Video: Red Snow

(video - 5:10)

This piece was my final project for MAT 253 - Digital Video Strategies, instructed by Brian O'Reilly.  It was presented at the 2002 Beyond Noise Conference, held at U.C. Santa Barbara.

I tried to create a sort of 'motion-watercolor' with a lot of implied, fluid motion.  The visuals loosely follow the audio track, which is a mixture of traditional Vietnamese Ca Trù music, Southern American Folk-Blues, and radio static.  The main portion of the audio is made up of the poem 'Hông Hông Tuyêt Tuyêt', which is sung in the ancient Ca Trù style of northern Viêt Nam by the performer Quách Thi Hô.

Technical Notes

The majority of footage is made of composited layers of footage taken with a Sony DCR-PC9 MiniDV video camera.  Adobe AfterEffects, UI Software's VideoDelic, and Syntrillium's CoolEdit 2000 were used in the creation of this piece.

I generated portions of the footage using software I wrote that generates JPEG image sequences from character-based cellular automata (e.g. 'Conway's Game of Life').  The auto-generating characters are limited to the Simplified Chinese subset of the Unicode character set (range 0x4E00–0x9FAF).

Figure 1 - Animated cellular automata using Chinese characters.

I created a short segment of anaglyph (red/blue) 3d footage using two DCR-PC9 video cameras on a special mount I made.  I composited the footage in After Effects using the left camera's footage as the red channel, and the right camera's footage as the blue + green channels.  The 3d effect can be seen using standard red/blue 3d glasses.

Figure 2 - 3d anaglyph image of the Santa Barbara Courthouse (solarized).

The audio developed by examining the spectrum of radio audio I recorded during a cross-country drive.  I found that during a transition from one station to the next, the interfering station's audio is noise-gated and limited to a narrow audio band plus harmonics.  By FFT filtering, adding pink noise, and noise-gating at around -19dB, the resulting audio was a good approximation of radio interference.

References and Links

Ca Trù, Quách Thi Hô
Sony DCR-PC9
AfterEffects
Videodelic
CoolEdit 2000
DivX