media at rmit teaching blog
So, here it is. My final project.
download the zip file (43.6 MB)
or try the other POVI have always been fascinated by the online time based media, and when we were assigned this manifesto to do, I saw it as an opportunity to realize my very own ideas of an online interactive film by using the […]
[From Vernakraft : A Manifesto based on Tom Sherman’s vernacular video]
Vernaculiar: The pecuLIARity of the everyday - a manifesto based on Tom Sherman’s excerpts of Vernacular Video.
the other POV
Being a perfectionist had always been a piece hidden at the most beneath of my inner being. It takes up a lot of self-detriments, sacrifices, disappointments, and dissatisfaction – not at all a good characteristic to pick up in life. An apparent example would be this late delivery of the manifesto. It had a solid structure by time it was to be due, but flaws keep appearing one after another, not to mention the faults we found through software, conditions of facilities use and also the race with time.
Rendy, a fellow tutorial mate and I decided to integrate our final projects, based from the course name of Integrated Media. It was time consuming to put our ideas together and put the differences away. We decided to make an example our manifesto through a cinematic approach. It was pretty interesting now that I browse through this batch’s students manifestos and find how most of them used videos as a medium of evidencing their propositions in a theoretical way. What I’m trying to get at is as I watch Rendy’s and my videos and try to reflect through comparing, it is totally different in a sense; we are making a vernacular video based on of our propositions!
Our differences lie on the most basic grounds of our propositions. Rendy’s propositon was more towards the allowance of viewer’s interactivity and cinematic online approach whilst mine was pretty much to improve the reputation of the vernacular art through proper cinematic approach.
It was quite a disaster during the start, while working in a group allows more ideas; but as more ideas follows, more conflicts came about as well. The more time consuming part was the scripting – believe it or not – we had 3 quite a formed story and bits and pieces of developable ideas. We settled down at what is in our manifesto, with two similar propositions where we are to disregard narrative and its elements as a priority but have multiple sequences that bears meanings within themselves yet are still able to contextualize each other well and keep viewers close.
The MOST time consuming part lied in editing (filming is just a hair below it), we locked ourselves in edit suite 1 and 2 for a week, working from noon till after hours, where we had no appropriate access. (getting kicked out is one, leaving with alarm blaring behind us is another, holding our pee in is the worst, really, then the worse when it gets to having to crash at a friend’s place for the whole week just because she lives stone throw to uni!) it was a challenge to share a similar material and make it into 2 different manifestos that hold similar meaning yet different in a way. Speaking of 2 different things, we did the film in 2 different ways each (2 storylines) to give choices to a viewer to take from. This is Rendy’s way to justify interactivity and on my part, is to add up appeal for my viewers content and aesthetic wise, having different songs to it. The navigation was a five letter swearword. I wanted my viewers to be able to have choices to read all the propositions in their own way, reviewing it by pressing next or back, or by choosing through the numbers. The videos I made a page where they can choose the storyline on how they’d want the story to end.
While editing, we met a fellow mate, Damien, who wished us luck and hinted that the worst part was to come by saying “I really want to track down the guy who made eZedia and kill him”. Well, that was very true. We moved to Bonza and started our exploration of eZedia which really is the worst part of the project. Not mentioning the after hours restriction, eZedia kept crashing on us which after a night in Bonza, we snapped and just went home in the late night. I decided to purchase eZedia and worked from outside restriction hours.
It was crazily crashing (still) and really, seriously, time consuming. One of them buggers were the links I tried to make in every single proposition page existent that links to each other, the effects, the photoshopping of images down to the right size. Oh just please, everyone would understand how this feels, after all we went through, won’t we?
Overall, I think we did a reasonably satisfactory work, I’ve tried to convey my propositions in my videos, content is significant, but aesthetics is a hair below it. I call my manifesto ‘Vernaculiar’ to achieve what I have in mind for the piece. Peculiarity is intriguing. Peculiarity in the everyday could relate to everyone and doing it in a proper cinematic way scales down the amateurish reputation of the vernacular art. It could have been done better, eZedia tones down the color of the video a little bit, which is a regret of mine. I wish I had more time (we all do, but I’m first on the line!)
It is satisfactory, but not satisfying, just relieving. We are definitely going back to edit a better version of our manifesto within the semester break because we are priviliged to keep the suite keys over the break being such a faithful regular! But for now, I hope the product conveys my perspective of the excerpts of Tom Sherman’s Vernacular Video clearly!
[From Vernaculiar: the manifesto of the pecuLIARity of the everyday]
So, I asked for feedback from the manifesto and no one could understand what I was talking about. Mum looked up vernacular video on google which I thought was pretty great for a 64 year old but she didnt get it. My boss didn’t get it and my friends just asked ‘Praxis, Alex? Is that even a word?’ And so even though I feel like I have learnt something this semester…it seems lost amongst the people. They are right though, I could have relaxed and had a lot more fun with this project. I wish I had thought outside the square a little bit more. So now….we will see what next semester brings.
This is an interactive manifesto pertaining to the production of “vernacular” holiday videos - videos that can easily be subsumed into an integrated, networked environment.
If your internet speed is crap, download it instead.
Alternatively, visit the following URL to view my manifesto in its own window:
http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3170805/Manifesto.mov
[From IM - Manifesto Submission]
My manifesto is an exploration of the character traits of vernacular blogging, and an attempt to provide insight and provoke thought regarding the way in which a video blogger should relate to his/her blog and relate to the other bloggers viewing his/her blog. It is a simple guide, and in my opinion should be the character traits that vernacular bloggers can build their foundation on. They are simple yet extremely important to think about whilst blogging. In regards to what works well/doesn’t work well - I am not sure if my background is working, and im not too sure why it isn’t. So this is an issue that needs to be addressed, however I think the layout is simple yet elegant and easy to follow and the background just makes it look a little more attractive however is not essential. The background was working previously, and as you can see from the big thumbnail I originally took a screen shot of the manifesto and the background is viewable however I’m not sure how it could suddenly dissapear when I didn’t alter the files at all.
[From manifesto]
A Manifesto for Vernacular Music Videos
Propositions:
1) The Vernacular Music Video as a Genre
2) Sound as Emphasis in Video
3) The Traditional Vernacular Music Video
4) The AMV
5) The Machinima
6) The Juxtapositional
7) The Homage Montage
8) The Lyrical Interpretation
9) The Inadvertent and Interactive
10) The Experientialhtml
zip archive
The Journey:
In my original list of propositions my ideas were broad an […]
[From A Manifesto for the Vernacular Music Video]
In this manifesto, I attempted to come up with 10 propositions that individuals could do to establish their own existence. As Tom Sherman said in his extract, “Video has become every person’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity.” I went along with this quote and tried to think of ways that each of us can use video to accomplish this.
The videos in this manifesto could be argued to be mundane. I will argue that it is irrelevant because the manifesto is about framing the individual’s own identity. Therefore, the images and videos will only make sense to the person, or anyone who has a shared/collective memory of it. Many of which are taken from my own archive of pictures and videos. Any images that I did not have I went to creative commons to look for something suitable. Other content were produced for the purpose of this manifesto.
I attempted to come up with propositions based on my own understanding of what is necessary to establish our identities. Thus, I looked at my own practices and came up with these ideas. The design of the project was aimed to look like a media player. This simple design was used because it would be familiar for anyone who has used the software before, thus navigation will be easy. It was aesthetically designed to look like a movie because each of our lives are a long, continuous narrative - similar to a movie.
I thought that I have succeeded in producing the manifesto like how I envisioned it. It was a relatively straightforward process of placing all the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. I liked the idea of the design but, having looked at some other examples, wished I could do better in improving on my design. At times I felt that this project was very egocentric; it seemed it I was producing a piece all about myself. That would be where I thought this piece failed, it should have more content from beyond myself.
I’ve tested the project at uni several times and it worked fine. I seemed to have encountered some problems when trying to play it at home. It is probably due to the slower network that I’m receiving at home. I have failed to consider that when drawing up my plans for the project. It would seem that this could be avoided if I had not used so many videos are compressed them more.
Click the picture to make it work…
…or…
if you like, here’s a zip file for your downloading pleasure (4.9mb).AND, what’s more…Here’s an explanation as to why i’ve taken this approach to manifesting
1) Why so ‘broad’??
I’ve seen a lot of manifestos while making this one that have centred on fairly specific details of what is required of the videos proposed in their manifestos, eg) has to be grainy, handheld etc. I was concerned about being to broad in my manifesto, but inevitably more concerned with it being too specific. At the same time i was reminded of a thought put forward by Adrian in a tute about the content in the manifestos needing to be something we actually cared about. While i definitely care about the decentralising of video, i can’t say i care too much for the specifics of how people produce their own content, it kind of defeats the purpose of decentralising it if we start making placing huge constraints and provisos on it. For instance, “decentralising video needs to happen…but only if you shoot it standing on one foot in the rain” (a colourful example but, an insight into where i’m coming from).2) What’s with the silly pictures/videos?
This harks back to something i did in the first constrained task Wed5th8am. In short, i wanted to take this approach of rudimentary animation a step further. It was in fact a lot of fun, I’ve enjoyed it, i think it’s worked but more to the point i took the opportunity to a) try something different, and b) ‘further myself’, if you will. Animation is in fact something i would love to do more of.
The other answer to that question would perhaps be, i chose to make illustrative as opposed to demonstrative videos; a purely semantic difference I’m sure. However what i was more interested in doing was making videos that supplement the broader implications of each point i made, or served at least as a visual accompaniment to the point i was making.3) Why no sound?
I though about the kinds of sound i could have included; i though of atmospheric sounds (street sounds for the videos outside), voices for when my characters spoke, even narration over the whole thing. Ultimately i decided against it, i really thought my ideas added nothing substantial to the videos. Furthermore the focus of my manifesto is video; naturally video that will be accompanied with sound, but in keeping with the video focus of the piece, i opted for a video only execution4) Am i happy with it?
As a learning experience, absolutely, that’s not to say there are parts that could use some improvement. I think my animations are very twee, but that’s kind of what i was going for. Had i set out to make very smooth, very slick animations i would be a little disappointed. I’m also kind of satisfied with the amount of depth and breadth i was able to go into. I purposefully kept things broad in order to do that; by not going too far into the technical aspects of video production i could discuss things such as arbitration and the filtering of noise. It was being able to include a discussion, albeit a brief one, on these implications (and i was glad to do so) that has given the manifesto some of that depth and breadth i referred to.5) What do i think of eZedia as a program?
Don’t ask
oh my chicken!
I have an uploaded MANIFESTO!!!!!
I have manifested like the best of them. And here is my finished product, blog links and all. What more could an Alice wish for????[From A MANIFESTO!]
YAY! DONE DONE DONE! The main directory with all the relevant files is <a href=”http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~S3178792/manifesto/”HERE.
You can view the actual project HERE and download the zip file HERE. Click on the above poster image for a brief preview that will auto-scroll through the different topics.
And in case you were wondering, the
is not supposed to be clickable. It’s the images above it that are. ;]
There’s also a “hidden” 11th manifesto rule. See the bottom of this blog post if you can’t figure it*** out…
Enjoy folks!
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References for CC Video Content
http://blip.tv/file/49419/ - Aula 2006: Alice Taylor on Gaming and Broadcasting
http://blip.tv/file/518488/ - theorycast.16 :: Adrian Miles on the Missing Link in Videoblogs ::
http://blip.tv/file/910956/ - Convergence: Music/Movies Meet Games
References for CC Images
All images taken from Flickr are with CC licenses.
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***The future of online content is shared and CC will lead the way.[From IM1 Manifesto Submission]
Is captured on video.
This video doesnt have a poster image, but im just putting it up there because i feel as though i captured something.
I was making a video for my manifesto of me making my bed and didnt realise that the sound to my laptop had been turned on.
My music was playing, and simply by having music playing over the top of this is makes it seem beautiful, which is entirely what the point of my manifesto was. To see beauty in the everyday.[From my very own beautiful moment]
Click here to download it.
My manifesto, ‘A Search for the Video Artist’, is trying to encompass Tom Sherman’s idea of the future of vernacular video in the sense of the loss of individual video artists. That is, if video is available to everyone, and everyone is becoming producers, then who is to decipher one person as a video artist over the next.
I tried to work with the idea of the different mediums in which videos can be produced, ie. camera, mobile, VLOG, and how these do not matter in terms of defining a video artist. These are the mediums in which we are exposed to for creating video today, so in a way someone who harnesses these technologies, no matter what the quality, is considered a video artist.
In terms of the process of creating my manifesto, I can easily say I did not put as much concentration in to as I should. I let life get out of my hands and as a result my thought processes were limited when it finally came time to do the manifesto. Also the blog outtage on the day it was due really hindered my work. I was due to fly out of the state on the monday after it was due, so even if they came online on that day (today) it was still limiting me. All the blog posts I intended to do and link to in my manifesto I was unable to. They came online this morning and I only had time after that to export my project as it was and put it in my blog.
download zip
video screen would become a city’s diary.
art video could display on urban screen.[From Final Manifesto]
