Cumberland Snow – Son et Lumiere

for videoblogging week, day 6
lumière style videos are silent, 60 seconds long, with a fixed camera.
this breaks the silent rule, so i’ve called it a son et lumière.

i wanted to keep the crunch of the snow, the voices carrying in the crisp smoky air. this is really just a postcard to myself, to remind me what it was like to live in Cumberland in the snow.

iPhone / iPod compatible file

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90 Second Dawn – VloMo08 Day 18


I created a 30 second version of this in August as a promo for a music festival I was videoblogging here in Cumberland. I put music over it and speeded it up to 8000x its original speed. But although the festival videos were well watched, this fell under the radar and few people saw it. And I think it lost some of its power being so compressed. So I’ve slowed it down a little – now you can see the outrageous colours and changes more clearly.

It’s shot from the balcony outside our bedroom. Amy gets up early, so I got to see a lot of spectacular dawns like this, this summer.

As the sky brightens, in the distance you can see the Coast Range mountains of mainland British Columbia and a small strip of the sea separating the island from the mainland. It’s a bit freaky, because Cumberland is quite a few miles from the coast, but our house is at the top of he biggest hill in town. On clear days, you can look out of our bedroom and see cruise ships on their way to Alaska.


Podcast file (iPod/iPhone compatible)

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Halloween in Cumberland – VloMo08, Day 1

Is this what Halloween is like everywhere in North America?

Madness.

Speaking of madness, it’s suddenly Videoblogging Month again. Already? How did that happen?

Last year it was called NaVloPoMo, but it’s (sadly?) just been renamed Videoblogging Month 2008 – VloMo08 for short.

Post one video every day in November. That’s all you have to do…

2007 was the first year, and it turned out to be an incredible collaborative experiment. Exhausting but rewarding. I hope this year is as much fun.

Actually, I think for me it’ll be *more* fun. Last year I just didn’t have time to watch enough. But then, between us all, we made over 1000 videos in 30 days.

You can watch (and JOIN IN) at our new Mefeedia channel:
http://www.mefeedia.com/channels/vlomo08

I can’t wait to see the videos start coming in.

Meanwhile, it’s now 2 a.m. – so you’ll have to excuse me. I have a *lot* of candy to get through before Amy wakes up.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

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Indecision – an interactive hyper-videoblog story

RAAAAAAAAAA!

I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do for about 2 1/2 years. I made a hyper-videoblog post.

You can only see it on YouTube – here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQg_LCq_T8&fmt=18

The thing that finally spurred me on was YouTube’s new Annotations feature. All this time, I’ve been waiting and hoping that they would introduce something like this.

But at the moment, they only allow you to use it on their site – no embedded players yet.

There are six different parts to it – what path you take is up to you. Click the options at the end of each clip to choose what I do.

I really was feeling indecisive about what to do with my evening – and it proved the perfect subject. I made it up as I went along, and it took 30 mins to shoot and 90 mins to get the clips onto the Mac, onto YouTube and Annotated with links.

I’ve always thought that for my hypervideo dreams to become reality, hyperlinked video would need to be a) easy to use, b) easy to create and c) within a setting that people are already comfortable with.

I’ve been working on much more complex hypervideo stories, and if this quick slapdash bit of fun seems to work, I’ll start putting some together properly. Let me know what you think.

It’s been a good week for me with my old nemesis YouTube. Tumblr saw my High Quality YouTube Embed Generator (thanks to Wreck and Salvage) and implemented it as standard on all Tumblr YouTube embedded players. So I helped make the world a prettier place.

The future is now! Even if this particular part of the future looks a bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book from 1982.

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One Minute Sunny

I like lumière videos. I like setting up a frame, as if taking a still picture, and then letting the camera roll for 60 seconds to see what happens within the frame. Often, something serendipitous will happen within the composition and within the allotted time.But lumière videos are silent, and I’m a big fan of videos with natural soundtrack.

Like Ryanne (and Jay)’s films, cut simply together, each clip with its natural background hum. There’s something very moving about the short rhythmic pulse of these sounds and images together.

I shot this one as a lumière , but it’d be half as good without its natural soundtrack. So I’m calling this a ‘son et lumière ‘ 😉

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_et_lumiere_(show)
(I used to love these, before irony)

Shot with the in-camera ‘Color Accent’ setting on the Canon IXUS 860, which allows you to sample a colour and turn everything else black and white.

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Ripen

Shot with the in-camera time-lapse setting on the Canon IXUS 860.

Music:
Roadrunner, by Gurdonark, via NegativeSoundInstitute.com

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