Marktollefson’s Weblog
doing the documentary thing
karl finally gets his copy of the award
After posting a video of clips from a documentary I made in 1990, I reconnected with the St. John’s sound recordist who shared this award given to the film. By coincidence, Karl had recently worked on an MOW with an undergraduate student who works with me in the film equipment cage at Ryerson University.
To view ALIEN OUTS, a compilation of trims from the documentary, go to http://futureoftelevision.weebly.com/area-of-refuge.html
presentations
Seeing all the presentations was both enlightening and entertaining. I was particularly impressed with Graham’s exhaustive and intricate coding system and Randy’s incredibly inventive puzzle game.
It was gratifying to see that people appreciated the tactile nature of my flipbook project. I have a new fondness for the non-digital that I never thought I would admit to.
flipbook printer site
Here’s a link to download a program which allows you to turn an AVI movie into a flipbook printed on business cards.
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/FlipbookPrinter/index.html
Printing and assembling flipbook update
It took two and a half hours! About a zillion paper guillotine cuts later, I had two sets of one hundred flipbook pages.
This was because I laid everything out in Photoshop … 10 images to a page … and then had Kinkos print them onto 2 sets of 10 matte cardstock pages. I figured it wouldn’t take that long to slice up the pages using their big cutting tables. So wrong. It is tedious and exacting work, and in the end I found it was impossible to be dead accurate.
However once I was done it was a joy to discover how much fun it is to have a hard copy. The flipbook pages are like playing cards. It is so, so much more enjoyable to spread them out on a big table and look for patterns this way than it is to scroll through thumbnail images on a computer monitor.
With the flipbook pages it’s like playing solitaire … you can make rows of images quickly and intuitively without overthinking why are you doing it. Then you scoop them up and you can see the resulting “movie” instantly by flipping through the stack.
I think there is much to be learned from this epiphany … the digital mirror of the archived objects does not have all the properties of the physical original, or even the physical DUPLICATE of the original.
printing and assembling flipbook
Okay, here’s where digital and electronic media has analog and physical media totally beaten … it took me two and a half hours to print and manually cut the 200 pages for the flipbooks. it was brutal. more details on this ordeal in the next post
Sequencing the flipbook
I have decided to add a layer of metadata to the 100 images. I am assigning a numerical value to each image which will be distinct from the images’ names. The numbers were arbitrarily generated when I created a targa sequence of the images from the disc Vid gave us, so they correspond to the alphanumeric sequence of the images’ names … therefore #001 is “P1003791″ and #100 is “x-ray 01″
The original reason I added this layer of metadata was my failing memory … I was afraid that without a unique, uniform and easily identifiable name for each image I would lose or duplicate images.
As I started arranging the images in a tempero-linear flow I realized that each sequence (duh) had its own unique DNA as expressed by its 100 digit code. In the Avid editing system I was able to use this code to quickly create new variations on the sequence.
When I print the pages of the flipbook I will put the images’ code number in the lower left side.
I am also considering making two flipbooks: one with a sequence I am working on that plays with the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and another which I will leave with its spine unbound. The latter will give people the opportunity to act as an editing system, rearranging and shuffling the sequence as they so desire.
I think it will be interesting to observe how this tactile experience compares to the digital. It will also be intriquing to see if the combinations occur more on the cognitive side or on the intuitive side when they are created physically.
Flipbook mockup
I’ve got a bunch of different ways of putting the flipbook sequence together. This is the simplest … it starts with the smallest file and ends with the biggest. This is just the first 50 images playing back at about 12 frames per second, which I have decided is an average speed people view a flipbook. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to print … I really don’t feel like having to cut and paste 100 bits of paper onto card stock. I’m off to consult with the friendly local Kinkos people shortly.
here’s a link to the video … hope I entered it right
<object width=”425″ height=”350″> <param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/LfkXxkPBPng“> </param> <embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/LfkXxkPBPng” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”350″> </embed> </object>
database project organization
In our discussion today we talked about the importance of naming. I think related to this is the issue of numbering … especially in relation to the flipbook I am doing. Numbering creates the sequence, it creates the narrative.
Beginning to create a sequence for the flipbook
I’ve converted the jpg images for the project into both tiff and targa sequences so that I can view them as a temperolinear medium … that is, in motion over time. To do this I have loaded the sequence into my Avid editing system. Right now I am experimenting with the effects of persistence of vision to create a form of visual narrative. There are batches of images in the 100 jpgs that seem to go together as similar types, but it is also interesting to juxtapose or intersperse dissimilar types to create a rhythm. Too bad there’s no way to associate an audio sountrack! I have also been working on determining the exact frame rate per second. When you watch a flipbook the rate is far less than 29.9 fps associated with conventional video so I am trying to tweak the system so that it will play at around 18 fps, which seems to be the speed most people view flipbook pages.
