Thanks to Adrian Miles over at vlog 3.0, tonight's episode of Sunday Evening Aesthetics is an experiment. Click on rhizomeOne.mov to see it. Once it starts playing, place your mouse over the left half to hear the soundtrack for the left movie; place your mouse over the right to hear the right movie. Adrian has developed and made available files that allow for the kind of recombinant video that I've made and posted here.
I did this sort of on the run tonight--fast and cheap, as they say. The basic concept was to do the film proper on the left (a woman finds something horrible . . .) and the behind-the-scenes down time on the right. As someone who admires Mike Figgis's Time Code, this is an exciting concept. Perhaps the same film playing side my side, but started at slightly different points, like two slot cars racing around a track at the same speed but separated by a few seconds. Or perhaps the same movie shot from two different points of view running side by side. Or perhaps a new sort of viewer-enacted parallel editing: instead of cutting, use one long take and let the viewer decide when to cut away to the parallel story.
Anyway, there are lots of possibilities here. I'm glad to see people like Will at Taylor Street Video experiment with this, too. And a great example of how new technologies help to create the conditions for new narrative forms. One of the unexpected outcomes has to do with the role of sound. As I was making this, I planned to have music only on the left frame, and natural sound only on the right frame. But of course, even though this happens, the viewer still has a choice: even though music plays on the left frame, the viewer can choose to watch either the left or right frame, and vice versa. In this regard, control is stripped away--at least a little bit--from the director.
A viewing tip: I notice that on my windows machine, the sound takes a minute or two to kick in, as if the videos need to play through once or twice (they're only about one-minute long). This doesn't seem to be a problem on the mac.
Now, click on rhizomeOne.
I had no idea you could do something like that in Quicktime! The possibilities that have suddenly opened up are frying my brain.
What I'm really interested in is a randomizer of sorts...that'll create new edits automatically every time you play the Quicktime movie. I know it's possible...figuring out how is the tough part.
Posted by: dvd | June 21, 2005 at 02:06 AM
That was really interesting.
I use to follow religiously your post since a year ago but i didn´t see these experiments in video yet.
Brilliant idea. Now i can´t stop wondering if it´s posible to do somethin similar but with the image...
Congrats for the blog.
Posted by: Pablo | November 14, 2007 at 05:14 AM