Camera Feedback

I spent several hours down in the AV department experimenting with recording and documenting the communication error between the camera and on-screen preview. Matt had never attempted to use the new high speed cameras, which was one of the things we tried out. Unfortunately the results produced by this were very unfruitful, the only method we could use was filmng the onscreen feedback from a standard HD camera, which was too slow to have any effect on the high speed model, so it was just a film of a film of a film...you get the idea.



However, using the XD Cam (in particular a Sony PMW-EX1) we managed to generate an array of amazing forms created by static, experimenting with the gain, shutter speed, shutter angle, zooming in and out, messing with the iris and just generally working with almost every possible setting to see what it would produce. I had over an hour of recorded film, so considering the final edit was five minutes long there was alot of unused work. Here are some screenshots from stuff I didn't use.



There was alot of this, and it looked great on the big screen when I was actually filming it, but it didn't work as well with the more erratic fast-paced feedback in the movie, it was a resulted of putting the camera out of focus at a very slow shutter speed.





We played with creating movement between the camera and screen, producing interesting results , however I felt they disrupted the flow of the final piece.



The ghost of the 'frame' of the television set was included a lot, but I decided to not again actually showing the object of the television set cause similar flow-disrupting effects.





The first 10-20 minutes of filming there was a lot of text on-screen, which I thought was pretty cool at first but when we removed all the menus from the screen, it seemed more easy to get lost in the feedback uninterrupted by text. I enjoyed using the text as a reference to the 'glitch' in the final piece and they allowed a questionable 'transition' between the more organic feedback sequences. Apart from not having any luck with the high speed camera, this experiment flowed pretty smoothly, and I'm very happy with the end results. It was also good getting used to using the AV Department and while I was there speaking to Matt and seeing what else they had an offer, I'll definitely be down there more in the future as there's a ton of things I'd love to try out. Anyway, this is the compressed version of the final piece uploaded on Vimeo, I'll need to figure out what format I want to provide the final HD movie on.

Communication Error from Joe Durnan on Vimeo.

Although from research and common sense I was aware that this sort of feedback was a result of a optical loop between output and an input. Matt joked that as an infinity curve, it was the answer to a range of Einstein theories. Saying that a simple process like this could be used in education as a visual reference to certain scientific space-time theories.