For Assignment 5, you can submit your work by uploading to to YouTube or Vimeo, or by creating a DVD of your video. Today’s class covered iDVD, which works with iMovie to let you easily create a DVD of your work, complete with an interactive menu.

The easiest way to get your video into iDVD is to open your project in iMovie, then click Share → iDVD. Use the theme browser in iDVD to choose a theme for your project. Themes are used for the interactive menu on your DVD. Many of the themes are geared more towards family vacation videos, so I’d suggest sticking with the more minimal ones. We’re using a more recent version of iDVD, so you may notice that only widescreen themes are available. If your video is in standard definition, you can still use a widescreen theme. When iDVD prompts you to Change Project Aspect Ratio, choose ‘Keep’ to avoid altering the aspect ratio of your movie.

If this is the first time you have used iDVD, it’s a good idea to click iDVD → Preferences and turn off the Apple logo that appears in the corner of the menu.

Each of the iDVD themes contains ‘Drop Zones’ that you can fill with content. These appear in various places during the interactive menu. You can use the Media menu to drag movies or photos from your computer into the Drop Zones (click the Edit Drop Zones button to see all Drop Zones at once). You can also edit the text which is used for the title and buttons on the DVD menu. Use the Inspector Window (the ‘i’ button in the lower left corner) for more options when editing the text or Drop Zones. You can also use the Inspector Window to edit the audio that plays during the interactive menu. Try clicking the Play button to preview your DVD.

By default, iDVD will create a DVD menu with one button, which simply plays your video. For more complex interactive menus with more than one video, use the ‘+’ button in the lower left corner to add multiple movies or slideshows. You can use the DVD Map window to further customize your DVD, including controlling what happens when you first insert the DVD into a DVD player. By default, iDVD will create a DVD which automatically plays your movie before showing the menu. You can use the Inspector Window here to create a DVD video which automatically loops when inserted into a DVD player.

When you have finished customized the menu, insert a blank DVD, then click the Burn button to burn your DVD. The Burn button is next to the Play button, and looks like a camera aperture.

Note that if you already have a YouTube or Vimeo account, you can also send your project to those websites straight from iMovie, using the Share menu.

Today’s class was mostly a work class for your video art assignment.

Recently I demonstrated how to use iMovie’s green screen feature to add animations with transparency on top of your videos. To use this feature, you need to turn on Advanced Tools in iMovie by clicking iMovie → Preferences → Show Advanced Tools.

You can create an animation in Photoshop with a green screen background, then add it to iMovie. This will work best if you work in Photoshop using the same pixel dimensions as your movie. For the example shown above, I am working at 960×540 pixels, which is the same size as the ‘Large’ quality setting in iMovie (use the ‘Video’ tab in iMovie Preferences to import video at Large size).

In Photoshop, create an animation as usual, but add a new background layer that is visible in all frames. You have to fill in this background colour with a particular green colour, which you can get by typing colour values into the Colour Picker in Photoshop. In RGB, this is (R: 0, G: 255, B: 0). As we discovered from this Apple Support Discussion, iMovie green screen works best when the green colour is a gradient instead of a solid colour. So you should create a gradient background that goes from (R: 0, G: 255, B: 0) to (R: 0, G: 240, B: 0).

When your Photoshop animation is ready, choose File → Export → Render Video to export your animation as a QuickTime movie that you can then import into iMovie. Once the clip is in your iMovie Event Library, drag it on top of a video in your Project (you should see a green ‘+’ icon), then choose Green Screen to create the transparent effect. Your animation should play over your video, with the green background in your animation becoming transparent.

Getting the timing of your animation to line up with your video can be tricky. You may find that 0.1 second frames work best when exported to video. If you want your animation to loop, you may have to copy and paste your animation frames a few times in Photoshop to create the loop, because when you Render Video, it will ignore any loop settings for your animation. You can also loop your animation by adding multiple copies of it to your video in iMovie.

Green screen can be a really fun way to combine animation and video. You can also use it to create more creative titles for your movie, such as handwritten or illustrated titles. Have fun with it!

During this class we watched the documentary Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart, by Mark Kidel. It’s a fascinating look at the life and work of a pioneering video artist. I really enjoy documentaries that allow us to see an artist’s working process – in the case of Bill Viola, you can see that part of his brainstorming process is isolating himself and writing pages and pages of ideas for projects. His technique of bringing in an outside observer partway through a project (his partner, who is deeply familiar with his past work) is also interesting. It is also clear from the documentary that he spends a lot of time with the Renaissance art that informs some of his recent work. I hope you enjoyed the documentary!

You can see more of Bill Viola’s work on the artist’s website, billviola.com.

In this class we finished a few critiques from the previous assignment, and I introduced some examples of video art. The first few are from Wholphin, a DVD magazine:

• Miranda July – Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody? (also on YouTube)
• Brian Dewan – Grimm’s Tales 2: Death of the Hen (this video is not on the web)
• Jeroen Offerman – The Stairway at St. Paul’s
• Emily Jane Carmichael – The Adventures of Ledo & Ix
• Lasse Gjertson – Amateur
• PES‘s whimsical stop-motion videos.

“My parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses and so I had a very strict Christian upbringing. There was a suspicion of rock and pop music, and some music, Led Zeppelin in particular, was branded downright evil. The rumor was that if you played “Stairway to Heaven” in reverse you could hear messages that would urge you to follow the devil’s path. Supposedly even if you listened to the music in a normal manner you would subconsciously pick up these messages and act accordingly. In my early teens, I destroyed some music that I thought I shouldn’t listen to or have at home. “Stairway to Heaven” was a difficult one for my friends and me. We thought the song and the lyrics were so utterly beautiful and yet we couldn’t listen to it out of fear of what could happen to us if we did. That’s the tension I felt by listening to this record: a teenage attraction to something dangerously beautiful. I am still intrigued how these myths are created and the effect they can have. So I started to learn to sing the song and its lyrics in reverse. After three months the job was done. I went up to the steps outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and performed it for an audience of confused passers-by, pigeons, and a video camera. Back home I reversed the tape and put a karaoke track underneath.” – Jeroen Offerman

http://www.archive.org/details/barstow_humpbacks_trinity_way_1980

Hey guys. just wanted to share this “gem” I’m working with for this project. Dated 1980 you see this americans first take of newfoundland. I laughed.

Here are some sources of audio, video, and other media that is either public domain or Creative Commons licensed (for more about Creative Commons, see creativecommons.org). Please be sure to credit other artists appropriately if using Creative Commons licensed work in your project.

• Internet Archive (a huge archive of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed audio, video, and other material)
• Public Domain Movie Torrents and the Public Domain Movie Database are not the most reliable websites, but you might find them useful.
• Freesound Project (Creative Commons-licensed sound library)
• PDSounds (public domain sound library)
• Librivox (public domain audio books)
• Project Gutenberg (public domain texts and audio books)

During this class we looked at some examples of video artists working with loops:

Martin Arnold is best known for Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), a frenetic remix of film from old Andy Hardy movies in which a few frames of film are sampled, replayed and stretched into extended sequences. There are some clips of this project on YouTube: 1 (above), 2, 3. Passage À L’Acte uses a similar technique.

In works such as La Ronde and Momentum, Montreal artist Bettina Hoffman creates video loops where a camera continuously arcs around a group of people who are perfectly still. This mechanism allows the viewer to examine these awkwardly frozen social situations in minute detail, working out relationships between the characters in each scene and imagining what has happened or is about to happen.

Think about how both of these video artists use loops and repetition to focus our attention on otherwise ordinary moments, creating a sense of tension and unease, and drawing attention to the conventions and constraints of cinema.

We also looked at Marco Brambilla’s Civilization and Continue. Many of Brambilla’s video projects make use of loops. Brambilla directed the 1993 Hollywood blockbuster Demolition Man before turning his attention to video and installation art.

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. In consequence we should not only consider what is shown, but also that which is not shown. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that which is most interesting to consider.” – Martin Arnold

My Desk is 8-Bit, from the amazing artist/designer/illustrator/typographer Alex Varanese. “I’d like to think I’m the first person to be inspired by Michel Gondry and R-Type on the same project.”