So after all the excitement of the Digital transformations conference , my first time going anywhere on my own for along time I had to get back to making new things .
I've been working for a while on a longer length video based on a copy of Johnny Mnemonic I bought a while back from a charity shop, its Ntsc coded , but as I have a few vhs players stashed for emergencies and nostalgia that play NTSC that wasn't a problem. Why this particular film and why this particular tape ?
Well I saw it when it first came out and later read the William Gibson short story its based on , Johnny Mnemonic fits in with a lot of the Glitch art and Vaporwave work that I follow online, especially the clunky ( though good for its day ) computer graphics and definitely the depiction of virtual reality and all seeing all powerful corporations that have the cures ( and cause) for diseases that they will not release for reasons of profitability. Also the tape was damaged so creating a lot of nice artifacts and noise. Its a nice piece of futurism and early fictional hacker culture , ah the future never seemed so grimy .
So the process goes something like this ; transfer tape to DVD via DVD recorder in real time, play back DVD onto mini TV screen , capture that playback using a circuit bent web cam that I'd recently finished . Edit film , add music . Then came the conference and I'd started to get into rewriting some of the codecs you find in Ffmpeg , so I put it aside until after . When I got back from the conference I'd changed my mind about what I wanted to do with the film , rather than it just being a straight glitching of the whole film I wanted to incorporate more sound and other sources , so I recorded a few more films through the previous method and started to edit at points where the circuit bent copy had dropped out too much to be readable , I want something to be broken , but not so far beyond broken that it becomes unreadable . There was the moment I realised Id have to go back and redo everything because too much light was shining between the screen and the camera , so I had to put a box over the camera and screen otherwise the camera would keep adjusting the white balance - and that black and white worked way better than colour films even though id replaced the infrared adjusted lens with a standard lens, these things matter .
The sound was sourced through the internet archive - old jazz sounds from the twenties slowed down and chopped up in Audacity - I tried LMMS ( Linux multimedia studio) but couldn't get my head round it quickly enough and also 1 other source which was a text file converted to speech using gespeaker , a great text to speech engine , must play around with those more . I wanted to add more sound as I've been told a couple of times that sound would improve the reception of what I'm making .
Anyway In the end the film ended up like this, I quite like the mix of retro hi-tech and old black and white films that I ended up with - all edited on Linuxmint LMDE2 ( due to the debacle of the meltdown and spectre patches messing up render speeds and compiling I had to switch back to pre-patch kernels, huge difference in speed and heat on the cpus under load ) . Clip below is from beginning of the finished film - the full film is here Down and out at the render farm
