentation

I'm presenting some manipulated stills and some short films. Both are on the subject of identity and feature my husband and I.

Software used:

Audacity - sound manipulation

Vidcrop - cropping moving images

MovieMaker - editing moving image

Picassa - simple photo manipulation

Gimp - photo manipulation with layers and filters

...and I recorded my progress, problems and research using a blog on blogger.com.

Hardware:

MP3 player/recorder

digital SLR camera

digital video camera

and a laptop with broadband internet access.

My concepts moved as I encountered a number of problems and as I actually dealt with the raw material I'd collected. The problems included:

(1) not being able to access files created in iMovie once they'd been copied onto my USB and put back onto a VU computer. This meant I lost a week's work. As I don't have a lot of free time to come and use VU Macs, I decided to move to MovieMaker and edit my footage there.

(2) In shooting the footage I was looking for reflections on water - but discovered that the orientation of the shooting location and the sun would actually mean there would never be a time when there would be reflections. Instead we shot our shadows in the original location and reflections of trees at new locations - which worked much better. The additonal challenge of the day was a large family gathering at one end of the location forcing us to shoot from only one direction.

(3) I even struggled with finding the right file formats for editing software as well as the process for getting footage from the video camera to the PC. And when I used Gimp - I didn't even know what file formats to save things in so I could edit them again - Gimp has many formats to chose from! and then the file sizes got so huge that my laptop failed to cope with them. Tasks that might have taken 30 minutes ballooned out into hours as the computer went crawlingly slow or hung up repeatedly!

(3) in switching to using MovieMaker I lost iMovie's ability to crop frames as well as gained (yipee!) a much cruder facilty for editing shots. Therefore, I had to do some research to find a utility that would crop. Freeware put a giant floating logo on the footage so I had to pay for the licence and then work out how to get that licence when it didn't come - although I was told it had - and then activate it!

(4) in using Gimp I found a highly complex tool I did not have the time to explore. Instead each time I wanted to do something I searched for tutorials on the internet that told me what to do - more useful than the manual! However, this did also mean that when something didn't work I had no idea what to do...and you'll see the resuts of this!

The theme of the photos is the way people in long-term relationships, to a certain extent, blend and become something new. I usually talk about there being three entities in a marriage: you, me and the relationship. But things are lost along the way in these three entities, some things change, some are added and the mixture is not necessarily always a comfortable fit.

Here we shot close-up face portraits of each other on a neutral background. Then I enhanced the chosen images by removing some of the effects of time and then transplanted our faces: my features onto his head and vice versa.

The theme of the movies is journeying within a relationship - a journey that is never done and it's never really clear where that journey is from and where it is to - only that it seems to contain some progress, some going backwards and a lot of repetitive behaviour.

Here, Mark and I shot footage in our local park, street and I also used some footage shot on this campus a few weeks back. From this I created three short movice, one of me, one of Mark and one of us showing us on journeys - my journey and what that feels like, his journey and what that feels like and our journey and what that feels like.

In VidCrop I removed as much of the ground as possible and any sign of physical bodies with the result that I have images in which no actual things appear, in which there is no ground on which to ground oneself. When one starts on a new journey or changes direction, it can feel that way - like there are no edges.

Within MovieMaker I could add transitions between shots and/or put an effect on a shot eg make it slower, roate the frame or colour it as it were a watercolour painting or a grainy film. I've used these effects to suggest loops or cycles which carries over the theme of the movies as well as reflects the action in the frame. I could also trim shots, so, for instance, I've used a lot of shots 1/10 second long to make a particular jerky, suspended effect. On short shots I could also add in a fade transition on either end and get a lovely overlapping of images.

I created the soundtracks in Audacity. While I found using the other pieces of software quite mechanical and sometimes frustrating, Audacity is where I had fun. The soundtracks are made up of conversation I recorded of Mark and I. So for the films about me or him we said the first thing that came into our heads about how it felt to be in a longterm relationship and for the film that concerned both of us I recorded conversation about how we would shoot the film. I combined words with clips from SF shows and a bunch of sounds downloaded from a brilliant site called FreeSoundProject. I matched sounds that seemed to echo our words as well as the images shot and tried to edit them into a soundtrack that also showed loops or cycles as reminiscent of the theme.

I'll just be using the projector to show you the work, but if I was hanging it I imagined it would look something like this:

There would be two lines of images identically framed:

(1) still images, on the left starting with me and on the right with Mark with the central image a blend of both of us and all the images inbetween showing an increasing amount of that blending.

(2) the movies installed in digital photos frames with Sarah on the left, Mark on the right and the us/relationship movie in the middle. There miht be a blopper reel too!

Finally, before I show you the work I'll just show you a few of the influences for this work, by showing a few of my Blog posts .

Show works.

Three sleeps to go...

...until presentation time; so how's it going?

Well, I'm putting in the hours but not necessarily getting the results and constantly thinking of work arounds and/or compromises. After Sunday I have very few hours to spare for this.

For instance, in the face transplanting in Gimp as I'm mechanically following tutorials I've found - if they don't work I'm at sea as I did not and certainly don't now, have the time to experiment. I'm also finding that Gimp is generating huge files which overwhelm this laptop's RAM with the result that they chew up heaps of time as they go slow, and both Gimp and MovieMaker have a tendency to hang up PC and I have to re-boot regularly.

Gimp issues:
Sarah on Mark transplant - skin colours are racidally different andI can't seem to colour balance them. In additon the gaussian blurr of just the cutout endge doesn't seem to be working.

Mark on Sarah transplant - can't seem to adequately hide Sarah's nose.

Movie issues:
I'm getting frustrated by MovieMaker's limitations with frame editing: its not as accurate as iMovie, and I wish I could lengthen or shorten its transition effects.

I also seem to have too much soundtrack: I have a number of separate sound environments I've made, but not enough space or a clear idea about how to assemble them with the visuals. It seems to be a case of work on movie. Then go back to sound and work on that a while, influenced by the patterns and rhythms I've seen in the shots and then return to the film and see how what sound combinations I've made affect the editing.

A key Audacity issue is sound speed. Unless I want to make an effect with non-matching sound speeds, I have adjust files form different sources. This is a trial and error approach of copying and pasting the sound into a base file and adjusting speed to match it (and sometimes pitch and tempo as well) until it seems to sound okay!

AaaaaH!

W11 Gimp Transplanting Faces

This week I'm creating two new photos from a mixture of Sarah and Mark. The results should be one of Sarah with Mark's face and one of Mark with Sarah's face. I'm using instructions from a previous post...

Gimp video Tutorial for transplanting faces
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQBKYtIc7g

...and another with written instructions...
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Blending-Faces/17474

...and finding out where various tools are using user manuals created by Gimp fans rather than the official Gimp manual - which is dire. The principal tools for a transplant are:

Transform tools: http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp/transform-image-gimp.htm

Layer Masks: http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html?node44.html

As the rotation and size of the images is pretty similar, my chief 'transplanting' issue in these photos is Mark's beard! In the Mark on Sarah photo I need to eliminate everything except Mark's features and keep Sarah's skin. On the Sarah on Mark photo the situation is reversed, I need to eliminate as much of Sarah's skin as possible. To remove skin I make sure that black is in the foreground of the mask and to put skin back from the original layer I toggle back to white as the foreground. This means it's easy to do finer and finer work choosing exactly what I want to keep and eliminate.

Colour Matching:

Our skin tones are extremely different so I selected the cut out layer - not the mask - and then Colors, Color Balance. I altered the settings for a better match. Here I had to think about what I was seeing: what tones are in Sarah's skin and what colours are in Mark's skin eg whose has more red (ie pink) on the midtones or who has more green and so on.

For the Mark on Sarah photo this changes were:

Midtones +52, +31, +4

Shadows -28, +7, +13

Highlights -1, -16, 16

...and then altered the Hue-Saturation

Hue -5,

Lightness +10

saturation -3

Blurring edges between layers

I used this tutorial: http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/softening-the-edges-of-your-cutouts-p268828.html

The edges of the cutout layer are very sharp, so even though colours might now be similar the illusion is ruined! Select mask - not cutout layer - then Select, Shrink and 1 pixel. Then Select, Invert - so only the edge of the mask will be blurred. Then Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur. On the Mark on Sarah photo i used 200 px blur!

And that leaves us with the beard issue! I've used the heal tool, but I really want selction from the Sarah layer to use on the Mark mask layer and that doesn't seem to work. What I've ended up doing is blurring and lightening the Sarah layer around the nose which leaves a 'five o'clock shadow' effect.

Movie Soundtrack References

Attribution list for movie soundtracks.

Sarah:
rutgermuller 2009, Radio Noise', downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=179538), on 27 April 2009.

Mark Movie:
Various SF clips: 'Open Wav Events', downloaded from WaveEvents.com, on 16 May 2009.

Us Movie:

acclivity, ByTheRiver55s.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=37876, on 9 May 2009
Cbakos, Cordless phone ring.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=103482, on 6 May 2009
Digifishmusic, Magpie_carroll.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=29541, on 6 May 2009
Digifishmusic, Writing.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=29541, on 9 May 2009
DJ Chronos, Clamp.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=103319, on 9 May 2009
Fastson, WritingMarker.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=586391, on 9 May 2009
guitarguy1985, printer.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=533680, on 6 May 2009
JonathanJansen, Scrolling a mousewheel.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=15882 , on 9 May 2009
JonathanJansen, sneeze.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=54505, on 9 May 2009
JustinBW, Creek Ambience 2 plane at end.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=1022651, on 6 May 2009
K1m218, 00553 coughing man 2.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=63102, on 9 May 2009
nicStage, TinyWaves.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=43853 , on 6 May 2009
NoiseCollector, mysterybirdlouder.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=58000 , on 5 May 2009
ReWired, 00_CHAIR.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=26695, on 6 May 2009
Robinhood76, 00094 tasma klejaca szeroka.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=321967, on 9 May 2009
Rutgermuller, Hardisk External Starting Up.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=179538, on 6 May 2009
Sagetyrtle, Sigh4.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=60671, on 9 May 2009
scarbelly25, Breathing.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=33939 , on 5 May 2009
Streety, laptopkeyboard2.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=52052, on 6 May 2009
vibe_crc, paper_crumpling.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=333536, on 9 May 2009
visionari1, QueenlandKookaburrra16sec.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=82269, on 9 May 2009
vixuxx, crow.wav, downloaded from http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=28679, on 9 May 2009

W10 Results of GIMP enhancements so far

REsponse to Archiving Issues with Digitial Art papers

Work may well become inaccessible over time – hardware or software becomes obsolete or hard to source, knowledge to operate either may be lost, storage media degrades.

The work can be (repeatedly) updated to new software, hardware and/or media, but this very updating could violate the work. There may also be privacy issues with documentation and/or storage if the work involves the data of other people. The Rhizome.org project recommends uploading work and/or documentation of the work to the Internet. Maybe other current answers include creating galleries in Second Life or creating universal formats.

An archivist’s main task becomes storing old technology, updating technology, converting formats where applicable. A completely different skill set is required for this. Also requires a new budget and storage space – a second museum. What responsibilities do artists have to update their own work?

There are new ways to display material and generate visitor interaction. What are the correct combinations of venue or occasion and frequency to exhibit digital work? In addition, there are value issues for the museum: what is the original? Adjusting artist and curator and collector ideas of originality and control (work can be altered to pixel level, copied and interactive works have multiple originators). What value is such a work without the right hardware and software to access it?

Maybe we just have to adjust our ideas about permanence? There are strange conflicting forces at work. One circular force tells us that longevity is part of an art work’s value. Conversely, the forces of globalisation and rapid technological developments and their commercialisation work against permanence but for innovation. Maybe we just have to let works pass away?

W10 Using Gimp to Enhance Facial Portraits

As an utter novice, how do you learn what to do, where things are in such a short period of time - especially if you're a person who has zero patience with non-intuitive software tools? On-line manuals just tell you what's under the menu and what it does, not how to do X. Instead I searched for video tutorials on what I wanted to do.

How to remove face wrinkles:

http://revver.com/video/1215400/how-to-remove-facial-wrinkles-from-photo-gimp-26/

- uses heal tool. Select non-wrinkled face near wrinkle and click to cover wrinkle with this selection.

How to enhance eye colour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6qBts7qZ6I

- uses ellipse tool to select pupil and Colours, Hue Saturation to play with colour.

How to cover facial hair, scars and blemishes:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1385102/gimp_26_photo_software_covers_unwanted.html?cat=15

Create a new layer and set to transparency.

Return to the original layer and chose the Colour Picker Tool - in clear skin near the unwanted thing. Select Air brush tool - larger the brush the more diffuse and natural the result. Use the colour and airbrush on the transparent layer to cover the blemish. Keep re-picking colour as you move over the face. Reduce opacity in brush to cover non-blemished areas.

How to change hair colour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6WPkDQtsbE&feature=PlayList&p=454D0EC9D954EAF2&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=37 - uses path tool. Move around hair and select its edge carefully. Select, From Path. Colours, Colour Balance. Adjust settings as desired.

How to remove face shine:

Use Colour Picker to select skin near the area.

Choose Airbrush and increase Scale, Reduce opacity - lower means more natural look, but more brushing required - and choose a fuzzy brush.

How to increase eye whiteness:

Choose Path Tool. Select around the white of the eye. Click Selection from Path. Click Colours and Brightness-Contrast. Adjust both to increase whiteness so it still looks natural. I also blurred the edges by picking the colour of the eye white and using a fuzzy air-brush with low opacity.

Response to Future of (Digital) art papers

If ‘digital’ as a prefix will disappear, will ‘reality’ as a suffix as well? Where boundaries are blurred and, perhaps, dissolved, are others necessarily erected? We have seen that as technology and transport allow commodities, money and people to cross national boundaries, those boundaries have legislatively and administratively tightened.

What will become of personality, identity? If we can transplant faces, why not personalities, minds? Maybe cryogenics is not the way towards immortality, but a personality transplanted into cyberspace.

What will become of choice and freewill? If a character we create for SecondLife can carry a camera and shoot a film, what if a camera can be implanted into the pregnant womb? Surrogate recipients can survey their developing foetus – and maybe the foetus can do the reverse. What would that mean about ‘when life begins’? What would that mean about choice – what if a foetus could reject its parents prior to birth?

Is there a possibility of the death of the artist with this supposed equalitarizing (just recall who actually has access to the technology versus who has never used a phone) of art production in the way critics have signalled the death of art (we lost aura, we lost reality, we lost the canvas…)? Or is the individual artist collectivised or will she be further commodified? Perhaps we will trade in artists, rather than in art?

What will become of galleries and museums, projects of empires past? With growing calls for the return of artefacts to their place of origin (although ‘origin’ is a contentious idea too, just look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_of_Saint_Mark, the [now copies] of statues of horses that adorn St Marco, Venice). Maybe physical international travel will become unviable (until teleport arrives) and the way to see artefacts and painting will be to construct a virtual gallery of our own with our own openings and commentaries. What indeed will become of the value we place on ‘ownership’, ‘creator’, ‘origin’ and ‘originality’ in an ever more intertextual world?

Getting a camera

Here was another compromise to time. I could find the time to do a health and safety course and book out, collect and return a camera or buy one. We bought one. Well, Mark bought one - he's longed for one for ages but I'm always 'what do we need that for' and 'we'll never watch it'. I still think that's true, but at least I had a purpose. It's a sexy little thing - easily fits in a coat pocket or handbag. It takes photos, stores and plays back music - i dare say if one could fit a film on the card you could play back that too. Its zoom needs a soft touch, it's hardly a smooth or gentle transition! The transfer from camera to PC is clunky. Silly me, I thought 'ah, a card, I can stick that into the computer and copy them off and that'll be that'. But no. They need to come from the camera to PC via leads and its own software and you have to know to push a little function button on the camera to make the whole thing work.

Changing ideas about editing and sound

Having ended up with shadow shots as well as water movement, tree and rock reflections, I've re-thought how I treat the footage and sound for the 'us' film.

I found a great site, The FreeSound Project - a YouTube for sound - where, once you've opened an account, you can search for and listen to whatever people the world over have uploaded. I listened to a lot - for the pleasure of it and to reflect upon what would work with the footage and the story the combination might then tell.

So, here's what I think I'll do. I've downloaded a variety of water, bird and office equipment sounds. I've chosen files that feature sound that comes in very discrete bites eg a hawk calling, or that builds and dissipates, eg a PC booting. In combination with the shots and the conversations I've taped between Mark and I, I want to build in a sense of escalation and dissipation and a movement between natural and built environment. This reflects not only the conversation, but also how much of our identity ('our' in the general and specific to Mark and I senses) we invest in the so-called natural while we spend so much time hooked up to technology.

Editing escalation/dissipation: build to shorter and tighter shots and then reverse (Hitchcock's technique).

Image in frame to show a movement between natural and built environment:
- no ground - or less and less ground, perhaps?
- no 'real' objects ie us, only reflections and shadows upon 'natural' surfaces
- move from slime shots, to tree reflections, to us reflections, to water movement, to shadows and back again

Sound tied to frame showing both escalation/dissipation and a movement between natural and built environment:
- start with quiet and slow rhythms eg water lapping, creaking office chair, pen writing, exchanging ideas conversation
- PC booting, Printer booting, typing, paper crumpling, (parts of the sound that show movement, get louder, faster)
- sighs, coughs, sharp comments, hawk crying, phone rings, sticky tape
- rising din of birds and typing, conversation becomes lost
- PC booting, Printer booting, typing (parts of the sound that are even and repetitive)
- end with quiet sounds and slow rhythms: magpie carolling, water lapping, pen writing

W9 Shooting the movie footage - changes ahead

So, Mark and I had a window of opportunity last weekend - the time and sunny weather. Sun was necessary to generate the reflections I wanted and time was, basically, in short supply. As I kept saying to him - it has to get done today, we're both around and there will not be another opportunity. He has been very obliging, especially surprising considering what bad moods we were in that day.

The location for the 'us' movie was Newport Lakes as it has stepping stones. i envisaged that we would film each other - or bits of each other - crossing these and our reflections in the water. I failed to account for a large boozey family fishing outing at one end (eventually moved on by the tireless ranger) meaning we could only shoot in one direction and, far more seriously, that I'd failed to account for the direction of stones versus the location of the sun. That is, there was no reflection!!! So this meant an immediate re-think on locations and shots. Instead, we found that the smaller lakes were better angled for reflections and shot some great footage of not only our reflections, but of tree and rock reflections and water movement. We also found that we cast great shadows, rather than reflections, from the stepping stones and so shot shadows instead.

Thus, the actual footage shot, rather than the planned shots has in turn influenced how I will edit and the soundtrack I'll contstruct. More in the next post.


Creatively, I'm realising that a lot of my time is spent in non-creative technical problem-solving and I can't say I find this very conducive to the process overall. In a unit where (VU having removed 25% of our course hours) we get one 3 hr session (minus late comers and the health and safety 'break' that no one takes) to play about on a variety of software and then decide what to create on what software and then do it - there's not a lot of time for 'mulling' or explorative experimenting that could fail.

W9 iMovie Doom and Gloom, bring on VidCrop

Having committed to use iMovie, I committed myself to a common problem as the Apple site later attested to: do not move your files. If you do when you try to re-enter the iMovie project; it won't work. At VU we do not have permanent server space allocated to us, instead we have to save files to USBs or external drives.

If one has the right software at home one can do work there even using a PC and this was true for Gimp and InkSpace, but not for iMovie. As an alternative I could use Windows MovieMaker, but only in an either/or senario: I either used iMovie to make my movies or MovieMaker which created scheduling issues for the remaining workshops available to me ie what can I do in the lab at all. Or it meant finding other times to get to the campus Mac Lab - very unlikely given my uni schedule.

Thus, last Wednesday, it came down to me and the tutor trying to work out a technical way around the problem of neither being able to reopen projects (not even copying everything back to where it had been in my temporary server space worked) nor import MPEG files as the help file said iMovie could! Miserable.

I resolved in mind that the test version of what I'd shot for the Going Nowhere movie, plus the completed soundtrack, might have to suffice for that art work and that the rest I'd edit on MovieMaker. This left the problem of how to deal with what MovieMaker lacks.

iMovie is an easy-to-use interface even if it lacks the capacity to do things like reverse, flip or slow or speed-up film and it has the abilities to manipulate the colour quality of the image and to crop the frame. I saw the potential of the cropping facility immediately. Not only did it mean that I didn't have to be so rigorous in what was in/out of frame when I shot - rigour meaning time-consuming - but, in effect, cropping is like an extra zoom. And the colour manipulation also gave me the option to add in a further loop of the movie. Having shot the film I'd now lost all these options!

Instead I Googled for shareware and found a free version of VidCrop, which I later tested. Very easy to use and compatible with MovieMaker. I did have to buy it, of course, as the cropped film would have a huge floating logo otherwise! And, the installation process, while easy, was obscure and required some detective work to compare what the support person said should be so - a registration email with instructions - but wasn't and how to search though and use what was actually available - a web-based receipt.

So now I can crop all the footage and import it into MovieMaker's library and edit all three movies. I have experimented with the effects library and I may be able do to some looping visual effects although not the same as iMovie and it does have the capacity to slow down, speed up and flip the shot. I can also publish the film to DVD in the same package which overcomes any potential problems with trying to work out what files are needed and how to transport and recreate the file structure for iDVD at VU - I just don't want to go there!