29 Oct ETC: Day 3
Whew..long day..hence making this post after midnight. After another lesson on the Sandin video manipulator and the Jones sequencer, I had a full day ahead of me. After writing last night I made a gigantic feedback loop using 3 monitors, 3 cameras and two computers running skype. The results weren’t that interesting but I achieved about a .5 second delay through the whole system…it was fun to set up at least.
After learning the Jones sequencer, a device which uses an oscillator to switch between 8 different sources, I set to work with a couple projects. The first thing that came to me was to make a sort of lo-fi ‘bullet time’ effect with the 7 cameras available here. At first i set them all up in a semicircle pointing at a central point, and it worked to a point, but the inaccuracies in my pointing ended up throwing it off..but the result looked like a weird kind of slit scan hybrid. Still working on the sync for this one…
Then I spent some time getting more documentation of the Wobbulator. There doesnt seem to be any quality videos of it around the internets, so I’m going to try and cut together a good sample of footage. Got some really nice patterns going today.
I returned to the bullet time concept after trying a few other random experiments. This time I arranged the cameras in a circle around a central point, and this was a little more interesting looking. I got footage of myself walking around and other confusing looking 7-viewpoint images. Then I had an idea for a goofy piece I’ll be calling ‘Drumcircle’
By using a mic as a trigger, I used different drum pieces around the studio to change the viewpoint of the camera as I hit the drums. I did a couple iterations of this piece, with a simple slow, self triggered switch, and a few with automated, oscillator driven camera switches. Hopefully it all works out..I may have to try again tomorrow if I can figure out how to get my audio trigger to be a little more responsive.