Game of Life

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Music credit: “Game of Life” by Goldtea

About the video: I first met Goldtea hanging out in Itaewon, an area of Seoul where there are about as many ex-pats as there are Koreans. Somehow, the idea came about to do a video together. He brought over an album he’d made before coming to Korea. So, we went with this song for starters. I filmed him dancing against the walls of my one-room apartment, and obviously it would have been easier to edit this footage if I’d come up with a blue or green screen – don’t know what i was thinking filming against beige walls. The editing took quite a bit of time, and it went through a few edits. In the first edit, I mixed up Goldtea’s dancing footage with some scenes of Seoul streets, etc, and it wasn’t quite what he was looking for. He wanted me to add in some scenes of stuff like robberies and crime, and it evolved from there. But, as of 2006, with the resources I had it, it wasn’t easy to just get a bunch of images together to sample from – I rented a couple of movies, a Denzel Washington movie where he holds people in a hospital hostage and the Brazilian movie City of God. I looked up robberies on some online video sites, and that’s where I got the surveillance camera idea for this video.
But eventually, the editing just got to be too much, and so in the video above, I faded the song out early, and just did the first two minutes, just deciding I couldn’t devote any more to it for now. So, I was sorry to Goldtea that I didn’t put together things for the whole song, but hope this holds some value for whatever it is. The last time I checked the whole song was available for listening at Goldtea’s myspace page.
Anyway, I quite like it, but I can see it pushes a lot of my technical abilities to the absolute limit. It’s definitely one of the more creative videos I’ve done.

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Amazing Fire Artist

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Watch at your own expense. Even for being deliberately bad, this is just plain bad. But, it’s a tribute to a lot of bad special effects work.
This came about one day when Ryan Gerard was over at my place. For several hours, he just did whatever came to his head while I filmed him. There’s four or five equally odd short videos that came about from that same day.

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Resolution

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I was filming lots of random actions and things around the apartment. I filmed this giant art book opening and closing, and the word ‘resolution’ jumped off one of the pages. A resolution to do something, to snap out of this loop. Made me think it would be cool to do an video dictionary, a collection of a bunch of short videos like this.

(POSTSCRIPT: This short little video would become a key video in the chain of ideas which led me to start the Vidtionary project.)

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Han River VJ Demo

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This video was done simply as an experiment in syncing together a music keyboard powered by the Logic music software with my Arkaos VJ software. I could load the still images into Arkaos, and then use a midi keyboard to simultaneously trigger the images as well as music notes. Someone complimented me on the music, which is funny, because I essentially just banged away at the piano keys at random since I don’t know how to play.
I have taken literally thousands of pictures along the Han River of Seoul in the past year – granted many of the photos are similar one to the other. I don’t know yet what I’ll do with all these photos, but for sure something more than this eventually.

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Rolling With Sam

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Sam goes to the science museum and the day gets remixed.
How this came about is my friend Ryan Gerard took the student he was tutoring to a science museum. When he came by my place, I was showing him my VJ software (Arkaos), and we loaded in his photos into the software, then linked the VJ software with a keyboard in the Logic music software, so the sound and the images are pretty much synchronized. See my recent video Han River VJ Demo for another example of this linking between the VJ software and the music keyboard.

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Autumn in the Tropics

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An underwater electronic meltdown filmed off the coast of Miyakojima Island, Okinawa, Japan in 2006. I hope this captures some of the awesome feeling of snorkeling far out from shore on a sunny day. I love seeing the bubbles, breaking the surface, and feeling the difference between air and water. The light and color dance everywhere.
The music is “Automne” by Seafran. I’d been to Miyako in June, and collected a lot of underwater images with my Olympus camera. I still want to edit this footage using the water sounds as music, but that’s technically difficult – and as I was working on this, my friend Seafran sent me a few of his tracks, and I thought this one matched really well.
I threw a lot of the video clips into my VJ software, Arkaos, and visually jammed along with the music for several takes. Then, using Final Cut, I edited together the better takes.

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