I will do this review of my progress reverse chronologically.
The first presentation I gave to my new class after returning from a year out was awful, I was unprepared and blasé – the presentation went badly. see a blog entry about that here - http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/thoughts-after-my-presentation-on-tues-1812011/
I wanted my next presentation to be better
My Pecha Kucha presentation was delivered live ( I have subsequently made a video version which can be viewed here ) – http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/progress-report/ I would happily submit only this as support of my work, I feel this was strong.
Retrospectively I can now see a big oversight in the plan I outlined during this presentation, the video data base that I started with was not as versatile as I thought it would be, I started using H.D video for the first time in unit two and as soon as I did all of my SD material seemed aesthetically inferior, thus I had to start building a new media data-base from scratch. I started walking and recording new footage with the college’s Panasonic hs9 camera (the only 3 chip camera available through CLS) .
I managed to create some nice material through these efforts see freeze frames from some of my favourite clips here – http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/stills-gallery_from-my-video-database/
Thus all of the videos featured in my database have been filmed and colour corrected in unit two of this course. I currently have 147 clips in my data base (the number will continue to grow throughout the exhibition) it should be noted that most of my effort in unit two was towards shooting video. A lot of time was spent in After Effects also, have not really commented much on this side of my process since it is the most tedious, nothing interesting to say about it really. The reason I had to spent so long in After Effects is Because Pure Data can’t really handle HD video, so I have to reformat everything as SD motion jpeg. The problem with this is that these re-formatted videos look completely different to the after effects previews which feature high definition footage, It has been a long process of trial and error in After Effects to try and get down scaled down HD video to still look like HD video. There was not much point in blogging about the video processing side of things as; (A) it was was very tedious and (B) I was too busy doing it (+ there is also the fact that I can’t connect to the internet while running an illegitimate copy of certain software) .
The other major technical part of my process was pure data, I did not start using Pure Data until unit two of this course. It is easy to see my progress in this area by looking at these blog entries which present the evolution of my patch.
http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/my-first-pure-data-experiment/ (it looks so cute now when I look at it)
bellow are later PD experiments. with video examples
http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/pd-patch-variation-1/
http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/looking-at-vertov-and-more-pd-experiments/
the above link describes an important moment in my projects evolution with a little help from Dzaga Vertov I realized a simple method for organizing my material (one that I have stuck too).
http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/my-pure-data-patch-middle-screen/
http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/my-pure-data-patch-outer-screens/
These last two examples show my finished patch.
My knowledge of pure data is still minimal, but I am happy with the progress I have made in a small time and the patch I have created serves the purposes of the project that I outlined, so no need for it to do any more just yet.
A good description of my final piece of work can be found here http://www.mada2011.com/?page_id=70
My reflective essay can be found here http://andrewburgess.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/final-reflection/
it contains details of my exit strategy from this course and my plans for the future.
