Organized Chaos

I hope tonight is going to be a little more "organized" than "chaotic." 

Deep Breathes...

Wow. So much going on.
I feel like everything has shifted drastically in the past few days.
My friend in Massachusetts, who I was collaborating with, got a concussion last week and is not able to do any strenuous physical activity (including dancing via skype). So, panicked, I contacted two other friends - one in Cambridge, England and one also in Massachusetts. I plan on doing the performance with the one in England, with my friend in MA on standby - ya know, just in case something goes wrong.

Organizing has definitely been stressful, but not too terrible. I had some fun making the program.
Hopefully everything goes smoothly tomorrow.

Crunch Time

I have to admit, I have been so preoccupied with actually figuring out the details of my project, fine-tuning the video, and organizing the event, I have forgotten to actual document my progress via blog. 

Where to begin? 

Well, the editing process was a bit slow at first because I was having some trouble coming up with new ideas. Everything that crossed my mind seemed boring and recycled. So, I made some changes. Instead of solely using footage of movement sequences, I decided to add into the video creepy, erie footage that I took  at an old storage section of the beach. It's pretty great. It adds a nice contrast to the movement distortion.

I've also been having fun being an organizer for the event. I hate to sound like a nerd, but I really like this kind of thing. 

Getting Down to Business

Figuring out what I wanted to do was the easy part. What will really make it happen is the connections and technology aspects.

List of what I need
1 Computer (on my end)... MA friends will have a computer of their own.
2 projectors - 1 showing MA movement and 1 projecting pre-recorded video
DVD player - playing DVD of pre-recorded video

I don't really want music and sound to interfere too much with the movement experiment, which is why I won't need extra audio connections. I would not want too much of the noise from the MA video to dominate the action. The DVD will be silent as well.

Connections...
DVD player will connect to the projector via RCA cable.
Computer (skype/ichat) will connect to the 2nd projector via VGA cable

hopefully it all works!!!

IDEAS!!

I've been thinking - A LOT - about my collaborative project for the 25th.

My original plan was to do something relating dance/movement with altered video. Aka, video that has been discolored, distorted, out of synch. I'm not sure so much anymore about all of that - maybe some of it.
I really want to record myself doing a phrase, and then slow/speed the timing and maybe change the coloring.
In the live performance, I would be doing the same movement.
Meanwhile, friends of mine from Massachusetts will be on skype/ichat only interacting with my live movement.
It's a connection - I'm feeding off of the distorted images, and they are feeding off of me. It's like that game "telephone" - the material is derived from the same source but, somewhere along the line, the images change.

I'm feeling pretty good about this final decision.

A Picture's worth a thousand words...

Information Overload

Though I think this is a given when collaborating and working with multimedia, this is what I learned in today's class: technology is complicated.
It took us over an hour to get everything set up, and we couldn't even fully achieve a proper connection with the audio. Which goes to show that some things are completely out of our hands.
You would think that there would be a less complicated way to make connections, but I guess not.
The entire class I was scribbling down terms in my notebook, attempting to remember which cables got plugged into where and why.
For the longest time we couldn't get our video to work. It turns out that the problem was that one of our cables wasn't plugged in all the way. Of course. We do everything correctly and something so minor caused us to have a malfunction.
This whole learning process is making me think about how I could possibly manage to make these connections by myself for my own work.
Overwhelming, to say the least.

Off Screen Intentions

Why exactly is film so intriguing? It is merely because it allows us to see into different worlds? Or even because it has the ability to show us something about our own worlds?
I've been experimenting with film for a few years now and I am still trying to figure out why I am doing what I am doing.
My "thing" is dance that incorporates film. But how exactly is that different than just "dance?" I know why. Well, I could explain the definitions of both and then explain, literally, why and how they are different.
But more abstractly, how are the worlds different? What am I trying to accomplish by using both? When working on a specific project or choreographic work, I could easily explain based on my piece intentions. But I am asking in the broadest idea of multi-media art - not on a specific level.

It's still something that I am working on.

World's Apart

I've been doing some thinking about what I want to explore in my October 25th project. It's a little bit difficult when the task is to communicate and collaborate with a person you are standing right next to - much less someone who is a skype chat's distance away.

With so many modes of communication these days, how do we effectively convey meaning?