6 posts tagged “experiment”
I keep forgetting to take these while I'm out, but I finally took my first series of photos yesterday for use in panoramic software, resulting in the stitched image you see above. Do make sure to take a look at it in its biggest size; that's the precise thing I'm excited about with this S550 and panoramic shots, is that I can finally do ones that are high in quality from one edge to the other, ones I could actually print and frame if I wanted, after doing a fine-tuning of the settings and getting a really smooth shot (which admittedly today's example is most certainly not). I've got to get more into the habit, but I'm really hoping to present a lot more of these, and to hopefully take more care with future ones and get the elements more perfectly aligned.
This is the 3300 block of North Clark (north to your left, east to your right), halfway between Belmont and Roscoe in the Lakeview neigborhood on the northside, or in other words three city blocks (six human-sized blocks) south of Wrigley Field. It's precisely because this block is so typical, I think, that makes it a perfect example of why nearly every block on the northside sometimes seems cool and unique; notice here the great combination of old Industrial-Age buildings and modern, how several have been gussied up in a "Painted Ladies" style color scheme, how many of the first floors have been renovated into very contemporary pubs and restaurants and boutiques, how the entire thing is surrounded by tall, mature trees. Chicago is a very thriving, very alive city, in an American Midwest full of dying Industrial-Age cities; and you can see that even on just random corners of residential neighborhoods, which the block in this image very definitely is. I have to confess, I really loving in a section of an urban environment where I'm surrounded by scenes like this, an active city environment that relies on the cultural, architectural, and culinary diversity of immigration combining with the jobs and money of the creative class, sitting on a broad sturdy base of history and gravitas. Maybe that's a bit too flowery a way to put it, but you hopefully see my point.
One of the many reasons I'm so excited about owning my brand-new Nikon Coolpix S550 is because it has so many manual settings, an important thing for me as a former fine-art photographer in film and paper form, as well as a photography major all through college in the late '80s and early '90s. See, these digital cameras have all gotten incredibly good now at automatically sensing all the conditions of that shoot, and automatically adjusting its settings to achieve the so-called "perfect shot" every time; but what artistic photographers do is deliberately tweak with those settings in ridiculous ways, for deliberate aesthetic effect. And so I've been itching to start doing some long-form tests of my new S550, to see to what kinds of extremes exactly I can push these camera's settings.
For example, the three things that actually determine the quality of a photograph are the shutter speed (how long the lens is open), the aperture (how wide the lens opens in the first place), and the film speed (expressed by either the American standard ASA or the European one ISO). See, the way that film actually used to work was by getting coated with photosensitive chemicals, and then adding tens of thousands of tiny flakes of silver that would turn black when exposed to light in these chemicals; that literally defines the shapes in your image, your "negative," that when projected onto paper produces your positive "print."
How "fast" or "slow" a type of film is, then, reflects how many of these grains of silver are embedded in that film; a low number like 64 will have just an insane amount of almost microscopic grains, while a high number like 2000 will have a lot less grains, much bigger in size to make up for the difference. So the less grains you have, and the bigger they are, the less light needs to be exposed to them to turn them black; and so that's why films with high speeds like 2000 are used for low-light situations, also sports situations, but why they always seem so grainy to the human eye when viewing them. And then conversely, the more grains you have, the longer an exposure to sunlight they need to face, but the finer the picture; and that's why it's known as "slow" film to begin with, because it usually requires slow shutter speeds to work, in order to allow enough time for all that sunlight to expose all those tiny little grains, which means that you can usually only use such film under very sunny conditions.
So then if you want to compare all this to the wonders of the modern world, these next several shots were all taken under the fully automatic mode; where I simply ran around pointing the camera at crap and pushing the trigger, and the camera itself in a tenth of a second would instantly analyze its surroundings and adjust all its settings for what it thinks is going to be the most aesthetically pleasing combination for human eyes. And you know what? My little freaking camerabot ain't that bad! All of these photos here, I think, are just astounding in their complexity; a much richer range of graytones than I was usually ever able to coax out of my physical film, back in the '80s when I was a photography major and developing my own film in the student darkroom every evening. plus with the perfect amount of light let in each and every time. Why would anyone complain about these functions on modern cameras, when in the old days you could easily waste half of your entire roll on pictures that didn't have these exact right manually determined settings?
Thanks for sticking in there with this extra-long report!
Oh, did I not mention that this new digital still camera of mine actually shoots full-motion, full-sound, low-light-capable videos too? It does! In fact, with the 4-gig memory card I currently have in there, I can technically shoot a full half-hour of such video before having to sync with a computer, at a quality even higher than what you're seeing here (but more on that in a moment). Yes, I know, ever since getting this camera, I've been raving about stuff that a whole lot of other people now take for granted with their digital media devices (and I'm sure to keep doing a lot more); but all this crap is new to me, damnit, and I'm simply astounded by the quality these tiny little decently-priced little devices all have! What you're looking at above, for example, is WAY MORE than enough quality I need for most of the amateur videos I will be shooting in my life -- artistic events, holidays, little mise-en-scenes like you're seeing here -- a quality at least as good as old tape-based videocameras from the '90s, back when they were the only home option available; and since you have just an insane amount of manual controls over that video image as it comes in, too, plus a device that automatically makes a series of "smart adjustments" to whatever conditions it's in, technically you're actually recording a better-quality video than most '90s tape-based cameras, not simply equal.
All us multimedia artists were dying to each own such a videocamera back in the '90s; and the lucky friends of mine who actually did ended up shelling out $500, $600, $700 or more for the privilege, and of course don't forget still with no way to actually edit such videos at home. So how absolutely mindblowing, I think, that this ability now essentially serves as a little-advertised freebie fringe benefit of purchasing what is mostly advertised as a still-image camera, with photographs that are literally five times higher in quality than what you're seeing here; and now combine that with the fact that all these functions all wrapped together in one device still costs less than $200, and can be slipped into your pants pocket. And now add to THAT that you can now cut all these videos together on your home computer, in a way almost as professional as full-time studios, with software that comes for freaking free when you buy the operating system. BLERGH. Careful, don't slip on all my brain pieces splattered across the floor.
If you're under 30 and take all this stuff for granted; SHAME ON YOU, or I guess congratulations for living in a wonderful brave new world of the arts, and how I wish I could put you in a time machine and bring you back to the '80s when I was in high school and college, and access to even the most basic professional equipment was such a privilege and rare pleasure and something you would literally beg, borrow, steal or whore yourself to keep getting to use. No wonder there are tens of millions of people in this country now releasing their own short videos and movies on a regular basis; I guarantee you there'd be that many doing it twenty years ago too, if simply all this technology had existed then as well.
*Oh, and the technical note I was going to mention as well: For those doing research about the S550 and who have come across this randomly, know that the camera originally outputs videos in a Quicktime/Mac-friendly AVI format, 640 x 480 pixels, at a fairly high 1 megabyte per second of footage; the 33-second video today, for example, was originally 33 megs in size when first coming out of the camera. I then not only compressed it into an MP4, but also lopped off the top and bottom to make it 16:9-friendly; that brought the total size down to a much more reasonable 6 megabytes, but of course also dropped the quality quite a bit. I don't mind so much, because I knew I was only going to distribute it as a much smaller streaming video online; but do understand that this video looks dramatically better when watching the original AVI on a television screen.
(UPDATE, June 2007: Don't forget that this series hasn't stopped; it's just moved to the website for my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.)
(Tired of seemingly all discussion of movies in this country anymore sliding towards poop fests and other kiddie fare? Me too, which is why I've decided to dedicate my new Netflix account to nothing but "grown-up" movies, and to write reviews here of each one I see. For a master list of all reviews, as well as the next movies on my "queue" list, click here.)
Metropolis (1927; restored 2002)
Written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang
Directed by Fritz Lang
The year I'm writing this review (2007), Fritz Lang's dystopian masterpiece Metropolis is 80 years old, which makes it officially the oldest full-length film I've ever sat down and watched from beginning to end. It's also one of the rare films of this "Movies for Grown-Ups" series that I'd already seen before renting it through Netflix; I caught the early-'80s edition by Giorgio Moroder a number of years ago, in fact, at a midnight screening at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. But that's the weirdo crappy edition of the film, the one with the colorized sections and the supremely odd new-wave and heavy-metal soundtrack, the one that cuts the already-butchered original film into a can't-make-sense-at-all 80 minutes; even though I had technically "seen" Metropolis already, I figured that the newest restored edition would be in reality like seeing an entirely different film.
And indeed, this is part of the mystique of Metropolis, and is what inspires people to continue renting and discussing it to this day; that the film has been mishandled so badly over the decades, butchered so much, that there are literally a dozen different "versions" of the film floating out there now, with none ever being able to claim itself as the "original" because of so much of the original footage being lost forever (over 25 percent, in fact). But thankfully, in these times of archival interest the academic film community now has (especially in Europe), we now have an edition of the film that can be called as completist as it can pretty much get anymore; and not only that, but that was meticulously scanned and cleaned using a variety of expensive computer tools, including the creation of a new piece of software just for this film alone. It's distributed commercially by the excellent archival company Kino, and can be found just about anywhere you find DVDs; ah, the modern world in which we live.
Oh, but don't try to convince Lang himself of this brave new world; he was having none of it in this film, one that set the blueprint for almost every dark science-fiction movie that would come after it, from Blade Runner to The Matrix to Brazil. It is essentially the tale of a city in the future -- a very, very, very big city, simply known as the Metropolis -- where free-market capitalism has been allowed to run amok, without any regulations to protect human safety, comfort, dignity and the like. As a result, the city is literally split into two halves; those who benefit from the wonders of this futuristic world, who live in splendorous skyscrapers with their own enclosed gardens and pools, and those who perform the actual labor to make the city function, who toil facelessly in dirty rat-like subterranean live/work hives.
Yeah, not exactly subtle, this one is, and basically wields the political issues of Germany in the 1920s about as gracefully as a serial killer with a bloody chainsaw. But then again, this is not supposed to be a subtle movie; it's a spectacle, damnit, and had been planned so from the beginning, ever since Lang made his first-ever visit to Hollywood a year previous, and suddenly realized what the German film industry was going to have to take on if they were to keep competing with the Americans. (Believe it or not, Germany's film industry at the time was actually three times as big as Hollywood, because of the postwar economic crash there making it so inexpensive to shoot films in the location.) This film was meant to impress, was expected to make some serious bucks, and (rumor had it at the time) was going to address some of the political issues of Weimer-era Germany in a way that was sure to cause controversy.
Ah, yes, the Weimer era, which it helps to know a little about, if one is to make sense of films like Metropolis; the roughly 20-year period between World War I and World War II, after Germany had been defeated but before Hitler had come into power, when a feeble Socialist government installed by the Allies couldn't come up with a single Constitution or President the entire time that could last over a year. Morals were loose in these years, artistic expression experimental and bitter, with a general feeling in the German air that their entire society was destined for downfall, so they might as well drink and laugh it up along the way. And the German Expressionist films of the time, the Berlin cabarets, and other forms of then-shocking creative output, were partly reflecting the general mood and partly leading it.
This was the same time, though, that the business world first started becoming truly international, and it was no different for the film industry; both Hollywood and Germany were actively trying to encroach on each other's territories in those years, forming overseas distribution partnerships with each other while simultaneously trying to release better and better films than their foreign-speaking friends. When you put this all together, you suddenly understand a lot better how a film like Metropolis came about; obscenely expensive, cutting-edge to the point of near-disbelief, with a temperamental artist in charge who also happens to believe in radical politics, whose every indulgence is being granted by a bloated film studio because they believe it'll make for good eventual publicity. Is it any wonder that the film was destined for the kind of spectacular financial crash the film industry had never seen before, and frankly has rarely seen again?
When all is said and done, in fact, besides the visual element of the film which is still breath-taking to this day, perhaps the most interesting thing about Metropolis is in the way it's been interpreted politically in so many polar opposite ways, all because of a script that was muddy in the first place and then kept getting cut with each round to fit the next political landscape. The traditional view, for example, especially with the shorter versions, is that it's a pro-Communist film; the entire thing hinges around a worker's revolt, after all, in a world that seems curiously like the proletariat-and-bourgeoisie society of Karl Marx's writings. A more interesting interpretation, though, is that the film is pro-Fascist; that its main message, "The mediator between the hand and the head is the heart," means that labor and management will never get along without a strong authoritarian central government, one that is respected by both groups and whose decisions are never questioned. According to Lang, in fact, this is exactly how Hitler himself interpreted Metropolis when first seeing it, and it was Lang himself who was first asked to be the Nazi party's official filmmaker, instead of Lief Riefenstahl. (Of course, we know that that was the moment Lang instead fled to western Europe and the Allies, and when Riefenstahl took the position instead; I've reviewed her first documentary under that position, Triumph of the Will, as part of this essay series as well, for those who are interested.)
People literally couldn't stop complaining about Metropolis when it first came out; the left wing thought it was a right-wing movie, the right-wingers thought it was a leftist film, the scientists thought it advocated religion and the religious thought we were all going to hell for the film existing in the first place. And this is part of the mystique, too; that without this hatred, without all these extra chefs thinking they can fix the soup, we wouldn't have had all the cuts the film endured, all the sections that haphazardly got thrown away for good, all the different versions that have existed and floated around in grainy forms on PBS stations late at night over the decades. But then, would we have as strong and passionate a global community of film preservationists now? Would such care have been taken into the 75th-anniversary digital restoration of this film? Sometimes bad things happen to good artistic projects, and there's simply nothing to be done about it; but if they can serve as cautionary catalysts towards things getting better, at least their abuse didn't go without meaning.
Now, let's be realistic, that Metropolis is never going to be mistaken anymore for something that will delight and entertain a modern mainstream audience; for example, I dare you not to burst into laughter during the scene with the evil hot-girl robot, doing this ridiculous Egyptian erotic dance that's supposed to be turning the men in the audience into panting buffoons, which apparently was quite the legitimately scandalous scene at the time the film first came out. But I'll tell you, even 80 years later, the visual effects of this movie still unbelievably hold up, are still even impressive in this age of Lord of the Rings style excess. This is enjoyed more anymore as a historical document than as a gripping sci-fi tale; but for those who like watching movies occasionally for their historical value, you can't really go wrong with Metropolis. Babel! BABEL! BABEL!!!
Out of 10:
Writing: 5.0
Acting: 2.2
Directing: 7.7
Cinematography: 9.0
Overall: 6.5
Random notes:
--Wow, you think modern Hollywood revels in excess? Metropolis ended up employing over 37,000 extras; and when adjusted for inflation, its official budget was over $200 million. (In fact, some scholars think this number might be as high as $800 million, when adding all the costs that were never officially recorded.) And this, mind you, while Germany was going through its worst economic depression in its history, a time when people were literally taking wheelbarrows of money to the store to buy loaves of bread. Jeez, no wonder this film almost put its producers, Universum Film, out of business.
--And speaking of Universum, their publicity department at the time boasted that over six million feet (or two million meters) of film had been shot and printed to make Metropolis; that would make the ratio of shot film to used film a whopping 148:1, pretty much an impossibly outrageous number no matter what year you're talking about. But as film historian Martin Koerber points out in the notes to this film's restoration, it was a fairly common practice in those days to actually shoot four or five versions of the complete film while on location, so that the footage could be cut into four or five slightly different negatives, to be shipped around the world for four or five slightly different versions of the movie. Could you even imagine such a thing now -- of the European version of a movie consisting entirely of slightly different takes of each scene than the American version, which itself is slightly but completely different from the Asian version? Just think of all those pointless DVD box sets!
--By the way, fantastical author HG Wells hated this movie; he rightly claimed that it routinely ignores scientific facts in order to present highly stylized visuals, and therefore didn't deserve the newly-coined phrase "science-fiction." And thus did the fanboy debate officially begin. "Worst. German. Expressionist. Film. Epic. Ever!"
Best viewed: As a first date with a hot nerd at an art-film revival house on a gusty autumn Saturday night. Either that or as a college freshman on acid.
Next on my queue list: A Scanner Darkly, a slightly more modern dystopian sci-fi thriller, based on one of my most favorite novels of all time, done using a cutting-edge animation technique that slides a new layer of cartoon reality on top of actual physical film. Oh man.
Good morning! For those who don't know, I'm trying a little experiment today as part of the "Getting Things Done" time-management system I use in my life, which I'm calling a "No Downtime Day" -- where I try to go 16 hours in a row without any "vegging" activities like television, goofing off online, etc. I thought it'd be fun, then, to occasionally throw up posts here at my blog as well, letting everyone know how the experiment is going and what I've been doing over that particular chunk of time. If this is successful, then, I'll add such an activity to my GTD system on a semi-regular basis; not just daily processing and a weekly review, that is, but maybe a monthly No Downtime Day as well.
Anyway, it's 7:30am as I write this, and I've been up for about an hour now; I've spent that time reviewing about 300 of the 400 websites I try to scan each day (via RSS feeds). Since I hardly ever post links to other things, in fact, I thought it'd be fun today to run a list of each and every item I ended up clicking on and reading in detail; here we go...
Today's "Penny Arcade" comic strip.
The Criterion Contraption reviews "The Last Temptation of Christ."
The Onion AV Club explains why "Edison Force" sucked.
The Saks Fifth Avenue store in New York buys its own freakin' zip code.
New report says that we should declare tobacco a controlled substance and regulate it under the FDA.
People will be able to pet stingrays at the Brookfield Zoo this summer.
FOX is making a movie of "The Sims." No, seriously.
CHUD.com explains why "Insomnia" and "Cradle Will Rock" were both disappointing movies.
Screenshots from Wednesday's "Lost" finale.
The San Francisco Chronicle's take on the "Lost" finale.
YouTube: Tom Snyder interviews a bunch of Star Trek people in 1976.
A 17-hour marathon of all six "Star Wars" movies has been showing overnight at the LA Convention Center.
The Chicago Tribune's take on the "Lost" finale.
"Lost" Easter Egg proves that flash-forwards happened on April 5, 2007.
Okay, so that's it for now; more computer work to do at the moment, then around 9:00 I'm going to get on my bike and start making my way to the Loop. Or, er, maybe...actually, the weather here in Chicago today is shittier than I expected, so maybe I'll put off the long bike ride for another day.
I'm trying an experiment tomorrow, that I'm calling a "no downtime day" -- in other words, a day where I spend every moment from waking up to going to bed doing something productive, with no "downtime" spent on things like television, goofing off online, etc. If it's successful, then, I'll add it on a semi-regular basis to my usual "Getting Things Done" time-management system; a customer-created supplement if you will, where on top of your usual action lists and project lists and daily processing, something maybe like once a month you try to go an entire 16 hours without any "vegging" time at all.
Now, note that this is not the same thing as an "all-go-go-go" day; there will be certain times tomorrow when my pace will be slow, for example when sitting around on my ass getting various online things done. But there will also be very active parts of my day tomorrow, too; 9am to noon, for example, will be dedicated to traversing the route of my fourth in a series of bike maps for Google Maps/Earth, this time from my place in Uptown to the Loop, using only inner-city designated bike lanes (i.e. not the lakefront path). It's a ten-mile round trip for me altogether (16 km), basically being done to show off the interior of the city, and also to detail what one can expect when making a long ride within Chicago itself among vehicular traffic. (I've done the trip to the Loop before, actually; the downtown area can admittedly get a little scary, just from the sheer volume of large industrial traffic, but certain tips I'll be sharing can make the whole thing both safer and less nerve-wracking.) So you see what I'm saying; a normal day like always, with its normal ups and downs, but just while trying to cut out all non-productive activities. I've never tried such a thing before, so we'll see how it goes!
Anyway, just thought I'd mention it because I'll probably be posting a few live updates throughout the day tomorrow, via my Palm Treo and the excellent mobile client VOX provides its users. Here's hoping everything goes well.
Funny story: Today I was riding my bike as usual, the daily 6 miles (10 km) or more that I'm trying to do this summer, but the wind just felt like it was literally knocking me backwards, even while pedaling. And the whole thing was just so exhausting, and I was thinking the whole time, "What has changed about me today, so that I can't handle a windy day nearly as well as before? I can't be getting less healthy, can I? Hmm, knowing me, maybe I can (sigh)." And then I got home and checked out the weather, and found out that the wind was blowing in my neighborhood at the time at 48 miles per hour (77 kph). Yeesh.
