Jed Inside

Jed Inside was the first project for me in the Mediaworks program. Called “60 Seconds,” the assignement was to portray yourself in 60 seconds of video and sound. I think this captures in a great way some of the essential elements of my personality: my opinion of the vast majority of verbal discourse that occurs, my anxiety of social interaction, my fear of and attraction to female humans, my tendency to hide emotions in the presence of other people, and the feeling of being pulled out of myself when conversing and interacting with other people. Now that is an intense minute!

Coffee Destructo Vision

Coffee Destructo Vision (my title, post-creation) was my 2nd large project in Mediaworks, and I really like how it turned out. I created it jointly with David Weiner, who was an enjoyable and flexible person to work with, and I am glad we shared a similar vision of what we wanted from the mass of found footage we started out with. It was edited linearly in the DV format, which was excruciating, but certainly taught me a valuable lesson about the process of editing non-linearly. This was edited in an thematically and visually associative fashion. We would see a theme of eyes, and edit everything with that theme together, and then see what came next: coffee, which linked to drinking and driving, which linked to crashing, which linked to destruction, which linked to drug addiction and insanity, &c. This was a very interesting method of creating a work of media that reminded me to some extent of surrealism, at least in its effect on me as a viewer. I would enjoy creating another recombinant work in this fashion at some point.

The Lunchbox

The Lunchbox was the first (and probably only) fictional narrative I will create in Mediaworks, for the “A Meets B and goes to C” project. I worked closely with the excellent Morgan Dusatko on every aspect of production, from scriptwriting and storyboards to shooting and acting. While it is not perfect, mostly because the piece should really be about 70 seconds longer than the assignement called for, I am quite proud of our work on this video. (except of course for the parts with me acting, because I am not capable of playing a homeless street punk very well).

Bang

Bang is a Structuralist Materialist gangster film created by Team 671 (Morgan Dusatko, Drew House, Jed Smith, and Tristram McDermott) for the “In the Style Of…” project at the end of Fall Quarter. It was created from a number of different elements all of which were composited and edited entirely in Adobe After Effects. A great deal of work went into just the creation of these elements. The base shot of the ‘gangster (Morgan) standing in St. John’s Episcapalian Church in downtown Olympia was an experience to shoot due to the old electrical system having no grounded plugs. The dollar bill animations were an experience; especially the shot of the bill burning. We accomplished this in a somewhat haphazard way by using a spraypaint can as a blowtorch. The animation of the hole-poking was especially interesting (and time consuming) for me, because it actually originated as video! I converted the DV video file (2-3 minutes) to a BMP image sequence, and then went through every frame by hand and chose 500 of the best looking ones, and converted it back into video to be used. This is an interesting process of creating animation which I would enjoy exploring further at some point. And then of course there was the scratching we did on 16mm black leader film (kindly donated by Sally Cloninger), which ‘made’ the excellent filmic aesthetic of the video. After we did all of the scratching on film, we transfered it into a digital format by recording a projection of the film with my PV-GS150 camcorder. There were many other elements as well, such as video feedback and refilming projections. The process of compositing this massive amount of footage in After Effects and then applying all of the transparency keying and filters and keyframed channel inversion and flashing light effects was probably the most challenging thing I had done in Mediaworks so far, besides the 18-hour straight paper-writing session for the big film analysis paper. Anyway, enjoy this video, damnit, because we busted our collective ass to make it.

Capitol Compression

Capitol Compression was edited nonlinearly and analogue, film cut and splice style! It was a combination of Brad Hutchinson‘s and my first 100′ of 16mm that we shot with the beautatious Bolex. We both heavily used the technique of pixilation, so the stylistic aspect of our rolls went well together. The problem then was to come up with a thematic relationship, which of course readily presented itself with the capitol building and that certain guy suffocating himself with a plastic bag. We did a great deal of work with direct animation as well, including but not limited to overlayed gells, bleach pen emulsion dissolving, scratching, hole-punching, single-perforation reversal of footage, and hole-punched face overlays.

Half Dead Organs Crossing

Half Dead Organs Crossing was created by me and Tristram McDermott for the “Place Evoking Memory” project, the final assignment for the first half of Winter Quarter, in which we worked with film, oh glorious film. In this project, however, we did not work with film, but a telecined transfer of our beautious film into pooquality 720×480 digital video. This pooquality was made slightly better than other regular DV by the fact that this footage was telecined. This meant (to my great excitement) that the original progressive frames @ 23.976 fps were recoverable! (the original original 24fps has to be slowed down by .1% or a factor of .001 in order to be successfully transformed with a 3:2 or other cadence of pulldown to NTSC standard 29.97fps). Being quite the excitable person in regard to technical stuff like this, I jumped into After Effects and performed an “inverse telecine,” (essentially removing the interlaced duplicate fields from the footage and restoring the original progressive frames), only realizing later that there was a built in utility for inverse-telecining called Cinema Tools packaged with Final Cut Pro. Tristram and I then edited our project in 24p in Final Cut Pro, and output to progressive 23.976fps lossless video (our entire workflow was necessarily in lossless, so as to preserve as much of the original quality of the film source material), and applied a 3:2 pulldown in After Effects again, then outputting to DV and authoring to DVCAM tape. We (mostly me) got somewhat too carried away with the digital compositing in After Effects, and didn’t realize how much it would contrast with the aesthetic of the film-originated video portions (this is especially true of the title sequences and the spotlight revealing the letter scene, as well as the green tint on the letter masking). In the future I will certainly be more careful and discriminating in combining footage from these two different sources. I stand by the awesomeness of our title till the day after I die, however.