Grrr

Grrr (QuickTime)

WARNING: The clip contains loud bursts of voices and sounds.

When assigned to produce a 30-second video about argument, I took the theme of "argument" rather literally and made a video about a couple having a spat.

I had just bought a Polaroid mio as part of my long-term financial strategy of investing in soon-to-be-obsoleted technology. I took my mio and my two fine amateur actors to a nearby cafe, and shot 40 Polaroid photos of them being peeved at each other in various ways. Afterwards I used my DV camera to reshoot the photos, laid out on a table in desired positions within the frame. For the sound effects, I walked around my lab one night asking students to make angry noises into the mic.

Thanks to Jeana and Cotton, for allowing me to make them destroy each other cinematically.

Constant

Constant (QuickTime)

The goal for Constant was to make a 30-second video about love. I attempted to visually represent how the memory of a single person can tie together other past memories - and how that person can become a strong presence in our current life, moment to moment.

Before shooting, I mapped out the number of shots I wanted and where the woman's photograph should be positioned within the (sub)frame of each shot. The various settings around the MIT campus were chosen for differing lighting and texture, and of course the availability of a nice wall or surface on which I could put up the photo.

Combo

Combo (QuickTime)
Combo (Slow) (QuickTime)

Welcome to Self-Promotion Week here at Split Screen! Starting today, I'll be posting three of my own short films that use split screens. All were made in 2002 for an art class I was taking.

The assignment for Combo was to make a 15-second video about love. I tried to represent visually the notion of two people becoming one, even if others might see them as being too different and probably incompatible, in the same way we might think of one type of food as not going well with another. (I think we all know couples like this.)

The shooting took most of one afternoon. First I wandered through the local grocery megastore to find the right food labels that I could use to form the desired words. Then I practiced my route from each key location to the next, so that I could follow the path without having to refer to my notes. Finally, I made several passes, shooting in single takes while walking to and stopping at the right spots for my close-ups. Luckily, none of the store staff noticed the guy roaming around the aisles for hours with a DV camera.

I'm also providing a slowed-down clip in case you want to see the one-take shots more clearly.

Combo was featured on the MIT homepage on Valentine's Day, 2003. You can visit the archived homepage.

Curiosity

Curiosity [Kaliber10000]

An oldie from deep in the archives of K10k. I think I first saw this around 1999 or 2000.

John Crumpton's piece is composed of animated photos, revealing themselves over time, so that they end up arranged in a comic-book layout. It's graphic storytelling that borrows from comics, animation, movies.

The best parts are the ones where the visual form clearly reflects the content. The plot is thin (to be fair, only Act I is presented) but what we have is a detective story of a man becoming intrigued, looking around, noticing this and that. The use of gradually revealed subframes is a good strategy for a story about the act of browsing, discovering, piecing together. As the climax occurs, the animation slows down, and for a moment, we are left with only one small subimage - alone and floating against the background of black. It works well as a visual representation of the breathless moment right before we and the main character realize what curiosity has led to.

For me, the piece raises questions that are related to other split-screen works. How much do we "watch" or "read" a composite moving image? How does "watching" work with or against "reading"? Among other factors, 100 years of cinema has taught us a way of looking at moving images. For most movies, the act of watching is one of making whole: we absorb the entire frame, without having to really work at it. But once you break the frame into individual sections - especially in way that clearly refers to illustrated page layouts - then we are made to work a little harder. We are both "watching" - composing the pieces into one superimage - and "reading" - organizing the pieces into a structure. And it's tricky to make that complex experience a pleasurable and rewarding one, I think.

Pixies - Head On

Pixies - Head On (Real) [RollingStone.com]

A simple 4x3 grid of partial images. If you squint, the band looks like four kids with oversized heads.

In their heyday, Pixies created amazing music and left behind a few amazingly terrible music videos - so bad that they were funny. My friend Dave used to tell me about the time MTV's 120 Minutes premiered the video for Here Comes Your Man. Once it was over, the bemused VJ turned to the camera in disgust, and said, "well, that's the last time you'll be seeing that one on this channel." Ha ha. Relatively speaking, the clip for Head On is much more... presentable.

If you're intrigued, check out the Pixies DVD for all their videos plus live footage and other goodies.

Cut Copy - Future

Cut Copy - Future (Windows Media) [Modular]
Cut Copy - Future (Real) [Modular]

I find this video quite beautiful. I also find it very funny.

Most of the shots use the familiar split down the middle of the frame. The images on the two sides are mirrored, but with a slight offset in position. The off-kilter visuals go hand-in-hand with other mysterious elements, such as body parts like hair and arms, which are treated as abstract forms of uncertain origin. There seems to be a narrative of some sort that has to do with multiple selves of past and future. But it's very loosely threaded within the real attraction: the strange images and dreamlike patterns.

The video is also an amusing capsule of one type of early MTV stylings. It screams out "pretentious eighties music video": non-sequitur flourishes, exaggerated action performed with deadly seriousness, look-at-me visual effects - all shot with straight-faced artsy conviction. The result ends up being very what-the-heck-is-going-on. I love it.

Overall, the video is a great fit for the band. Cut Copy sounds like they have a deep love for eighties new wave and synthpop among other genres. They don't treat them as kitsch or approach them ironically; they make convincing tracks that have both the detailed touches and the overall feel of that era. This sincerity in turn makes it easier for them to update the eighties sound with more recent musical flavors. Like Daft Punk's best work, the end result is close to timeless: a song might immediately recall a particular point in time, yet belong to many points in musical history, all at once. Be sure to pick up Bright Like Neon Love.

The B-52's - Debbie

The B-52's - Debbie (Real) [RollingStone.com]
The B-52's - Debbie (Excerpt) (QuickTime)

Several fun multi-frame shots, including a video version of the ol' children's-book trick of mixing and matching the heads, torsos and legs of illustrated characters. (Is there a name for such types of books? Not exactly a flipbook...)

The video's finale is an animated take on the photomosaic idea. Different shots of the band members are collaged together to form a sparkling image of Earth that fades away into the distance. The zoom from a tight shot on the grid of band videos to a faraway shot of the globe is a nice touch, because it helps the viewer notice the smaller component images in a way that static posters can't. That's one thing I've always noticed about photomosaics: I'm rarely drawn into closely looking at the detail images that are subsumed by the global image. I realize that, in some ways, that is the whole point of photomosaics, so I'm not really complaining. But I do think that a "videomosaic" artist who uses video and/or animation has more tools to play with in terms of exploring the space between the macro and the micro - as demonstrated by this music video and Media Mirror.

Media Mirror

Media Mirror (Windows Media, 35MB) [Jeff Han]

From the project page:

The Media Mirror is an interactive video installation, in which 200+ channels of live cable television are continuously arranged in real-time to form a mosaic representation of the person that stands in front of it.

Must... not... use... cliched analogy... Oh what the heck: it's like photomosaics on steroids.

In the second half of the 10-minute video, a "Channel Target Mode" is demoed, where one channel is selected and its image constructed from the 200+ channels. You can see Bjork (I think) at 6:44 and Star Trek at 8:16.

Check out other projects by Jeff Han.

Via Screenhead.

Pillow Talk

Pillow Talk (Doris Day / Rock Hudson argument scene) (Windows Media)
Pillow Talk (Sydney Pollack intro for Turner Classic Movies) (Windows Media)

There are older movies with split-screen scenes, such as 1927's Napoleon, but when I think of good ol' fashioned split screens, I think of 1959's Pillow Talk. Starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the film was a smash hit. It featured two perfectly matched stars, witty dialogue, and Day pulling off a hilarious fake orgasm in a crowded deli... Erm... Sorry, wrong romantic comedy. (That other movie has a couple of split-screen scenes too, by the way.)

Watch Sydney Pollack's intro for Turner Classic Movies for glimpses of three split-screen shots. Fittingly, even the studio setup for Pollack's segment has several screens going at once. For more info on the movie, check out the TCM page for Pillow Talk.

Kings of Convenience - Toxic Girl

Kings of Convenience - Toxic Girl (QuickTime)
Kings of Convenience - Toxic Girl (Windows Media) [Musicbrigade]
Kings of Convenience - Toxic Girl (Real) [Astralwerks]

Nice use of multiple photographs to create panoramas and stop-motion animations. Taking after the name of the song's parent album - Quiet Is the New Loud - Francois Nemeta's video is not "loud" about its techniques. The animations and camera pans over photocollages are slow, subtle and deliberate.

I love the bit where we see an animated carousel of a sequence of portrait photos: first of the "toxic" girl going counter-clockwise, and then of the forlorn singer Erlend Oye in the opposite direction. And there's something priceless about the expression on Oye's face in close-up, right after the zoom into the collage grid of the girl.