making BLUE MOON

My video poem BLUE MOON, has generated quite some interest in how it was made.

The underlying sequence of buildings panning along to a beachscape is actually a single still image that I built in Photoshop. It is constructed from about 100 images of buildings around the Adelaide CBD, North Haven, and Brighton. They were photographed on days with bright sunshine and clear blue skies so that the lighting was comparable across the shots. Even so, I needed to adjust colour, brightness, saturation, scale, perspective and so on to get the visual mix right. The blue skies also allowed for easier compositing later on. In the final mix, the background sky was processed to be the same in all assemblies and was derived from the average sky colour in the images. The final Photoshop file is huge: 62,000 x 1800 pixels and about 500 MB. It was assembled from 5 smaller montages, each of which was from a specific location, and each of which contained dozens of layers.

I then took the final composite image into Final Cut Pro X and animated the pan from one end to the other. To save memory, I rendered it, and used the … Click here for more.

Water Under the Bridge: a collaborative soundscape installation

 

BRIDGE is a large collaborative exhibition held in The Packing Shed, Hart’s Mill in Port Adelaide as part of the 2018 Adelaide Fringe Festival art program. I was invited to contribute a soundscape to the installation Water Under the Bridge, by exhibition curator,  Tony Kearney.

The work is installed in massive disused steel silo, which has extraordinary echo and reverb characteristics. My soundscape is built from sounds recorded at the nearby Birkenhead Bridge. The order of the sounds in the piece roughly follows the crossing of the bridge from one side to the other.

 

Click here to read more about RUST SALT TAR, a long term collaborative art project based in the Port Adelaide area.

… and here to see some images of the works.

 

A total eclipse of the moon…

A total eclipse of the moon, a blue moon, the second full moon in a month, a super moon, about as close as it ever gets to earth. Filmed from our front yard in Belair, South Australia, accompanied by our frogs (Crinia signifera) and a neighbour’s dog. The apparent movement of the moon is due to the rotation of the earth, here sped up by a factor of 3.

Lunar Eclipse, 31st January, 2018 from Ian Gibbins on Vimeo.

heist: what’s going on here?

My video-poem heist was shown recently at the 6th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens and has attracted quite a bit of interest… but what’s going on here? It’s not really a narrative, at least not in the traditional sense, but it’s got something to do with banks and code and presumably illegal activities linking the two.

The video’s subtitle, RAID IV, that appears in the credits, is a key clue. A RAID array is way of setting up computer hard drives so that data are written simultaneously to more than one drive, providing a secure form of back-up in the case of disk failure. Hence Drives C, D and E should have copies of the same files, if they are working properly and if they have not been corrupted. V drive is usually the networked virtual drive that mirrors the others and is used to access the array.

So, then, what if there were a bank raid being planned? Or maybe being thought about, a bit of wishful thinking? Or maybe it did happen and the perpetrators more or less got away with it? Or perhaps you were trying to tell someone about a crime movie you saw … Click here for more.