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.