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The constraint of “no cuts longer than 4 seconds” led me to explore a style of jump-cutting 1 subject with so little change in the jump as to produce the illusion of movement between frames. This in itself is a type of animation, if less manual of a process than creating each frame independently, as is traditional to animation techniques.

The red substance oozing from the mouth of the subject is Oobleck, a non-Newtonian solid.

Consider this a placeholder for just such an exceedingly extensive and detailed post about the process of creation of “Transference Simulation“, mostly regarding my post-production workflow choices and process, evolution of the conceptual content, and some explanations for my choices. And including, of course, a web-compressed video file of the final final cut. First, I will actually finish that tunnel of wires, and finish my eval, then I will write this post of gloriousness. You will see.

Here is an MPEG4 AVC encode of Transference Simulation, for your repeated viewing pleasure.

Transference Simulation is my final project for the Mediaworks program at the Evergreen State College. It is an animated music video recursively examining the representation of gender and sexuality in popular media. By accentuating morbidity, and asserting the vapid portrayal of the human body as a sexual object, this project attempts to bring light to the superficiality and delusional distraction of pop-culture media, such as the pop music video. Affected reflexively by this blight, the diegesis is allowed to play out and descend necrotically into the metaphorical consequents of this infection. Specific meaning is intended to be created in a willful dialectic between the viewer and his or her experience of the work.

This project was submitted to the Platform Animation Festival, and I ambivalently awaited word as to my acceptance or rejectance for quite some time. I had a feeling that it was likely to get rejected because of its lack of conceptual cogency, and overall stylistic roughness, and my inclinations were correct.

communicating in most forms online, such as bulletin board systems like blogs and forums, instant messaging, and personal profile pages such as myspace and facebook, are unique in that they allow or even encourage premeditated mediation of content. This is to say that one can think about what one is saying while one is saying it, and edit the result. This is not possible as much in real-time vocal conversations.

The portrayal of self online allows for very intentional representation in a manner which has the distinct possibility to be disingenuous. We were certainly interested in the implications of this possibly malicious capability.

We were also interested in the voyeuristic attributes of sites such as myspace, and suicidegirls.

Graham knew a girl named Ana who qualified perfectly for interrogating a number of these issues, and she graciously agreed to donate some of her precious time to talk to us. We ended up with an hour of interview footage, which discussed a great variety of issues and her personal experiences online. We then had to extract what we interpreted to be key phrases, telling of the issues we wanted to address, and cut it down to less than 5 minutes. This was a difficult task, and it resulted in the absolute butchering of what Ana said. We literaly cut sentences in half, pasted them together, and rearranged their order.

Possibly because of the moral ambiguity of this, we decided to employ the tactic of emphasizing our manipulative role in the creation of the video by beginning and ending with a deluge of jump-cuts. This worked very well to illuminate the constructed nature of many interview situations, which many people (myself most of all) are probably unaware of.

Watch the video.

The process of creation of this video is somewhat interesting to note. All footage was ‘collected’ completely independant of this ‘production’. The story was actually created and sequentially evolved out of the seed ideas of the contents of the footage I had previously shot. For example, the idea of the “Omnipotent Artificial Consciousness” / Brain-in-a-Chamber-Pot was concieved and added into the script after the footage was shot, which was when I was about halfway completed with it.

Looking back on The Bees, there are some technical elements which I could certainly do better (notably, sound design and mixing!), however I am quite enamored with the amount of nuance and obfuscation in the story. I also love the stylistic approach of synchronizing audio and video, in both cuts and motion within the frame. This is evident throughout The Bees in the cutting, and to a more obvious degree in the fly breakdance scene. Note that this represents an imperfect initial exploration of this technique, and that I have honed and perfected my approach and skillls in later projects, such as the music video I did for edIT‘s track “Laundry.”

The editing was accomplished in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, and various video effects were done in Adobe After Effects 6.5, with sound capturing and processing done in Sony Sound Forge 8.0.

Cinematography, sound and video editing, voice talent, video effects: Jed Smith
Music by Autechre, µZiq, End, Aphex Twin, Aix Em Klemm, and John Dowland.

Note: This video will require the most recent version of the Adobe Flash Player to work.

Pandemic

Pandemic is the first video I edited together after the acquisition of my neat tiny 3ccd camcorder. It just features combined footage from around my old home in Whale Pass, in Southeast Alaska, combined in a witty and somewhat interesting way. This was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. The first bit of music is by “End” from their cd “the sounds of disaster” – 04 – ruin anyone anywhere anything. The next sample of music is track 03 – “countdown to the end”, from the same cd. The sound at the very end is a clip from track 03 “destination sexy”, from Cex’s self-titled cd.

Flayinbombentrail

Continuing my tradition of excellent and perceptive titling, Flayinbombentrail represents my first experience editing in Avid Xpress Pro 4.6. Always the ascetic, I decided it would be a good experience for me to abandon the comfortable fuzzy interface of Premiere and see what a real GUI was like. Needless to say, I spent a good 10-12 frustrated and painful hours on this one 2 minute video, but I learned alot. There isn’t much in the way of content in this, but it could be construed as interesting just the same. Thusly, this esteemed artsy video was laid out over the excellent track 01 – Ashtray, from edIT’s release “Crying Over Pros For No Reason”.

Meatonyny

Meatonyny is a collage of life during the summer months at my home in Whale Pass, Alaska, edited entirely in Avid Xpress Pro. This edit was significantly easier because of my previous experience with editing Flayinbombentrail in Avid Xpress Pro. It is also my first successfully executed 30i to 24p converted video. Woo! this could probably be classified as long and boring, and thus is an excellent representation of my summer months of 2005. Set fittingly to the repetetive and ominous Autechre: Amber – 11 – Teartear.

Consummate

Consummate is a technical experiment with a rosy heart of fermented cabbage. The title is somewhat wittily ironic in context of the subject matter of a person endlessly eating and uneating a plate of food. Inspired by the cloning of Nicholas Cage in Adaptation, and armed with my “bulletproof” concept, and a method of carrying it out in After Effects, I set out for the Co-Op and bought some imitation hamburger product made of soy and things (myself being a pecto-vegetarian). Despite storyboarding and thinking this shoot through extensively, it is far from perfect, as is evident when I reach accross the table to dump my uneaten meat onto the other me’s plate. Someday it will be redone to perfection.

Vilem Boletum

Vilem Boletum (Latin for tawdry mushroom) was shot as an improvisational video in one Wed. night of fall Mediaworks lag. The rough story is as follows: a guy goes to strange Evergreen Soup party, and is offered some mushroom tea, which he reluctantly accepts. Strangely surrealistic adventures ensue.

This is obviously technically flawed to an extreme, but I love the rough approach and surrealist moments of clarity. The sound effects were all created in Propellerheads Reason 3.0 by myself. I am obviously a novice to an extreme.

Grotesquity

Grotesquity was a small independant project further exploring my identification with Suffering Bob, as being autobiographically representational of myself. The aspect of recursive spectatorship inherent in the process of creating self-portrayal is emphasized in the method of cutting, and symbolized with the presence of audio and video feedback. Enough is said.

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.