This post contains all of the animations I have completed so far, including the 1020 frames I captured last night during a rather fantabulous 10 hour shift. probably 1/5 of these frames were taken rapidly, just to capture movement, and aren’t of the greatest quality, as you will see in the Lumbar Laura clip. I think I made some progress on creating lighting that doesn’t look bad. At least an hour was devoted to setting up for the dance clip. I am glad I am shooting puppets instead of people, because they take much more kindly to exceedingly slow homicide.
Here is a conglomeration of all the animations that I spoke of in my last post. They are presented here edited only in a linear narrative fashion, which does not at all resemble the end result, so please bear that in your mind while watching. You will notice a couple experiments with compositing digital noise with the chroma key technique. You might also notice a displacement map of the following frame, hidden in the digital noise behind the barbie dolls. 
This is a technique which I think deserves at least some further experimentation.
Here are the other animations I completed last night.
A Word on Themes
I originally laid out in my treatment that one of the intended purposes of my project was to bring light to and possibly subvert the base portrayal of the human body in the traditional popular music video. Over the last few days, I have been acquiring and critically scrutinizing a number of videos by pop music artists such as Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and various rap artists. Watching these videos has reinforced my previous sentiments. Many of these videos paint a unidimensional view of reality, emphasizing the polar dynamic between men and women. Whether the video is portrayed by the men (rap) or women (Britney et al.), the message largely the same: the bodies of women are objects made to be pursued by men for sexual pleasure. While this statement isn’t universally true, I think that this dynamic is existent in the great majority of the videos I watched. This “dynamic” to me does not seem benevolent, relevant, or even valid in the furtherance of any sort of worthy goal other than the capitalistic exploitation of sexuality (selling sex for profit), which, in itself, is not far removed from pornography. The interesting and frightening thing however, is that these videos are broadcast widely on MTV, a channel whose target audience is largely younger teenagers. Every day, millions of kids are interpellated by these broadcasts, being told how to think about themselves, their peers, and their sexuality. Being informed by this occasionally sexist, occasionally misogynistic, occasionally hyper-masculine, hyper-sexual source, cannot be healthy. These messages are mediated through the television and other electronic forms of mass-media distribution. These are things I’m thinking about as I continue to work on my project, which looms over me and attempts to crush my cerebral mound and determination valve.
A Word on Hosting Video
Some of you may be noticing a growing preponderance of embedded quicktime files rather than google or youtube videos on my blog. This is because they are (in my eye) much higher quality. Using the services of ourmedia.org and archive.org you can upload a quicktime video for hosting and have immediate access to it (just as, if not more immediate than youtube!). There are fewer limits on both content, format, and size than either google video or youtube, and many of the videos hosted there are actually somewhat cognitively interesting (not to throw poo at youtube and google video, but a large amount of the videos on there are not exceedingly pre-planned and edited to infinitude and beyond…). What you need to do:
- get an ourmedia account.
- get an archive.org account.
- encode your video (I use quicktime h264 500-800kb/s dual pass, best quality, etc…)
- upload/publish your video at ourmedia.org.
And then of course you have to publish the video in your blog, which you can do with the following code. Just paste the code in like it is below, and replace the embed src=”" and value=”" parameters with the URL to your video file.
<object classid=”clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B” codebase=”http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab” height=”256″ width=”320″>
<param name=”src” value=”http://myMovie.mov”>
<param name=”autoplay” value=”false”>
<param name=”type” value=”video/quicktime” height=”256″ width=”320″>
<embed src=”http://myMovie.mov” height=”256″ width=”320″ autoplay=”false” type=”video/quicktime” pluginspage=”http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/”>
</object>
Initial credit for the discovery of this hosting service should certainly go to the excellent Jeremiah Jones.
A Word on Pornography and Previous Influential Work
I have been debating to myself for some time about whether or not to share this video in this academic context, and some may disagree with me, but I have decided to do go forward with it. It is a music video for the track “Laundry” by the electronic music artist edIT, which features the same technique of audio-visual synchronization which I will be expanding on in my spring project. Perhaps sharing this will allow you all to see in an oblique sort of way what the final form of my project may end up looking like. As the warning at the beginning states, this video contains pornographic nudity, which could be perceived as offensive by some. Please don’t watch it. The file is ~20MiB, and about 6 minutes long, so you may with to download it instead of streaming it.
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