DSLR cameras extend the possibilities of macro (close-up) photography to video. Aside from the expensive macro lens options, there are a range of super-cheap DIY modifications available, that let you capture miniature worlds in motion.

All below are cheap options, and can be frowned upon by photography purists – you’ll lose some of your camera controls ( eg autofocus), but when used for DSLR video, image quality is still fantastic compared to traditional video cameras in the same price range, and really, you’re swimming in miniature worlds, and potentially capturing them in HD video.

Macro Conversion Lenses
Option one – find out what diameter size your lense is ( it’ll look like this on the lens – Ø72, meaning 72mm ), then buy a cheap lens add on magnifier of the same diameter that will screw on. An Ebay search for ‘macro lens kit’ will deliver a cheap collection of lenses with a variety of magnifications.

Reverser Rings
Again, the diameter of your lens is needed her, and when you flush the reverser ring search through Ebay, a small package will arrive from Hong Kong in a week or so. The reverser ring attaches to the front of the lense, which let’s the lens go onto the camera backwards. (Or DIY Reverser ring )

Extender Tubes
These cheap metal cylinders extend the distance your camera’s innards and the end of the lense, enabling a closer minimal focal distance for shooting from.

Bellows
There’s something perversely analogue and satisfying about these, kind of like attaching a small piano accordion to your digital pixel capture magic box. They allow easy fine tuned adjustments, moving the lens with respect to the focal plane for focusing. ( Crazier, more expensive tilt-shift bellows option, with full Canon EOS controls retained by camera: Novoflex have you covered.)

Or You Could Just Use
A Pringles can. And aye, naturally, there are many DIY iphone macro photography tutorials ( eg Instructables ). Mostly they involve magnifying glasses of some sort in front of the camera lense. Or maybe a video endoscope’s more your flavour?

Challenges?
Depth of field will be a problem. Even very, very small movements with the camera will take objects in and out of focus. Stability is key then, and DIY stages / environments for objects, even better. Lighting can also be a problem, both in terms of having the camera so close to the object, and with the extra lense lengths being added, letting less light through to the camera. This can be solved with ring lights which fit around a lens, or thoughtful side lighting / reflected light.

Be off swimming with the micro-beasties now, won’t you?

In an alternate universe you have been asked to do some live remixing of Tim Burton related films. However, in that universe, inter-universe messaging systems are commonplace, and your alternate self received the following, hopefully helpful note about possible films to sample.

Take Me Back To Wonderland
Congratulations on your assignment, you are going to have fun – there’s plenty of room to move here, from the whimsy of Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure through to much more macabre and grotesque cinema. And this little known fact should help: Bit Torrent works the same in all known universes.

Alice in Wonderland is a great place to start digging. Try the Ravi Shankar soundtrack soaked 1966 BBC production (one of the most psychologically engaging Alice films), with Sir John Gielgud and Peter Sellers. And there are twenty or so other versions, but Jan Svankmajer’s stop motion Alice packs more invention than most. His short film Ossuary, about visiting a cathedral of bones will cross-edit nicely too.

If you lived in a universe where Prince wasn’t a newly religious recluse who complained about the internet killing culture, you’d probably find the combination of his Batdance music video ( half joker face, half batface, 80’s music video aesthetics representing) and the unaired pilot episode of Batgirl irresistible. Especially say, when paired with matching shots of his purpleness on the rain era motorbike, and Batgirl swaying on her batbike in front of a green screen, while a presumably expensive blow-drier makes like wind with her hair.

Hit Tim Shiel / Faux Pas up ( iamfauxpas.com = alternaverse friendly) for some Major Beetle Juicy Lazer file transfers. Sadly, Tim is unavailable in other universes for live soundtracking and sonic manipulation of video clips, but if you’ve got the bandwidth, he’ll bring the Day-O / Beetlejuice dinner / remix party – with Harry Belafonte and the muppets, karaoke dreamers, ableton live splinter video cut-ups, and a Major Lazer infused Day-O for dessert.

Tim will also remind that Janelle Mondae’s ‘Wondaland’ is great accompaniment for Alice’s rabbithole comedown. He’ll also likely recommend a deluxe edit of Janelle Mondae’s The Archandroid album – “delete tracks 9, 10, 11, 18 and try again – another bloated over-ambitious r&b/futurefunk record saved by some judicious editing. 78 mins of blah becomes 47 mins of pure gold!”

In your universe, Ed Wood wears budgie smugglers and complains about boat people refugees while he directs films – and the Political Opposition leader of your country, Tony Abott, slinks about Parliament after hours in a blouse and skirt, with matching stockings and heels. Work with that.

In this universe, The Tim Burton exhibition runs until Oct 10 at ACMI, Melbourne.

Japanese audiovisual performance that takes in Super-Collider, NES emulators, circuit-bent Pikachus and custom iphone controlled sound synthesis programs and video sampling systems? Ah, that’d be Craftwife. They play “70-80’s style techno pop music in the special costume that may remind you (of) a German band (.. in a miniskirt).” Takeko Akamatsu took time out from touring Australia’s East Coast, to answer a few questions.

[ Above, Craftwife @ Horse Bazaar, Melbourne, Wed Jul 28, 2010. ]

How do you describe your show?
It’s an audio-visual performance and it looks like a techno pop music live. But I combine many elements in a show with many thoughts. So I’m very happy if audiences can see my performance in different, various way.

Kraftwerk liked machines playing notes, claiming it freed them up for composition… What have Craftwife been freed up to do?
Making music with computer is something special for me. I found many musicians are still following the traditional way, i.e imitating a physical phenomena with machine. I’m not interested in it, I’ve been trying to find the new way to play music with computer programming and technology. I really don’t like keep on doing a same thing, “Practice”. So that I’m happy I don’t need any sweaty practice to perform as Craftwife.

How does a circuit bent Pikachu fit into your show?
I have a project called “Craftwife + Kaseo + “. Kaseo (is the author of Pikarumin – bent Pikachu) plays powerful and loud noise music. The style of our music is very different, but we have common thoughts about the sound and music. And visually, you may find some Japanese “Kawaii” or “character” culture. Also I love the contrast of my “clean” programming, software and his messy, physical hardwares.

What has been your favourite / ( or would be your ideal?)  place to play a Craftwife gig?
Craftwife plays everywhere if audiences are waiting for us. I had played in different places such as a small cafe to a nice club or fashion museum  even at an academic conference. I cannot choose which was the best, we’re going to have a show in planetarium of my small town in this September and I’m really looking forward it. Hopefully, it must be fantastic if we can play with my favourite German band someday.

What do you enjoy about super collider?
It’s difficulty. Memo: sometimes people are used….. to be used by technologies. bababa .. too sleepy…..

[ Above, Craftwife + Super Collider + custom software + iphone + bonus Kristin... ]

[ Side-note: First discovered Craftwife via a blog post by David Lublin, one of the VDMX head-coders. Popped off an email to see if Takeko would like to do an interview. As well as agreeing to one, Takeko mentioned she was touring Australia soon. Which later turned out to include Melbourne. On my birthday. Thereby continuing the weird sensation that VDMX pulses somewhere near the centre of a cult universe, an electromagnetic conduit for a small but growing band of dispersed pixel gypsies.]

Part 1: The Hustle

Hassle Canon to sell a 7D at cost price in exchange for review, knowing from using the camera, and seeing online videos, that this is a most desirable camera for shooting video.

Part 2: Zoom In

Focus the review on the video qualities of the Canon 7D, knowing that the Canon 5D MK II has much better photo image quality, and that while other video cameras are on the horizon, which promise similarly large sensors but better video handling controls ( eg the SONY NEX range), the 7D holds a unique position for video capture at this point.

Part 3: Dirt, Meet Fingernails

Run around with the camera a bit, see what it can do ( it sucks light in! ), see how it feels ( sturdy, solid, well built). Think back about shooting video with it, and analyse each component.

The Body
Jumping inside, the camera’s sensor is APS-C sized which means the focal range of all lenses used with it need to be multiplied by 1.6 ( eg a 50mm lens which gives a natural perspective on a full framed camera, will look like an 80mm lens on the Canon 7D – 50×1.6 = 80mm = a lense which gives a slightly zoomed in perspective.) Lenses are separate, and not something being considered here, but the camera itself feels great. Controls are precise and reliable, built to last. That said, this is not a traditional video camera, with ergonomic focus and zoom adjustments within reach. The small size ( relative to a big video camera) also means stabilisation is needed to prevent too much wobble-cam. There is a smorgasbord of companies rushing to supply supporting rigs, but the cost of these also needs to be considered up front if video is your goal.

Software
- Highly customisable interface ( hardware buttons can be re-defined / has 3 custom global settings for easy access to specific settings to suit particular shooting conditions )
- Saves files to a Compact Flash card, in the H264 codec. (Good quality, but needs transcoding into editing software)

Image Quality
Utterly gorgeous. Induces giddy laughter in low-light. It’s not without issues ( google 7D + jello-cam, rolling shutter, moire and aliasing ), but if you’ve come from any other video camera in the same price range, you’ll mostly just be slack-jaw amazed at what the camera is capable of.

Audio Quality
As lame as might be expected for what is essentially a photographic camera slowly morphing into becoming a video camera. A work around? Record using an external recorder such as the Zoom H4N, and use PluralEyes software to auto-sync up your high quality audio files with your lower quality ones, within your video editing software. Once synced, delete the bad audio, and your filmic masterpiece now has rich sound to match.

Part 4: Duel at Dawn

Compare the 7D with the 5D Mk II, the 7D’s only true competitor in the field.

5D: Full frame sensor, greater image quality, more depth of field. Better for wide shots. Use up to 25600 ISO ( ie great for low light). 3.9 FPS for photos. 1080p at 30p only. ( ie 1920 x1080 HD progressive / non-interlaced footage at 30 fps ).

7D: Smaller APS-C sensor ( means less image quality, but also means closer to 35mm movie sensor size and possibility, after adding mods, of using cinema lenses ). Better for telephoto shots. Use up to 12800 ISO. 8FPS for photos. 1080/30p (29.97), 1080/25p, 1080/24p (23.976), 720/60p (59.94) and 720/50p ( 50p + 60p footage can effectively create slow-motion footage at 25p and 30p ).

Aside from the above specs, the 7D also has a dedicated video record button, a better LCD screen for viewing in daylight, and better ergonomics for handling. Plus, this guy recommends it for video.

Part 5: Signing Out

When offering some final words of critical acclaim for this most desirable video camera, don’t forget to crowdsource, and point to the huge range of support material online developing around the 7D and it’s enthusiastic fanbase. People like to see it for themselves.
vimeo.com/groups/eos7d
vimeo.com/groups/canoneos7d

See also:
The skynoise intro to DSLR cameras and an overview of
steadicams and video stabilising systems DSLRs.

Thanks to Canon Australia, and to 3DWorld for printing the review.

Considering cinematography as a dynamic flow through time and space, it’s hardly surprising that skateboarders often demonstrate a flair with the camera. Most are familiar with the skate background of Spike Jonze, but let’s tilt the hat to a few other skate creatives.

What’s Up, Stacy Peralta?

After developing a public profile in the 70s as a sponsored skater with long blonde Californian hair, Stacy later used this to form the influential skateboarding company Powell Peralta ( with George Powell). As a marketing move, they gathered some of the best skaters ( such as Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain etc, to represent the company as the Bones Brigade. Crucial to their wild success was a series of videos directed by Stacy, which fruitfully combined 80s skate gymnastics with collaged graphics, cleverly repurposed weird locations and artful editing. The Search For Animal Chin probably reigns as the most notorious of those, as the skaters wander between skate locations trying to find the kidnapped grandfather of skating, ending their search at a giant custom built ramp when they realised Animal Chin represented the true spirit of skating, and was within everyone. Further refined, Stacy’s technical skills were again well employed on his first feature, Dogtown and the Zboys ( a history of early Californian skating), then Riding Giants ( about big-wave surfing ) and Crips N Bloods ( a history of racial violence caused by segregation in Los Angeles ). From there, apparently he went onto sell hamburgers : whoppervirgins.com.

Breaking News from image above: Animal Chin found by Ilana Taub.

Macho Tail Drop
Pitched as a Michel Gondry influenced Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for skaters ( If that sounds implausible, check the trailer ), MachoTailDrop zooms out from the celebrity skate circuit and tries to examine the skate stardom making machine and it’s impact on a young skater. While this terrain is covered by Stoked, The Rise and Fall of Gator ( a true and sad story of a skater succumbing to the pressures of the public limelight ), MachoTailDrop explores this from a wildly imaginative perspective. It’s a promising feature debut from co-writers and directors Corey Adams and Alex Craig, who won a $1 million prize to shoot their flick, and a teaser click will have you watching flaming riverside halfpipes, underground caverns, horses wandering inside a mansion and some quite decent skate tricks.

Paper Cut Grinds
Tilles Singer has fantastically reimagined the classic skate magazine photo sequence, by cutting out skaters in each stage of their tricks, then having them perform as stop motion animation skaters on his table top, alongside or on top of various props. It’s a gorgeous effect and well worth a few replays.

Pool Dreaming
I had a dream ages ago that involved skating a curved pool – that was full of water. It was easier to balance underwater – you could lean away from the pool wall while riding up it, and could really carve up towards the edge of the pool in a really controlled way, kind of like skating in slow motion. At some point my underwater skating brain thought it’d be good to get some air ( as in the skateboard move, not oxygen, I seemed to be able to skate fine without needing to breathe ), and I started skating towards the surface. Do you know what it feels like to grasp your right hand on the edge of a skateboard as you approach the top of a pool, then burst through the water surface, rise like 3 feet in the air, turn 180 degrees and then dive down again, splashing through the water, letting the wheels hit the pool wall just under the edge, and riding through the pool again? Let me tell you, it feels AMAZING. Watch Bob Burnquist if you need some help imagining. (Found via coolhunter.

Even More Skate Flicks
Cannonball by California is a place, via good.is. Apparently there’s a lot of newly empty pools in California these days, while people re-boot the American Dream. If the Trans-Siberian railway is more your flavour, 10,000 Kilometers is a skateboard documentary that documents the two-month-long journey of skaters who travelled from Moscow to Hong Kong by train, skateboarding the unique architecture of various cities in Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, and China along the way.

UPDATE: A timely tweet by William Gibson, points to this “Tarp Surfing” video ( which, yes, features skateboards.. )

UPDATE 2: Ok, so I’m not going to update this post with every single new weird skate video, but this was too good to pass up: Flaming skaters in Mexico, via Dangerous Minds.

One makes songs about gay dentists, the other is a legendary French comedian and director no longer with us. Between them, they’ve delivered us this year, a pair of French feature films about serial killing car tyres and struggling magicians.

French Rubber

Mr.Oizo, already somewhat notorious from his audio exploits at Ed Banger records, has earlier branched out into music video and film making. Steak, a feature released only in France in 2007, had a plot based around kidnapping, plastic surgery and the fashion world, and handily, featured cameos from French artists Sebastien Tellier, Kavinsky, and SebastiAn ( who appeared as wheel-chair bound car thieves ). Apparently Mr.Oizo himself, Quentin Dupieux, is the only person who has an English subtitled version, after the French producer lost interest post-release in France.

Rubber on the other hand, is already popping up all over the web video radar, with quirky trailers available at vimeo.com, or fresh from the leathery horse’s mouth at rubberfilm.com ( and as it turns out, writing rubberfilms by mistake, delivers a premium fetish gallery. Not to be confused with Rubber, the 1936 Dutch flick, or Chris Cunningham’s flickerfest, Rubber Johnny ). It’d seem easy enough to think of this as a quirky road movie ( and yet another feature film shot on the Canon 5D), but this rubber tyre serial killer flick might just transcend the genre’s usual offerings. Also on the soundtrack alongside Mr.Oizo, will be Gaspard Augé of Justice ( another Ed Banger ). Make of it all, what you will. See Rubber at the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival.

And In The Other French Corner..

Being both a master of comic timing and carefully orchestrated cinematography, Jacques Tati’s films inevitably unfold with visual charm, and an abundance of surprise for the eyes. Playtime, his most famous film, took 9 years to make, was shot on 70mm and involved a set on the outskirts of Paris which resembled a small city in itself. Like his other films, it too took a sword to modern society, lampooning social attitudes and obsessions with gadgetry and convenience, and being near dialogue-less, requires viewing to see just how funny it and Tati are. Interest is high then, for The Illusionist, an animation based on a script by Tati, and directed by Sylvain Chomet ( who also directed the gorgeous Triplets of Belleville animation feature). Tati intended to make the film as a live action film with his daughter, with the plot revolving around ‘a struggling illusionist who visits an isolated community and meets a young lady who is convinced that he is a real magician.’ And being a French production, naturally everything is a little more complicated.

See The Illusionist at the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival

Once you’ve figured out your DSLR camera, the next problem for shooting video with it, is going to be removing shakiness. Walking around with a handheld video camera generates jerky footage, especially with smaller cameras such as a DSLR. It doesn’t need to be this way.

The Cheap Option: Steadycam.org
Johnny Chung Lee has an infamous tutorial for building a steadicam with $14 of parts and needing one hour of your time – or you can order a kit for $39.95 if you wish. Bingo.

The Even Cheaper Option
A ’string tripod’ is an old photographers trick, which simply involves finding a bolt in a hardware store that fits the underside of your camera, and attaching a 1m or 2m piece of string to it. Carry this around in your pocket, and when needed, attach bolt to camera, let string fall to ground, step on the string, and pull the camera upwards until the string is taut. Instant stabilisation.

The Bling Option: Steadicam.com
Aside from their Hollywood rigs which effectively turn camera people into stormtroopers, Steadicam also deliver smaller systems for smaller video cameras, and even a version for the iphone – the ‘Steadicam Smoothee‘ ( though you’d really have to question spending any money on that rather than getting a better camera). For smaller cameras though, there’s a whole new range of emerging players coming through.

Given the armies of DSLR wielding hipsters roaming the streets, an inevitable side industry has spawned to fit them in thin exo-skeletons for their auteur adventuring. A few of the key players include :
Redrockmicro.com – handheld, shouldermount and cinema style rigs.
Glidecam.com – These have nice ‘gimbals’, a kind of gyroscopic ball bearing system, which allows movements to be transferred to the handle, rather than the camera. Found one of these on ebay for $250.
Zacuto.com – Aside from a range of DSLR rigs, they also make add-on viewfinders, which can make the mobile filming process happen much more smoothly.
Cinevate.com – Large range of rigs

There are a quite few other manufacturers too ( eg The Blackbird Camera Stabilizer
The CB 105 counter balance video camera stabilizer), but in general these kits tend to start at around $1000 for anything vaguely useful, and spiral upwards quickly. A recent addition to the list is slightly cheaper. The “Indi System”, made in U.S. and distributed in Australia by Dragon Image – is $950 for a complete rig, including focus follower, shoulder mount, adjustable handles, and rail sections for attaching externals ( lights / monitors / microphones etc ). I was able to try one out recently at the Camera Expo – felt good, solid, reliable.

Still Need More Camera Movement?
A dolly is a wheeled platform that rides on a track or smooth floor – which generally means a lot of weight and volume to carry around for shooting. There are a couple of interesting alternative solutions around though. The Wally Dolly and Track System is a portable and minimal weight rails system made in Australia. Another option is fitting a rails system on top of a tripod, allowing the addition of smooth motion to framed shots – eg Glidetrack. Or a DIY Dolly? Sure. Built with skateboard wheels if you want. And when it’s time to graduate to a motorised dolly system, you’ll be ready to shoot the next ash spewing volcano…

See also: steadishots.org – “Where the skills of the men and women responsible for some of the most memorable shots in television and cinema history are put on display.”
How Steadicams work – see how they eliminate shaking and rolling..

Perth artist Bennett Miller has been in the global spotlight recently for an artwork that involves 141 live sausage dogs masquerading as United Nations delegates, ‘Daschund UN‘ ( as part of the Next Wave festival). No stranger to complex logistics, previous artworks of his have included topiary mazes and retelling the story of a war in Iraq across nine mini-golf courses. He was kind enough to take time out from juggling canines to answer some questions:

Golf. Is it a gentle sport for the elderly, a grotesque misuse of land and resources for elites, or a chance for a good pun? In other words, what inspired your ‘Golf War’ series?
I regret the pun a bit- but the ‘grotesque misuse of land and resources for ( a game for ) elites’ is very close to the mark. The golf war was an ever expanding mini golf course that imitated the events and structure of an actual war in Iraq. It started as a landscape, then it was gradually turned into a game, then it was turned into an unplayable game. The architecture of the course is from the perspective of those waging the war I guess.

In the majority of instances it was shaped like a cross – like a contemporary ‘crusade’, but by the end of it this cruciform had been consumed by an islamic pattern. I liked the work at the very end, which was kind of a simple homage to the failure of the whole exercise, but before that the work was chaotic and peppered with obstacles and characters from the conflict. I made it ‘fun’ and interactive/playable to implicate the audience in the spectacle. The Dachshund UN has a lot more optimism in it than the golf war series ever did.

Was there a specific UN incident that triggered your thoughts for developing this project?
My interest in the reputation of the UN was triggered when the ‘coalition of the willing’ bypassed the UN during the Iraq War. Since then I’ve been interested in the public perception of the value of the UN- and what forces are at play in shaping this perception. I’m also very interested in the conflicts between the UN and Israel, which had a few flashpoints last year after the Goldstone Report. I developed this work in response to the festival theme ‘No Risk too Great’. The UN is a very good fit for that idea, and while my work seems like a piss-take, I’m actually a huge fan of the UN (whilst it has some massive failings- the idea of it alone is quite important).

What qualities makes the dachshund a good choice to pose as a United Nations delegate?
They are physically restricted via a breeding history that has literally ’shaped’ them. Yet they always persevere- blissfully unaware of their stature and limitations. They often look very proud, like a statesmen or diplomat, but in faintly ridiculous dog form.

They also have a racial diversity comparable to humanity- eg ‘different but the same’, there are short, long and wire haired dachshunds, red, black, tan, dapple, chocolate and even ‘piebald’ whites. I don’t know of another dog breed with that racial breakdown, outside of all those poodle subgroups with silly names.

I love dachshunds, I don’t know whether other people see the same thing in them as I do or not, but they really make me happy and seem to represent the beauty of endeavor and personal struggle, alongside the absolute folly of it.

I wanted the audience to expect the work to be critical of the UN -but wind up affected by it in a different way. Like how ‘dog’ or ‘bitch’ is an insult but really everybody loves them. The dachshund seemed to be the right dog to mimic how the UN is both flawed and fantastic.

How did you possibly manage to get 47 dachshunds?
The Kickstart program by the awesome folk at NEXT WAVE helped get the project off the ground, and get callouts placed in the Age newspaper. I also had a lot of help from Corrienne at the Dachshund Club of Victoria. I actually needed 3 separate groups of 47 dogs- for a total of 141 – which took a full year of recruiting and meeting (pleading) with the owners. It got much easier as the momentum grew and interest in the project snowballed.

How did they seem to feel about seeing each other?
Many dachshunds only like other dachshunds, it’s not always true- but it often is. The truth is I don’t really know what they feel about it, so whilst I like to think the dachshund UN is an exciting event on the dachshund social calendar, it may not always be the case. Certainly there have been some barking incidents, but on the whole the dogs have been remarkably well behaved and fall asleep more often than they get upset.

Did the large number in a small place seem to affect them?
It can be hard to tell what they think about the experience – I wonder what the dogs make of suddenly being placed in a large sculpture full of other dachshunds, in front of a large human audience. Based on the only evidence I really have, some get a little angry and some fall asleep, the bulk of them react somewhere in between… interested in the surroundings- but only to a point.

How have the dachshund dog owners responded to the work?
I am eternally grateful to the owners for making the project possible. Some owners have responded to- and really supported- the theme of the work and some have just wanted to involve their dog for the sake of the novelty. With so many people involved I have found it hard to keep up with everyone properly- but I was pretty astounded at how generous they have all been with their time.

What kinds of unexpected scenarios / strange logistics have you encountered with the work?
The whole project has been a bizarre undertaking. Logistically it was massive and difficult, and generated all kinds of weird databases and spreadsheets. The structure itself had some strange requirements too. As the deadlines approached it became super serious- with risk assessment forms and engineer approvals. I became completely humorless about it, which was a bit strange for what is essentially a gathering of sausage dogs.

What breed of dog do you think best represents Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott?
I keep getting asked if I think ‘politicians’ could learn from the dachshunds but it’s hard to answer because I actually love dachshunds and the UN, and intended the work as a (balanced) celebration. If I was making a work about australian politics it would be two chihauhas in a room full of mirrors.

Above: Bennett being interviewed by Marcus Westbury.

[ Related: Videohuahua, an interview with Fernando Llanos about his VIDEO-PROJECTING-CHIHUAHUA! ]

Joined the old Digital Single Lens Reflex camera club recently (hello video capable Canon 7D), which has meant learning about photography (shout out to photo guru Dan Murphy), and about technologies that bridge the old and the new. And haunting Ebay a bit more than usual.

To DSLR or not to DSLR?
The benefits of digital image recording ( cost / workflow etc ) combined with the advanced light controls of a SLR camera – make DSLR cameras great for photographers, and now that they’re often capable of good quality video, DSLRs are lluring in a lot of film-makers too. It’s not all win though – videomakers expecting DSLRs to have the same ease of shooting will be disappointed. Weighing it up for those interested in video, David Torcivia has summarised the pros and cons over at Poetzerofilm.com:

Nay
Ergonomics – too light / small / awkward screen and controls
Moire and Aliasing – skipped lines in video, during process to shrink large image down to video size
Shutter Rolling – fast moving objects can be in different places in the same frame
Resolution – they don’t actually shoot as well as advertised
Compression – Canon records to lossy H264 format ( which needs processing before editing )
Audio – terrible on DSLR, need to record externally ( eg with Zoom H4n) + sync (pro-tip: Plural Eyes! )

Yay
Ergonomics – The small size can also mean shooting easily in cramped spaces, and more discreet filming.
Depth of Field – Hey look, it’s blurry in the background! Beautiful, but as the web fills with it, David helpfully notes:
“Don’t wear out the effectiveness of a shallow shot by making an entire “test” film filled with nothing but micro DoF. Shallow depth of field is just another tool in the cinematographer’s box to better tell a story. It is not a crutch or a gimmick to sell a shot or a product, an idea which cheapens the art.”
Low light – Zowie! For the price, DSLRs can shoot in hearts of darkness that video cameras cannot even see. Believe.
Price – Fantastic quality and value.
Photos – Oh yeah, do they do those too – 10 stops of dynamic range, full RAW files, 18 or 21 Megapixels – all great for timelapse .
Lenses – The variety of glass available for DSLRs vastly outweighs that possible for video cameras ( hello eBay, or hello rent-a-lense for important occasions )
Media – Tapeless workflows. Drag n drop, rather than slowly capturing footage.

Plunging In…
So in the end – disregarding all the science and numbers, you’ve found yourself swooning over luscious, colour-ripe non-grainy video shot by someone in such low light conditions that you’d packed away your video camera an hour ago. THAT’S OKAY, you’re with friends.

And if being the new owner of a DSLR finds you bewildered by the array of options available – Wikipedia’s photography page is incredibly useful for getting up to speed with photographic terms and principles, and pointing to a huge range of future learning. For starters you’ll be needing to understand :
Aperture – the lens opening, measured as the f-number ( eg f2.8 ), which controls the amount of light passing through the lense.
Shutter speed – time the imaging medium is exposed to light for each
ISO speed – The higher the ISO, the greater the sensitivity to light.

There’s plenty more, and plenty more starting points too..

Which Lenses To Get?
If you need, you can actually mount cinema lenses to a DSLR, using add-ons from hotrodcameras.com. For most people though, the existing range of photography lenses will be a vast enough jump in quality from handheld video. Things to note? Lenses with lower f-numbers are preferable ( and more expensive ). Aside from lenses specific to your camera, there are also a wide range of cheap adaptors that can be fitted to any DLSR, which will enable lenses from other manufacturers to be used ( functions like auto-focussing can be lost with some of these though ). And one more complication – the Canon 7D doesn’t have a full frame sensor, and it’s smaller proportion of a frame means you have to multiply the below numbers by 1.6. In other words, a 50mm lense on the Canon 7D is the equivalent of a 80mm lense (50 x 1.6), and the perspective it brings.

50mm - The classic lense. A lense this size renders perspective in a way similar to a scene is perceived by the human eye.
Wide Angle Lenses ( Below 35mm ) – allow you to fit more in frame from closer range ( think fish eye), but exaggerate distance between objects and can distort.
Telephoto Zoom Lenses (Above 70mm ) – allow magnification of distant objects / skateboarders / small furry animals etc ( though tends to compress distance between objects ).

Macro lenses – Want to shoot close-ups? These are the lense for you – or – seek out extension tubes or adjustable bellows ( both which are placed between another lense and the camera, changing the dynamics so that close-up is possible ), or get an auxiliary close-up lense to attach to the front of a lense, or get a reversing ring ( an adaptor that allows the lense to be attached to the camera backwards, which creates extreme close-up vision ). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_photography

( See also Tamron’s guide to lenses, and Cambridge in Colour about lense focal lengths, zooms vs primes etc )

A range of trick filters which can be added onto existing lenses for various effects ( find out what diameter your lense is ( eg 72mm), to find appropriately fitting add-ons ). And then there’s the tilt-shift lenses ( see also lensbaby ), and other trick lenses… ( on it goes.. ).

Time Lapse?
The image quality is significantly higher quality for photos in DSLRs, than it is for video. Correspondingly, animating a series of high quality photos in sequence for timelapse bumps the ‘video’ quality up even higher. Strangely the Canon 7D doesn’t have an automated sequencing function built in, and needs an external ‘intervalometer’ to do this. Canon sells one for around $200. Hong Kong vendors on Ebay sell adequate imitators for $30. There’s also an iPhone app for remote triggering / viewing of photos – but it requires the camera to be attached to a computer ( not great for out and about shots.. )

Stability… Later…
Someone walking around with a handheld video camera, will produce jerky footage, no matter the camera… but especially so with a small camera like a DSLR,, and then there’s the additional desire to avoid troubles like the Jelly Vision mentioned above. The image quality is good enough though, that a whole industry has spawned in providing ways to minimise trouble. And so…

Next DSLR Update : Stabilisation, active filming + Steadicam Systems ( from pro to DIY )

Extravagant lighting and video productions are increasingly expected with touring acts, but a little thoughtfulness can go a long way.

Massive Attack @ Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne
Enhancing Massive Attack’s recent sublime musical performances during their Australian Tour, was a very elegantly integrated lighting show designed by United Visual Artists. The kind of gorgeous, restrained and stylised light show you’d hope to see while visiting Blade Runner Town. The lighting set-up was deceptively simple – over the course of the evening, every one of the limited parameters available was gradually tweaked, revealing further variation where it seemed all avenues had been explored. Pulsing dots, became horizontal lines, and then combinations of dots and horizontal lines. From the palette of mostly white, red was sporadically and only very occasionally introduced, and very effectively. Occasional smoke bursts and white lights to reveal on stage depth behind the main plane of pulsing lights. And gradually, the dots are clustered closer, so we can approach something like ascii video playing through the spread out LED wall. Cycling through ascii characters, cleverly varying font sizes and cycling methods to effect the overall image. And again, occasionally using red as individual spotlights. While lighting rigs and lighting pre-visualisation and sequencing tools are getting increasingly sophisticated ( ie crazy ), this show worked because of the restraint shown, its thoughtful choreography and pacing over the evening, and because of its tight integration with the music ( they nearly became inseparable at some points ).

Chris Cunningham’s new Audiovisual Show
This is an exciting prospect. News that one of the most acclaimed music video directors of the last decade, is working on a 75 minute live audiovisual show certainly presses buttons.

“It’s a work in progress really. It’s three giant screens, lasers and a soundtrack that will be like a big mixtape. It’s the closest I can get to what I want to do: the visceral sound of a live show but with massive screens like a cinema,” he explained in the Guardian recently, arguing, “what I do is more experimental and the visuals usually come first. That’s why the live performance is exciting. It’s not film, it’s not a gig, it’s not an installation, but it has elements of all three.”

While it’s undoubtedly an impressive show ( what a great body of work to play with! ), unfortunately the comments on the Guardian article suggest that the performance seems far from live, a sidestage witness suggesting there wasn’t much meaningful being done by Cunningham on stage, others suggesting it seemed like a linear showreel. On the one hand thats fine, the show is a stepping stone, on the other – it’s a reminder that visual technologies tend to lag behind audio in terms of power ( it’s necessarily more computer intensive to manipulate 1 minute of video than audio ). And no doubt, given that the music world has decades more behind it with manipulating loops sequences and processes, it is likely also advanced more conceptually for dealing with time based media in performances. Looking at how someone like Autechre (touring Australia shortly, and themselves with a fine Cunningham video) approach time and samples, might illuminate other approaches to video than ‘jukebox compilation’.

[[ UPDATE ]] This review sounds a bit more promising. And an amusing anecdote from William Gibson about Chris potentially directing a version of Neuromancer:
“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice…My only choice. The only person I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of doing it right. I went back to see him in London just after he’d finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing Aphex Twin’s head. We talked.”

Weimar in The House
Max Neupert explores great and granular audiovisual compositions using the free software pure data, and now runs ‘Breaking The Timeline‘, a great course at the Bauhaus University of Weimar, which is dedicated to exploring ‘performative audiovisual artworks and experiments’.

“The third dimension of the moving image is time. Manipulation of the timeline means taking control over the creative potential of this dimension. Editing film or video transforms footage into a movie, thus film and video aren’t necessarily linear, but stay static in their determined timeline. Video made analog real-time effects popular but todays graphics processors in computers make it possible to fully explore the real-time potential of digital image and sound.”

Max also makes available patches which demonstrate audiovisual programming techniques in Pure Data and the Gem library.

And let’s not confuse Max with Max for Live – another exciting Audiovisual prospect – complicated max patches ( including jitter video parameters ), controllable from inside Ableton Live and it’s sophisticated sequencing possibilities.

The audio app ecosystem for the iphone is still fairly young, so there’s plenty of apps fighting for attention, and quite a diverse range of approaches to portable music and sound. Below, the fruits of an afternoon’s worth of downloading and testing (and about $73 all up).

Beatmaker $19.99
- Mobile sampler interface with 16 pads (multi-touch up to 5 sounds at once ). Load or record your own samples or use the built-in banks from the likes of Richard Devine, or from genres such as hiphop, dub etc.
- On-board wave editor to select in/out points of samples.
- Fairly intuitive easy to use step sequencer to play arrangements of those samples.
- Delay, 3-band EQ + BitCrusher FX.
- Export audio and midi.

Touch DJ $23.99
The most expensive app on my afternoon list, this offers scratching, looping, positioning, equalization, effects and pitch controls for 2 simultaneously playing mp3 or m4a files. Claims to offer a ‘new’ DJ technology it calls ‘visual mixing’ – which basically shows the waveforms playing as every other piece of DJ software before it has done for the last 10 or so years. Has an onboard sampler ( limited to 3 samples ),

Spoke $2.49
Interesting radial design for creating drum loops. Sounds placed closer to the centre are more quiet, sounds placed further are louder. A clock hand spins around triggering each sound as it passes over it. Something about the lack of any grids seems to make this all the more fun for making loops work. Lacks tempo control, exporting capacity or ability to load samples. A fun toy anyway, and maybe interface ideas worth noticing by other developers?

JR Hexatone $12.99
More interface weirdness here : load six samples into a hexagonal grid, and start six oscillators by pressing play. These oscillators then ‘travel’ through the grid to an end point, changing position on the beat, and being affected by commands as they travel. Four modes of Play : GRID, CELLS, SND, or SET-UP, allow you to rekindle that feeling of playing Dungeons + Dragons with strange numbered a dice and a manual of elaborate rules. Bizarro, but can import + export, change tempo, so maybe of use to some.

Finger BassLine $3.99
I could say this reminds me of making acid-basslines with the old Roland TB-303 Bass Line Synthesizer – but I’ve only ever played around with Rebirth (RIP: rebirthmuseum.com ), software built in 1997 to emulate the old 303 (and the TR-808 and TR-909 rhythmic composers ). And so, now on my phone: monophonic synthesizer with built-in pattern based step sequencer. Sawtooths. Square waves. Filtering. Modulation. Tempo tap. Kids these days.

Nanoloop $8.99
Sequencer, sampler and synthesizer modelled on a version made for the nintendo game boy back in 1999.
“It does not simulate the Game Boy’s sound or other functions, but has been fully optimised for the iPhone’s capabilities.”

RjDj Free / $2.49 option
The original augmented reality music maker. Microphone + algorithims + auto-layered beats = fun times. Featured examples include work by Perth’s Chris McCormick ( Girl Science records ). Branching out these days into other apps :
“Experience LOVE by AIR in a new way, through four real-time soundscapes. Record yourself as you become part of the music, and send your own Love message to someone special.”

EveryDay Looper $4.99
“Record yourself, loop it, layer it, mix it, merge it. And do it again.” The equivalent of a loop pedal used by a guitarist or vocalist. Simple to use, lacking any sort of manipulation capacities ( eg changing pitch / speed or moving loops further forward or backwards in time ).

Tonepad (Free)
Draw dots on a big grid. Erase some of them. Draw more dots. Move your fingers around the screen. Congratulations, you’ve just made a soundtrack for a Japanese shampoo commercial.

Game Show Sound Board (Free) + Pocket Studio (Free)
Crowd laughter. Applause. Oohs. Ahhs. Bad answer honks. Etc

DrumPad (Free) + Mad Decent (Free)
They’re free. You like hitting stuff, right? A drum kit. And : Air horns, sirens, elephant groans, lazer guns, gunshots, delay. Optional looping, delay and warning siren if someone picks your phone up.

Overall verdict? Lots of little prices add up over time. Necks get sore from hunching over and peering into a little screen for a few hours. And yet, there’s lots of engaging fun to be had. Beatmaker struck the best balance for me, between being fun to use and seeming versatile enough to use for vaguely serious occasions. ( It’s sample bank functions should help get rid of a few sound-board apps too. Except maybe cat piano. That stays for now. )

What is it?
Quartz Composer is a versatile visual programming environment ( mac only +needs either tiger or leopard to work), that enables complex compositions to be created without writing a single line of code. Any mac running 10.4 or later with Quicktime can play quartz compositions as stand-alone files, but importantly, they can also be easily integrated into various workflows for other software ( eg as customised FX in editing or real-time video software) or used as an iTunes visualizer or system screensaver.

In other words, you can build your own interactive software or effects using Quartz 2D, Core Image, Core Video, OpenGL, QuickTime, MIDI System Services, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), XML and various hardware inputs ( eg mouse, audio inputs etc ) – without needing to know any code. It is however, also kinda complicated to get a non-programmer head around. The benefits for mac visualists though, are starting to get too large to ignore: continuous developer and community momentum behind it, easy integration into many other applications ( eg VDMX, Resolume for live work, or other apps for production ), a large body of existing examples that can be customised to suit, and the potential to create or invent visual effects, transitions or processes that are exactly suited to your one-off or overall needs.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to try and document my own learning process with it here, and aim to post a weekly-ish blog post exploring what I’m learning, or what I’m struggling with. Hopefully this’ll motivate me to get up to speed quicker, but also provide something useful for someone else. This first post just sets the scene, puts Quartz Composer in some kinda context, and offers up some links to the key online resources for it. With the next post, I’ll try tackle what it feels like to dive into, and how to start making sense of it, what kinds of rules and quirks it has, and how to start making your own quartz patches. Yes, neantherdal baby steps, because they’re mine. Somewhere in the distance, there’s an endgoal though, of being able to execute a range of long desired visual effects and processes that would be handy / interesting in some situations. And so begins the Hobbit like adventure..

What You’ll Need
- A mac running the Leopard ( preferably ) or tiger operating system.
- XCode Tools ( free on the OS installer disc, once installed, Quartz Composer + examples can be found in the /Developer/Applications/ folder).

How does it work?
Quartz Composer creates Quartz Compositions ( motion graphics programs that work by assembling ‘patches’ in a workflow for processing and rendering. There are several types of patches eg Composite Patches / Controller Patches / Environment Patches – Filter Patches etc which can be combined in various ways.

User Interface
Opening up QC, options for Blank Composition, Graphic Animation, Graphic Transition, Image Filter, Music Visualizer, RSS Visualizer and Screensaver offer easy templates to begin from, and give some idea of the program’s scope.

Once open, there are four main windows to consider:
Editor window – a workspace for assembling and connecting patches. Also, on the editor window toolbar clicking the patch parameters button will open up the Patch Parameter Pane – a place for Editing input parameters.
Patch Creator – utility window for browsing and getting information about QC patches and clips. ( A good place to browse and familiarise with available patches )
Patch Inspector – Utility window for editing input parameters and patch related settings.
Viewer Window – Where you get to see the results of all your pixel mangling.

A good beginner exercise is just to open up the example patches that are installed with the program ( found inside Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer ). Exploring some of those will help clarify the relationships between the above four windows, and give an idea of how it operates. I’ll dive in further with the next post, and the resources below will help anyone wanting to keep on trucking.

Further Resources
Apple’s QC Guide – Comprehensive breakdown and introductory explanations.
QC Developer Mailing List –
http://kineme.net – A community surrounding the development of Quartz Composer custom patches, plugins, and other hacks.
VDMX wiki- Tips for integrating QC into VDMX, links to other QC sources.

Over at Vimeo –
vimeo.com/tag:quartzcomposer : 1,477 example QC clips and counting.
vimeo.com/groups/search:quartz
vimeo.com/5616060 – Shakinda shows the basic concepts for setting up QC.
vimeo.com/goto10 – bouncing balls, feedback effects, double helix, QC plugins, dynamic slideshows.

Extra Patches / QTZ FX
http://vdmx.memo.tv – QC patches ready to drop into VDMX.
http://002.vade.info – great QC add-ons from New York’s Vade.

Erik Gandini, Erik Pauser & Johan Soderberg that’d be. Fine (interconnected ) feature film fiends. Let’s start with:

Videocracy ( 2009 )
Directed Erik Gandini / edited Johan Soderberg
Imagine a country where the owner of the biggest Television network, and several press outlets, also becomes the elected leader of the country. That country is Italy, and because the several sprawling scandals around President Silvio Berlusconi are not covered in Italian news ( but widely elsewhere), it’s surprising there aren’t a greater number of critical documentary documentaries about this.

“Berlusconi has created a culture of banality so that collective societal desires are no longer important. People in Italy now just want to be television stars so they can be famous and rich. There’s a strong tension between those who are on TV and those who are not. For young Italians, power is embodied by those who are celebrities…. What I’m really interested in here is how you can destroy a democracy by tits and ass. It’s shocking that the banality of culture can destroy a once mature and politically engaged populace,” argues Gandini in an Indiewire interview.

The resulting film is an almost spooky glimpse of a society governed by an obsession with celebrity, and a Governor obsessed by the power that television can manifest. Those who have seen Mike Judge’s comedy Idiocracy, about society’s devolution through television will be mightily amused / horrified at the parallels. Director Erik Gandini is well known for covering provocative topics, including – Gitmo, Bosnian refugees in Sweden, and the 100,000 children American soldiers left behind in Vietnam, but we’ll mention here his other Soderberg collaboration:

Surplus: terrorised into being consumers (2003).
Directed Erik Gandini / edited Johan Soderberg
This film is Gandini’s personal visual odyssey about the destructive nature of consumer culture, threaded together with Soderberg’s trademark rhythmic, often musical editing. While the film as a whole doesn’t necessarily provide a strong coherence, it has plenty of powerful moments, many which derive from the ways in which Soderberg marries sound and vision, and understands the power of letting raw images to play out by themselves over time, or looping and repeating them as need be. ( Available on DVD )

Lucky People Centre International (1998)
Directed + Edited : Erik Pauser / Johan Soderberg

Finally, this vastly under-rated film is available on DVD, do yourself a flavour. Lucky People Centre was a Swedish artist collective known for their electronic music, video projects, a couple of audiovisual albums ( not just tracks with videos, but editing video source material samples to make music ), and this film as their pinnacle achievement.

“Lucky People Center International takes us on a journey around the world, navigating by means of people’s inner life. The use of music and rhythm and the pulsating form of the film are reminiscent of the aesthetic tools of music videos, and provide a fresh approach to documentary filming. The film team spent two years travelling the world looking for people and ways of living reflecting the world.. and so we encounter voodoo powers, the investigative methods of a brain research scientist, Buddhism’s view of death, a former porn actress (Annie Sprinkle) and her thoughts on pleasure, a banker and his ecstatic needs, and much more, all held together by musical rhythms and the song of the gibbon.”

On an entertainment and provocation level, the film is loaded with a fascinatingly diverse range of people and situations, but beyond that, the film’s audiovisual relationships, the layered multi-linear storytelling, and the rhythmic approaches to editing ( sound and vision ), mean this is
( Can’t link to them directly ( Oh, Flash, hai there~! ) but click through the interface to find a series of LPC videos at soderberg.tv )
Tokyo Noise ( 2002 )
Directed + Edited : Erik Pauser / Johan Soderberg
This is a gentler documentary exploring the character of Tokyo through the lives of interesting characters, but again includes wonderfully expressive editing and audiovisual sequences.

Tong Tana (2001)
Directed: Erik Pauser
Powerful story about a Swiss man who went to live in the Borneo jungle, and ended up living with, and defending the locals.

The Voice ( 2005 )
Directed + Edited : Erik Pauser / Johan Soderberg
A well edited and animated music-video style exploration of global power. ( Available on DVD )

Read my lips, that Bush + Blair duet that blew up online a few years ago? That was Soderberg too.

Some February eyeball snippets..

Sculpture
http://tapebox.co.uk
http://vimeo.com/sculpture
Dan Hayhurst: Music, Reuben Sutherland: Animation
“DIY music and animation duo, who use zoetrope record deck, tape loops, cassettes, samples, and lo-fi electronic noise, cross-fertilizing analogue and digital techniques to generate vivid sonic and visual collages.”

Sculpture are one of my favourite discoveries of late. Notice the words ‘zoetrope record deck’ in their description? Those custom made picture discs ( just a sequence of images arranged around a vinyl disc and filmed from above ) definitely help define their aesthetic but there’s much more going on than that. Glimpse a few of their animations and live performances to grasp some more.

Everything
http://vimeo.com/6364896
A vibrant array of visual creators constantly pump out material on vimeo.com, so even casual exploration of the site usually brings some rewards. It’s especially nice though, to discover delights in clusters, masses of talented folk orbiting around one of vimeo’s groups or channels. Such as the awesome compilation ‘Everything’, curated by Danny Jelinek, each episode tending to feature 5-6 snappy segments, sharp editing and humour, and sophisticated but whimsically used visual effects.
 
Op Art in Visual Chinatown

davidope.com
http://dvdp.tumblr.com
On the optical art front, albeit with a more contemporary feel, ‘davidope’ creates hypnotic looping animations, which he offers up as a series of tumblr gifs ( hosted at what he calls his ‘visual chinatown’), or java apps / quicktime movs for those inclined. His recipe?

1. I create a simple animated 2d looped pattern in Flash or with Illustrator+Javascript.
2. Then I use them as a displacement/diffuse/alpha map for a static 3d object in 3dsmax.
3. Rendering it with Vray or Illustrate.
4. Finally converting it to GIF with Photoshop.

DJ Yoda 

www.djyoda.co.uk/
youtube.com/user/djyodauk

Belated shout outs to DJ Yoda, who toured Australia in late December. Admittedly I was skeptical after glimpsing a set portion online a long time ago ( too obviously cut and paste in that mid-late 90s way, with little sampling subtlety in the choices or choreography), but for the sonic and visual heads in the audience alike(@ Falls festival) yoda ‘ripped it’, constantly weaving through pop culture grabs with fluid, sophisticated ease. This included a range of recently new worthy items as well as an extended encore of contemporary Australian TV.    

Apart from busily honing his live gigs, DJ Yoda also recently contributed to the DJ Hero game ( Playstation, XBox, Wii ), offering up two mixes for playing : Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” vs. Gang Starr’s “Just to Get a Rep”, and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” vs. Shlomo’s “Beats”. As an aside – has anyone ever used this? The game made a lot of splashes on release, but I haven’t heard from a single user of it since, or even seen anyone pointing to an interesting video of it (or it’s turntable controller ) in action. Meanwhile, ‘Scratch, The Ultimate DJ‘, being developed by Bedlam games and delayed because of legal troubles, is now back on track – with tracks by Mixmaster Mike, Kid Koala, Gorillaz, Salt N pepa etc. Stay tuned.

Pilotless floating killing machines now routinely fly over borders, grim drones of surveillance no doubt predicted by plenty of science fiction before them. The actual 21st century messiness of the drones was best nailed a near decade ago, by Patrick Farley of electricsheepcomix.com.

BackTracking
Over at No Fear Of The Future, Chris Nakashima-Brown wrote about watching the Alex Rivera film Sleep Dealer, ‘an amazing work of Mexican cyberpunk about info-maquilas and memories for sale in near-future Tijuana’. He goes on to mention ‘one of the more over-the-top plot elements was a reality television show in which viewers help drone pilots select their terror targets’ – a near identical premise to Patrick Farley’s web comic ‘Spiders’ ( which we’ll get to in a second.. ), and which he presumed as far-fetched – before reading a NY Times report about the Pentagon’s struggle to process ‘the huge quantities of data it is receiving from the proliferating network of Predator/Reaper drones patrolling the skies of the earth’.

You want video data? The U.S. military can give you video data. In 2009 the drones clocked up 200,000 combat flight hours, each generating a constant feed of live video and other data. In 2010, the drones will be able to begin recording video in ten directions at once, 30 directions in 2011 and 65 directions in 2012. Aside from the obvious storage and archiving issues, that also amounts to a serious analysis challenge. How to meaningfully process that much material?

In attempting to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, the NY Times wrote that the air force and military are ‘turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier’ through a mix of text, live video, replays, and graphical augmentations of the filmed reality.

“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

As Chris saw it, ‘dudes in Department of Defence trailers in Orlando’ aren’t going to be necessarily that effective at analysing the footage from several hundred drones in the air, and suggests a more engaging scenario might be a distributed computing model to fight the war on terror, something along the lines of SETI (where distributed computing power of home computers are used together to help process analysis of signals from space ). As Chris puts it, “allow the private sector to turn the video into the basis of a real-world tactical game, in which teenage boys in suburban Chicago tag the Talis for special attention.” This kinda crowdsourcing was also used in two recent attempts to find missing people ( Jim Gray who went missing off the coast of California, and Steve Fossett whose plane went down in a small region). Making public recently available aerial imagery ( see Google Earth Blog), this was an approach to ‘more rapidly search a large area of imagery using many eyeballs of people around the world’. [ Wikipedia aside : "On May 25, 2007 the U.S. Director of National Intelligence .. authorized .. local, state, and domestic Federal agencies to access imagery from military intelligence satellites and aircraft sensors which can now be used to observe the activities of U.S. citizens. The satellites and aircraft sensors will be able to penetrate cloud cover, detect chemical traces, and identify objects in buildings and "underground bunkers", and will provide real-time video at much higher resolutions than the still-images produced by programs such as Google Earth."]

Spiders
www.electricsheepcomix.com/spiders/
In Patrick Farley’s horizontally sprawling webcomic ( screens aren’t pages! ), the drones crawl along the ground. Rather than swooping planes, swarms of insect robots travel over Afghanistan’s desert mountain terrain, each beaming back a video image for spare-time mouse-clickers to watch and report on. Farley’s still unfinished story has plenty of twists, and tries hard to explore what comics on the screen can be, playing often with various technical conventions of the software he knows users will be reading his story with. Unfortunately the whole story isn’t available for viewing at the moment, while he rebuilds his site ( originally hosted at the domain e-sheep.com, but the domain registration lapsed ), but it’s still worth a look see, and there’s plenty of other webcomics and stories to see there too. Bonus Points? His offering of a ‘List of Story Premises’, free for Creative Commons use, noting “If any of these makes you rich, consider buying me lunch.”

HackTracking
Don’t forget SkyGrabber, the software used by Shiite fighters in Iraq to regularly capture drone video feeds. Available from your nearest torrent site.