Category: video archive

  • Dziga Vertov and Social Media

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    A century ago Dennis Arkadievitch Kaufmann, more commonly known as Dziga Vertov, the spinning top, came up with the concept of the All-Seeing Eye. The Kinoki. The Cinema Eye. His idea was that with time life unawares could be documented and daily life would be captured by cameras for everyone to see.

    https://youtu.be/yzxrSX79oz4

    Until recently the idea of filming and documenting everyone with video and photo cameras was an act of fiction. Rolls of films had only 36 frames and DV tapes only lasted 63 minutes. Cameras were dedicated devices that you did not have with you at all times and to take pictures was expensive and you needed space for storage.

    If we were to take 36 pictures I think we would have paid 1.20 CHF per image recently. DV tapes were about 15 CHF per tape depending on how many you bought at once.

    Today we have two or three cameras with us at all times with gigabytes of storage. With the iPhone we could easily take a thousand pictures in a day if we had a way of recharging the battery halfway through.

    We also have the means to share these images. We have Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Whatsapp. We also have blogs. We could mention Flickr and SmugMug but they have angered those who loved their site to the point of losing their users.

    When I was streaming live from Paléo a few years ago I was groundbreaking by using the phone and QIK or Bambuser.

    Manu Chao – Paléo 26 July 2008

    Fast forward a few years and live streaming of music events has progressed.

    We have gone from cameras that were stuck on the ground and barely moved to FPV video cameras that fly and follow snowboarders as they jump and slide down mountain faces. The camera no longer needs to be on the ground to be steady and get good images. Without weight the Kinoki can see scenes like this:

    These all-seeing eyes can also fly in the landscape and show us the world as only a wingsuit flyer could have seen it in the past. We can see the same things without risking our lives or devoting hours of training to get to the right level of competence.

    We then see Paris in the 1900s and now. We see how some things have stayed exactly the same and how other things have changed. The main difference is that in the 1900s it would have been a wooden camera with a wooden tripod and in modern days a carbon fibre tripod with a modern camera.

    There is also this footage of 1900s Paris in colour.

    The All-Seeing Eye then takes us to 1911 New York and we see life with cars and people walking across a street. Sound was added later.

    An old-style educational video of how hydraulic steering works.

    Compare to this modern documentary

    When we jump forward a few decades we have this footage of 1960s London.

    Of course the diversity captured by the All Seeing Eye does not stop there. We often come across arts that are preserved by a single individual, which thanks to the all seeing eye, is preserved for future generations

    When I was on one of my daily walks I expected that this would be a long written blog post about theories and reasoning but in the end it becomes a collection of videos to explore the diversity of topics that the “all-seeing eye” can capture. The topic is broad and this is just a tiny glimpse.

  • Film and Video archiving

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Film is Fragile – Film needs your help! | BFI Trailer from BFI on Vimeo.

    Recently I spent more than a year working as a video archivist for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. During this time I digitised several decades of documentary films and news stories. In the process I went from knowing very little about refugees to being a better informed member of the public.

    We can learn a lot from watching old films and old television series. We can also learn a lot about society. One documentary I watched was about the Bamboo city. It looked at refugees living there and tried to understand why those trying for asylum were refused. It followed their skills training, language training and finally their acceptance to host countries.

    Another documentary I watched was about the 1980s Afghan war when the Soviets went in to try to win over the country. It was fascinating to watch how one generation of Soviets and then a generation of Americans met the same challenges and trials.

    Le Monde Du Silence, film by Jacques Yves Cousteau from 1956 is a fascinating documentary because of it’s reflections of what people knew of the seas and oceans at the birth of self contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) exploration. This documentary as well as all Jacques Yves Cousteau documentaries are an interesting glimpse back to what people were learning about and discovering. It allows us to study and understand the way in which attitudes and understandings have progressed over the decades.

    I watched Magnum PI and it’s interesting to see a pre-mobile phone society. It’s interesting to watch these series and see the world of my youth. Another series of interest is Friends because of how seldom we see mobile phones at least at the beginning of the series. We see how society was in the 1990s. If we watch this series in parallel with Big Bang Theory we see how much society has changed. We see how knowledge has progressed.

    We need to keep the film and video heritage alive and well. We, as a generation must work to preserve our film and video heritage. We must either donate our time or the funds to help preserve our heritage. In so doing books about film and television history are not just books. They are interactive. When I was reading about Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov these films were on film or VHS tapes and hard to find. Today they are available on demand. If we continue to digitise and preserve our cultural heritage then future generations will see and understand how ideas and art forms have progressed over the decades and eventually centuries.

  • 14-18 Le bruit & la fureur

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    An interesting take on the 1914-18 war. 48 minutes in you see mention of mountain fighting.

  • Eric Powell Sarajevo Story

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    An interesting look back in to the past. I remember seeing this conflict on television. I know people who covered the story and I’ve heard about how a colleague gave one person a gameboy when he left Sarajevo. That person called and asked about the individual and that’s how I knew of a personal story.

    One or two segments in this video show the tape to tape editing process. I learned how to edit this way but by the time I worked as an editor everything had moved to non linear editing systems.

    I’m sure this will bring back memories for a few people.

  • Lake Parade streaming fun

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhilst a friend was filming with a high speed camera i was streaming the event live from my phone via Qik. I noticed they improved a couple of important things. The first is that video files are now saved and readable without conversion. The second fact is that you now have an RSS feed, makes aggregation easier. I’ve added two or three of those feeds to itunes so the content can be accessed more easily.

    And there are a few more on Qik which I’ll let you get to yourself.

  • People appreciate video of an event for the second time

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteA few months ago I filmed the Silent Disco in Paddington station, one of London’s main train stations. As a result of the coverage of the event many people were happy to see it. With the footage I have recently filmed of the events that took place on the 6th of October I am once again getting a lot of that appreciation through facebook comments.

    It feels good and I need to find more events to cover that will get this type of response.

    update:–

    I’m also really looking forward to watching the trends on tubemogul as I see whether it will increase over a period of hours or a period of days. It’s always fun to watch how many views you get over a period of weeks and months.

  • After two months as a camera operator in the UN General Assembly hall in Geneva…

    Reading Time: 3 minutesA tall slender woman was sitting on a chair by the podium where her husband was delivering a presentation to a hall filled with people. Each group of four people had a white board in front and on this board was the name of the deleguation. Canada, USA, France, Lithuania and more. In the balconies NGO names could be spotted. The location is the general assembly hall in Geneva and the occasion is Abdullah Il bin an Hussein the second of Jordan speaking to all these deleguations. I was the cut away camera and I was told to focus on cut away shots.

    This took place on my second year of working for the International Labour Conference, general meeting of the International Labour Organisation. My job during this time was to cover the plenary sessions. Whenever a deleguation requested for their presentation to covered  I had to be there and record it, either on VHS or Beta, depending on what the client wanted.

    When the ILC began you would always find every seat was filled but as breakout sessions took place so the general assembly hall would empty. You would find only three or four deleguations at a time and quite often you would spot them leaning back in their chair with a beige object over one of their ears. This was the simultaneous translation. Quite often the deleguate would have both eyes closed. Was he sleeping or focusing on what was being said. I’m not sure.

    You can see diplomacy in action in such halls. Occasionally there would be an important person speaking and many other deleguations would come and listen. Once the speaker finished talking everyone would get out of their seat and go and congratulate them on their great oratory and the things they had brought up. Some of these speakers did deserve the praise but most of the time they speak in droning monotonous voices, hence the closed eyes I described earlier.

    Occasionaly I would get something fun to do like press conferences. There are two press conference rooms where i might have gone. Room 1 and 4. Room 1 is an informal room with tables and the personality would speak at the head. Each of these rooms had a breakout box so that placing a microphone was not necessary. Room 4 is one you have seen many times in news items from Geneva. That’s the room with the blue UN logo repeated over and over again. Above is a mural. The drawback to working at the UN is the long corridors you walk down to get from place to place. When you’ve got a camera, two batteries, a tripod and two or three tapes you’re lugging quite a bit of wheight. Add the summer heat and you see why it’s not to everyone’s liking. Personally i miss it.

    Once the press conferences were over I’d head back to the general assembly hall and sit through ten more plenary speeches. Occasionaly i would take the camera and the tripod and walk around the room getting cut away shots. That’s quite fun. You look at people and you see what they’re doing. You isolate people. You see a person writing something down, you get a shot of that, someone else yawning you get that. If someone is focusing on the speaker you get that. In certain cases you get shots of the deleguate and the board saying which country they represent. Other times you’d get a behind the shoulder shot looking up at the speaker.

    There are some press conferences that are emotional than others. I remember taking one of the nicer cameras and recording a press conference about slavery. During that event some experts talked about the situation in certain countries before getting to the special guest. One of these guests started to talk and described her ordeal, how she had left her country of origin only to end up as a slave in a western country and how she was never allowed to leave. Hearing someone speak about this and not having a television screen or monitor to separate you from their reality has a powerful effect.  Such occasions take certain things from being abstract to reality.

    When I went to Tanzania I was one year away from completing the IB and I saw such a different way of life that I wanted to stay there. I was impressed by the improvisation and happiness of those children. I also liked having to walk for fourty minutes through banana plantations and fields to get from one place to another and experience their culture, at least fleetingly. If there’s anyone reading this that needs to cover the humanitarian work that they are doing to bring awareness to their work then let me know and I’d love to be part of those expeditions.

  • Slow data transfers and self satisfaction

    Reading Time: < 1 minutePlaying with technology is a great way of learning new skills but occasionaly you are let down by it. This happened to me tonight when I wanted to do episode four of twittervox. The entire day I had an excellent connection and things were downloading at a good speed. Wait until it’s time for twitter vox and the connection crashed down to just 500 bytes per second up and 1.5 kilobytes per second up. That’s hardly enough to do text chat.

    There are two reasons why this problem may occur. The first of these is that someone is downloading torrents and this is eating up all the bandwidth. The second option is that because this home is using a cable rather than adsl connection the speed ebbs and flows according to how many people are using the connection.

    Tomorrow at some point during the day I will record some answers to the various points in such a manner that I will have participated even if it’s with a lag of several hours. If I can’t use the technology when I want then there is so much redundancy that I will use other methods.

  • As featured on Operator 11

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteAfter a long but great day of work I came home to do The Twitter Vox show with Loudmouthman and two guests. We were joined by Goldie Katsu and Malburns. We discussed what it’s like to reach 3000 tweets and the conversation moved towards the advantages of using twitter when part of global communities like Second Life. We had some interesting insights and the conversation progressed well. It’s a good show and can be found here.

    additionaly the show was featured on the front page of operator 11.

    Twitter Vox featured

  • New Site of Interest and Old Site To Avoid For A Few Days

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Once more facebook is down due to site maintenance and it’s making me think that it’s time to move onto another site for a number of days until they sort everything out. That’s where Tubemogul comes in, a video sharing website.

    Facebook down

    Whilst it has hardly anything to do with Facebook Tubemogul is nonetheless an interesting website because it encourages you to upload your videos to several online communities at once. I’ve been trying it out over the past twelve hours and so far I’m quite pleased with it.

    What I love is the ability to upload to several video sharing websites at once and here’s a visual representation of what this implies 😉
    Rag week 2007 trailer
    Uploaded by warzabidul

    Video thumbnail. Click to play
    Click To PlayIf you want to read my review of the website come here