I would have written on Saturday night but I had to play in the snow. And I took Sunday off completely.
As I was falling asleep on Sunday night I was trying to imagine how the projections would work: what the relationship between the two videos should be; whether there should be two or just one; and if there are two whether they should be adjacent, parallel or anything else. The same thing duplicated? A lag? Some kind of reciprocal repetition? I toyed quite seriously with the idea of back-projecting the two videos onto two closely-facing screens, with just a slim gap between them which you could slip into if you liked, and watch the scribbling uncomfortably close. Anton was just getting off to sleep so I woke him up to announce the new development. I’m not sure I should do that sort of thing.
But back in the studio this morning (following the unexpected mopping of the floor) we considered the possibility of back-projection. Screens were dragged out of the stock room, unrolled, rolled back up, things were googled, people were telephoned, and eventually back-projection was laid to rest. It’s something I might try another time, but with just four working days left I’d prefer to focus on a single conclusion rather than keep my options open.
This said, focusing on a single conclusion wasn’t easy today, mainly because of the pedancies of Final Cut Pro X. Pedancies took up more than two hours. I was almost at my wit’s end when I decided to reverse some of my ordinary settings and ended up with a video that made me breathe slowly. Relief. It keeps the grain and loses the shadow. And best of all I adjusted the settings with the video playing via the projector, so there were no horrible surprises in the transfer from screen to wall. Why wasn’t I doing this all along?
These new settings lack the screaming whites and almost violet blacks of the oversaturated videos, and because the contrast is reduced the real-life event of writing is more immediate. You can see it’s a real thing rather than something generated by a computer. The more work I put into the computer interface the more it disappears. Good.
Tomorrow lunchtime the studio’s open to the public again. I’m looking forward to gauging responses to the work in its present form. Before lunch I plan to film a video that replies to the one I made this afternoon, then I can spend the rest of the day editing. This still leaves two days to look over the work and experiment with projector screens before we finally install on Friday.
I wanted to post an example video but I don’t think I’ll have time today. I have to edit this afternoon’s video tonight so that I can reply to it first thing tomorrow.
