Probably about time I updated the news on our movie database project.

It’s going.. ok, but still a bit theoretical at the moment, as we have all our ideas sorted and we know what we’re going to do, we’re just waiting to be able to start capturing video. Vicky’s going to be doing that at home as she has the equipment, but not the knowledge of how to use it, and her Dad isn’t available to help her, but anyway,  if we haven’t got anything by the start of next week, we’ll start getting it captured in Babbage 213, even though previous attempts at that have not been successful because it hasn’t been working.

We’ve got a video of four black and white films that I’ve recorded from Channel 4 daytime TV and last wednesday the group got together to look at some of this footage and make notes of the points that contain particularly emotional content (love scenes, people looking sad, etc), so we’re all ready to just capture those scenes. We also discussed other sources that we could use aswell, as we agreed that many of the emotional scenes across all of those movies were very similar, for example two people in love would end up having very similar conversations to the couple in another film, with similar music, etc. So we threw around some more modern film titles that we could use, and have access to, so we’ll also be adding those to our databse of clips.

We also decided on roles for each team member, and it was my task to develop a script in Visual Basic that can be given the total number of clips that we have, and arrange all of the numbers within that range in a completely random order, also ensuring that the numbers in the list don’t repeat. We can then use this to dictate the order of our clips, in conjuction with  a database that contains all of the content details for the clips. This script has now been developed, and although it doesn’t appear to work on some computers, it does at least do the job on my laptop, so as long as it can be used effectively.

We presented our idea to Sarah today for the movie database project, and she seemed to really like it, which is encouraging.

The idea is to incorporate scenes from a variety of sources, including the supplied archive space DVD plus a number of old black and white films that I’m recording from Channel 4 in the daytime, but only utilising the scenes based on emotional content. For example in the movies, scenes were romance takes place or where people are looking like they’re conveying an emotion, or in the space DVD, scenes of triumph such as a rocket launching or sadness, where a news reporter is informing about a sad story. We were going to record our own footage aswell, but we’re not really sure what to shoot and probably won’t need it anyway, so it’s probably not worth the bother.

Taking all these clips, we’ll assemble them in a database, referencing the files by id, source, length, starting and ending frames and emotional content etc, and using this we can extract any footage that conveys love, for example. The final movie will be based on a random ordering (using vbscript) of these clips, so it will contain a number of narratives within it, based on the different sources and emotional contents. Furthermore, all audio will be separated from the clips and also arranged in its own random order, so as to create an additional narrative alongside the video, so what the viewer is hearing won’t necessarily match what they are seeing, at the time.

Now we need to get on and do it. I already have a couple of film recordings that I want to bring in tomorrow and start recording into digital format. Possibly requiring Musaab’s assistance, as I’m not really sure what kind of facilities the university provides to do that, although I have done video capturing before. Hopefully the girls will stick around to be involved in it aswell. May also start capturing stuff from the DVD too, which we still need to take a proper look at.

Well, not “dilemmas” so much.. just thought that was a bit if a catchy title.. sounds like the name of a track on those old Micro Machines racing games, doesn’t it?

Anywho, the girls and I have just finished our meeting with Sarah about our video project for iDat104. We were all pretty unsure about what it is we were supposed to do, but I think it’s a bit clearer now. We didn’t know that we pretty much had to use the footage from the archive DVD that’s floating around the place – we were just going to do it all based on our own recorded footage but apparently it’s preferred if we stick to a mix of the two sources rather than something completely original. We’re also allowed to use footage from other sources – movies, TV, whatever, so that opens up our possibilities a bit.

We still don’t have a firm idea for it all though. We thought about emotions and how we can link particular emotional events in the archive footage, to footage from the other sources of people conveying those particular emotions. That could give us a range of narratives within the whole sequence to mingle together, if clips from the same sources reoccur. Somehow a database needs to be used to generate a random order for all of the material, and that’s where things are still a bit confusing. It’s all a bit vague at the moment, but at least ideas are starting to formulate, and Sarah seemed to like the idea of linking material together based on emotions conveyed in the footage, so I think it’s a good road to take.

A couple of things have been decided. We’re going to stick to black and white, purely as an aesthetic quality, because we agree that it’s a style that seems more appropriate for this sort of experimental film, as it relates to the use of black and white images in art and photography. We’re also not going to divide up the roles of who does what in a particularly formal way. Some of us have different strengths, with databases or video editing, etc, but we’re all going to try and be involved in everything.

We’re hoping to get the DVD on Monday and have a look at it together before burning our own copy, so we’ll sort some more things out then.

The first project for the IDAT104 module is to put together a bibliography of sources about a particular aspect of space travel or a particular mission, etc. I’ve chosen the conspiracy theories of the moonlanding, because I think it could be a really interesting subject (although I bet loads of people are doing the same, oh well), but so far I haven’t had much luck with finding any library resources based entirely around it. Any searches lead to very little. Tomorrow, I’m going to have a big online search to find as many sources as possible, and locate some keywords and find the names of prominent theorists and their books on the matter. Even if I can’t actually access the books themselves.