2008-07 Video for TIM

I've been taking a few good photos and seeing some neat old films and I'd like to do something where the problems are creative instead of technical or mechanical so a video for TIM sounds good.

Sort out the track(s).
Sort out and idea for it.
Sort out the tech' to do it.

OK well, sorting out the track and the treatment were kind of linked:

Something short and fun perhaps?: I had the idea of doing a space travel track based on animating graphics from styled on 60's SciFi paper back covers and sketched up an idea but it didn't jell. Those graphic artists were great and I only really realized how great until I tried to copy their style. I still think I'll have a go but I need to mull it over for a while.

Something with a very clear and simple process?: A photographic temporal cutup for a jazz track was another option so I bit of thinking that through made me realize that I have an idea for another project that is too close to that and I don't want them to bleed together. (And I'd already done something quite similar to this for another of the tracks.)

It looked like the epic track was going to be the one after all. I'd been holding off on this trying to find a way of using Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus using a weird old doll . But I need a better blue screen then I have right now and photos and lighting etc. etc.... too much. So trim it down: Rhinoceros by Inesco sounded easier and it fits the track almost as well. I could re-use an older idea I'd had and just plonk Rhino heads on the narrators as the film continued.

Easy.

So that was it.

The process was quite obvious after that:
Generate backgrounds:
Generate Narrators:
Use kino to put the narrators on the backgrounds.
Use cinelerra to edit the scenes in sync with the soundtrack.

Backgrounds: I picked through one of my piles of freak newspaper clippings and scanned then clipped and resized them in gimp. I sorted the images in to categories then dug up the script I used for the TV23 stuff and used that to make some video from them.

Narators: These are from a set of photos that disquiet. A lot. Trimmed them, sorted them and made temporalfilms oif them with the TV23 script.

Edited a narrator to inject more of the soul of the image owner back into it with kino. Used a custom png file as a mask for a luma wipe and set the start and end to 40% or so to fudge the narrator onto the background.

Finally got enough cinelerra skill to layer the back grounds and narrators onto a soundtrack and did a test run. I think it looks good enough not to use the Rhinos. Cool. Just the grunt work to do now.

A week Later: A few hours work and the figures and backgrounds are all done. I need to composite the figures onto the backgrounds and then mix them in cinelerra. I've been playing with cinelerra a bit and dont get the interface.