Kicking off our third unit: EVENT! Today we will look at ways time can be digitally manipulated to capture an event.
SLOWING DOWN
Ordinary video is customarily 25 (Europe) or approximately 30 (USA) frames per second (fps). Slow-motion cinema, also known as overcranking, is achieved by using a special camera which can record events at higher frame rates, such as 1000fps. When this video is then played back at the usual frame rate, it appears slowed down.
Dr. Edgerton and his strobelight
Because the exposure time of each frame is so short, high-frame-rate cameras generally require a lot of light. A lighting kit or bright sunshine is essential for good results with slow-motion cameras.
The video clips on this website were filmed with a special high-speed camera. The super slow-motion playback lets you visualize effects that cannot be seen with the naked eye or with a standard video camera.
Bill Viola ‘The Passions’
Bill Viola and the making of Emergence
Sam Taylor-Wood, Hysteria
In Sam Taylor-Wood’s Hysteria (1997), a woman displays extreme emotions in slow-motion. “There are no sounds, so the viewer cannot be certain whether she is moved by joy, despair or both.” Citation
Rachel Talibart Uses high-speed photography and telephoto lenses to catch waves:
Guillaume Panariello
unconditional rebel – siska (music video)
Adam Magyar, Stainless
High-speed recordings of people on subway platforms.
Does a Falling Slinky Defy Gravity?
Gabriel Boyer: Puma RS-X3, Highsnobiety
Raindrops – A Skateboard Short
Steve Giralt, Burger Assembly
Dong Hoon Jun, Every Day Experiments
Everyday Experiments
Commissioned by Apple. All it takes is the #iPhone12 and a different perspective to turn the everyday into something extraordinary.
Time Stretching in Audio
Justin Beiber Slowed Down
https://ew.com/article/2010/08/18/justin-bieber-u-smile-slow/
Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch
This is a program for stretching the audio. It is suitable only for extreme sound stretching of the audio (like 50x) and for applying special effects by “spectral smoothing” the sounds. It can transform any sound/music to a texture. The program is Open-Source and it’s released under the version 2 of the General Public License. You can download the source code for Linux or the Windows binaries.
Luke DuBois, Vertical Music
A chamber piece written for 12 players, lasting 4 1/2 minutes. Each musician was filmed individually in several takes using a high-speed (300fps) camera and an extremely high definition (1 MHz) analog-to-digital audio recording setup. When played back at 30fps, total time is ~45 minutes.
Marcus Coates – Dawn Chorus
The video installation uses human voices to replicate the natural phenomena of a birdsong chorus at dawn during Spring. Each of the fourteen screens feature a view of a human habitat: a car, an office, a bedroom, a school staff room etc. Individuals are seen sitting in their domains singing accurate birdsong.
Assisted by Coates, Geoff Sample (wildlife sound recordist) recorded the individual wild bird’s songs on the edge of a small woodland near Bamburgh, Northumberland, from 3 am to 9 am in May 2005. They used up to fourteen microphones to simultaneously record as many of the individual songs as they could. The recordings of each bird were then slowed down by up to 20 times, lowering the tone and lengthening the duration so that they fell in the range of the human voice and became slow enough to sing along to.
Singers from a variety of choirs in Bristol volunteered to mimic these slowed down recordings. They were selected according to their vocal range and ability as the bird songs varied in their complexity. Some birdsongs, like the robin’s, have a broad tonal range and unpredictable rhythms; others, like the chiffchaff (as the name suggests), repeat two simple high pitch notes which when slowed down, reveal previously unheard notes and dynamics. The singers were then filmed singing along to this slowed down birdsong for up to two hours.
The video footage together with the audio was then sped up to the original tempo of the birdsong (approximately 20 times faster), creating a transformation of the human voice into that of a bird. When the individuals are seen and heard as a collective, the timings of their songs, relative to each other, replicate when they were sung on the morning they were originally recorded.
The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
From the paper: “When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object’s surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones. We recover sounds from high-speed footage of a variety of objects with different properties, and use both real and simulated data to examine some of the factors that affect our ability to visually recover sound.”
Reversing Time
Michel Gondry
The duo, Miho Hatori, Yuka Honda, start their day in bed as the screen is split and follows each of their days. The left-hand screen is shown is shot forward and the right is reversed.
Jeroen Offerman Stairway to Heaven’ backwards, 2003
Jeroen Offerman, a Dutch visual artist who, a decade ago, spent three months learning to sing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” entirely backwards. He filmed himself singing the song in reverse, while standing in front of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, then flipped the direction of the video (hence the pedestrians walk backwards), all in order to show how well he mastered the art of singing Zeppelin in reverse.
SPEEDING UP
Frames of video are recorded at intervals less than the standard 25-30fps but then played at the normal frame rate. Alternatively, regular video is simply sped up, causing some frames to be dropped. This technique is extensively used in security/surveillance, scientific video, and documentary videos of processes which take a long time to complete (such as the construction of a building).
Recent iOS iPhones will record time-lapse videos. Many camera manufacturers also have inexpensive software that allow you to control your camera automatically, such as Nikon’s Camera Control Pro.
Marcell Esterházy v.n.p. v2.0
the artist documented a family Sunday lunch in which his grandfather was a participant. In so doing he used an acceleration effect thanks to which his grandfather’s usual, very slow, movements look calm and noble, while the gestures and conversations of the other participants seem deformed, incomprehensible and absurd due to their excessive rapidity. Were it not for this editing trick, the grandfather’s slow movements would be completely ‘uncinematic’, totally beyond the boundaries of the patience of the average spectator. the artist’s approach breathes media life and dignity back into the old man at the cost of shortening and deforming the time of his younger surrounding company. Age and time thus assume the character of relativistic, social constructs.
Tehching Hsieh – One Year Performance 1980 – 1981 (Time Clock Piece)
For one year, the artist punched a worker’s time clock located in his studio, on the hour, every hour. Marking the occasion by taking a self-portrait on a single frame of 16mm film, the resulting reel documents a year in his life at approximately one second per day – a pace that is polar opposite of the enduring length of the original performance. The punch cards, witnessed by a third party for authenticity, and other ephemera, document Hsieh’s life restructured around this highly repetitive task.
Geoffrey Reggio and Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
“A 1982 American experimental film produced and directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating “it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.” In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means “life out of balance”.
Sam Taylor Wood, still lifes
Apps that Capture an event over Time
The “Memories” function in apples’ photos
“With Memories, you can rediscover moments from within your photo library. Photos recognizes significant people, places, and events in your library, then presents them in curated collections called Memories. You can also create your own Memories, view them as movies, and share them with friends and family.”
1 Second Everyday
“1 Second Everyday is a video diary that makes it easy to take your day-to-day moments and create a meaningful movie of your life.”
Dispo
Dispo’s concept is simple, which is part of the appeal in an era where people seem to need immediate gratification. There’s a view finder, controls for zoom and a flash. You can take as many pictures as you’d like, but the pictures need time to “develop.” You can’t see them until the following morning at 9 a.m.
After the pictures appear in the app, Dispo users can choose to post them to either a solo or shared “roll” with other users. You can also just keep them in your library.
NEW LENSES: Experimental Capture and Release 