Topic “lumiere”

Anniversaries and new beginnings

June 20, 2009

The lumiere project has been a collection of soundless minutes for two years now with Brittany and I collecting videos. The project is still going strong in no small part due to continued participation and support from talented people like Michael and Sam. The first four videos are still online showing rusty tools and cars moving slowly (1, 2, 3, 4).

In the department on non-moving, non-digital images factory takeover has turned one year old. It is full of images from the household's old cameras and it is a very fun thing to produce. The latest addition is a Lubitel 166 and I'm enjoying the medium format film.

This year's the new project is the new Hoist that I mentioned in my previous post. We have taken all the things we learned from making collaboration software for two years and applied it to the new product and the result is software that works like you (rather than software that dictates how you should work). It's a new paradigm for collaboration where the individual is empowered in a way you don't usually see. I'm very excited about showing off the result of 5 months development off next week when we start holding workshops.

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Your chance for 15 minutes of fame

September 26, 2008

Now is your chance for 15 minutes of fame. If you hurry up and make a lumiere video your submission could be lumiere video #1,000 posted on the site. The rules are simple:

  • 60 seconds max.
  • Fixed camera
  • No audio
  • No zoom
  • No edit
  • No effects

Update

You're too late. Michael got the honour with some magic from above.

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Auteurs and lumiere videos

July 16, 2008

Shawn Van Every forced his students at ITP to read the lumiere manifesto and watch a few of the videos we have collected on the site. A small handful of them have taken their comments to the blogs.

Kacie likes that the barrier to participation is low, but an investment is required of the audience. Matt points out that the lumiere videos often gives a glimpse of everyday life that is overlooked. Stephanie prefers photographs over lumieres, but may give them a shot. Finally, Cameron feels smug and points out some contradictions.

I’m thrilled that the manifesto and the videos are being used in classrooms (Adrian and Michael have done the same), but I must admit a bit disappointed that the ITP students have not made any lumiere videos. It is important to participate to understand the practice. I’ll encourage all Shawn’s students to create at least one lumiere video and submit it. Brittany, I and all the viewers will be happy to watch what you create.

The lumiere project is a reaction. It is meant to challenge people to think differently about how they produce online video. We use the the lumiere rules as a metaphor, by following the same rules as the Lumiere brothers we hope to instill the same humility towards the medium as they must have had.

The lumiere rules work well as a framework as they force you to work with the bare minimums needed to create moving images. Perspective, a camera, a start and an end point are all necessary. Yes, all of those are editorial decisions, but trimming, cutting, special effects are not “merely an extension of that process” as Cameron says. The lumiere rules allows for the filmmaker to choose a paradigm when he or she places the camera and starts recording, but the filmmaker is denied the usual privilege of creating a syntagmatic axis with post-production. That is a massive difference, not a negligible one.

As Cameron suspects audio is removed for almost all submissions because most modern cameras all record sound. We have chosen the lumiere rules as a framework so we must go all the way and remove audio. The pleasant side effect is that the videos become more easily accessible across the globe. A similar case is video compression. Most modern cameras record files that are simply too large to be distributed easily and each video must be compressed for consumption. You can create many special effects by changing your compression settings, but doing so would be going against the spirit of the rules.

Matt uses a Hitchcock reference to describe what role lumiere videos play and he is spot on:

Didn’t Hitchcock say that “movies are like life with the dull parts cut out”? Well, if that’s so, then these are the dull parts — where it takes effort and patience to get something out of it.

As one of the poster children for auteur theorists Hitchcock stands for everything the lumiere manifesto does not. Don’t get me wrong: My favourite movie is Rear Window and I think the guy was a genius, but today’s filmmakers still see themselves as auteurs with a vision they must cram into the innocent heads of their audience. The lumiere manifesto is a reaction to that line of thinking.

You hear talk about “Internet TV” and cinematic theories and concepts are uncritically applied to video online. For once the world wide web gives the viewers a larger role and filmmakers should pay attention to them. We should not be forced to sit in a cinema or in front of our tv, bound by technical restraints and social norms, forced to accept the action as it unfolds in the order and pace the director has deemed perfect (for him - he does not know what is perfect for me). The filmmaker should acknowledge that his audience are composed of intelligent people who create their own interpretations differently from what the filmmaker intended. Communication theory has long ago realized that treating communication as a transmission in which the recipient is little more than an automaton waiting for input is a flawed and inefficient approach. It is sad that filmmakers and would-be filmmakers still think this way. The lumiere project is among other things a risk-free way for filmmakers to try to think their films differently. A chance to play in ways the regular thinking does not allow for.

Enough talk. Here’s a lumiere video. Now you go make one and submit it.

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Water lumieres

March 12, 2008

We have surpassed 600 lumiere videos and to celebrate I have collected a list of all lumiere videos that are focused on water, how it moves, how it reflects light and how it contains fish. Especially in the beginning of the project there were many water lumieres. I know because I created most of them myself. Almost 20% of my lumieres are about water.

Assembling this list made me wish I had added tagging to the lumiere project page to allow each individual video to be tagged. It would have made it much easier to sort through the massive collection.

Here they all are in a more or less random order. Some of these links point directly to quicktime movies—proceed with caution.

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Over 500 lumiere videos collected

December 18, 2007

As I'm writing this I have just added two more lumiere videos to the lumiere project. This brings the total amount of videos up to 523 videos from 78 different participants. The volume of videos is striking and it's not something I expected when Brittany and I began posting these videos back in late May. I'm thrilled and I'm looking forward to the next milestones of 750 and 1,000 videos posted.

I thought I had more time to write the update on video number 500, but Michael has introduced the lumiere videos to art students from Leeds and they posted a great number of them quickly. You can see them at Leeds Vlog where they are posting many videos, not just lumieres. Video collections from courses and classes are always fun to go through just because you get so many different types of videos.

It would be very wrong to talk about the lumiere project with mentioning Sam Rensiew from patalab. This elusive Dane has posted almost 70 lumiere videos and is showing no signs of stopping soon.

One thing I think has helped the success of the lumiere project is that the whole thing is completely de-centralized. We don't host your videos, there's no special upload process. The project page is just a collection of links and you participate by just posting on your own blog. This makes sure each participant is still in full control of his submission (just delete your video if you don't want it anymore) and it also gets the word out because people are posting their videos where they usually post videos. Spreading the word person-by-person has lead to many new people posting lumiere videos - I know that from the people who have e-mailed us. Unlike our mention on BoingBoing in late September which led to very few new videos (but a lot of anonymous visitors who never came back).

If you are a new-comer and interested in participating just follow the "Submit" link on the video collection page to add your video. You need to post it to your blog first though. The rules are simple meaning anyone can record, off-load from their camera and post:

  • 60 seconds max.
  • Fixed camera
  • No audio
  • No zoom
  • No edit
  • No effects

In a public attempt at reflection here are the first two lumiere videos I recorded during a bike ride to the beach this past spring:

  • Rust
  • Crops+Artifacts (challenging the no effects rule by showing the effects of video compression)
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Danish lumieres

October 1, 2007

Last weekend Rasmus Rasmussen interviewed me for his Danish podcast, Blogmagasinet. You can listen to me talk about lumiere videos and the Danish vlogosphere (or lack of same). The interview has inspired a handful of Danish lumiere videos and I know there are more on the way. I'm happy to see that people who don't usually post videos have chosen lumiere videos as their start.

In other happy news we reached 300 lumiere videos this weekend. To celebrate we've redone the video collection page. Now you can browse videos by vlogger and submit videos directly from the site rather than having to e-mail them in. Brittany and I will still moderate submissions to fix broken links and such before your video goes online, but things will be much more smooth in the future.

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250 lumiere videos posted

September 8, 2007

Earlier today lumiere video number 250 was added to the lumiere video project. That video turned out to be a silent destruction of a sofa from Brittany. Over 55 videobloggers so far have participated — and continue to participate! 30 videobloggers have posted more than one lumiere video. I've been floored by the amount of creativity I've seen and I'm looking forward to seeing more lumiere videos in the future. If you haven't made a lumiere video yet now is the time. Tag it lumierevideo and send an e-mail to info@videoblogging.info to get it added to the list.

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Discussing Black & White Lumieres

July 14, 2007

I've been discussing the possibility of black and white lumiere videos with Brittany and Paul. Obviously it's a violation of the No Effects rule if the black and white is done by removing colours from a colour video in post-production. However many digital cameras can record directly to black and white. Should we be using this setting in addition to colour? Paul brought forward this argument which I tend to agree with:

I keep thinking about the camera that the Lumiere bros. created and used to make their films. The entire process was contained in the camera itself. If I understand the process,the film is shoot in negative and printed in positive and then ready for projection, all in camera. With our cameras today as long as the image is captured natively it shouldn't matter whether it is colour, b/w, sepia,negative or whatever. If no changes are made in post production the video should be as close as possible to the Lumiere process.

The Lumiere brothers had no choice, they had to film in black and white. With our modern cameras we have the choice to set colour or not, but colour is most definitely the de facto standard. While the black and white may not break the lumiere rules as they're set out they may well be against the spirit of the rules. On the other hand black and white can look very, very nice and I really want to make some black and white lumieres.

I will be posting any black and white lumiere videos to the project page as long as the black and white was done in-camera and not in post-production. I have been posting lots of other videos that bend to rules such as using title cards or bumpers (no editing, remember). After all, the important thing is that the creator use the rules to re-think how he sees his videos (and his world).

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Lumiere Rules

May 23, 2007

Note: Brittany and I have written a manifesto based on our experiences with these rules. We are also collecting lumiere videos at http://videoblogging.info/lumiere. Please link to one of those pages rather than this blogpost if you are writing about lumiere videos.

The rules are as follows:

  • 60 seconds max.
  • Fixed camera
  • No audio
  • No zoom
  • No edit
  • No effects

Aske Dam, a good friend, told me about these rules last summer when we were attached to the same research project. They mimic the conditions under which the Lumiere brothers made their movies in the late 1800s. All transfer seamlessly to web-video and videoblogs except the last one. On the web we are used to compress our videos because the raw files from our cameras are too big to be practical. But is the compression not an added effect? You can certainly tweak the compression settings to provide results that differ tremendously from the raw camera files.

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