A Walk Around The Block

The Video Posted is a project that I did along with the help of John Tankard and Jessica Marquardt  while studying in Paris France from 2008-2009. The video is a walk through of the streets of Paris around the neighborhoods that shoot off from the Bastille. Accompanying the walk is music by a local group of metro performers, whom I unfortunately cant recall the name of, The Doors, and AIR. The video is demonstrating the different psycho-geographic feels that all these adjacent streets give off all branching from the same intersection and all residing in different neighborhoods of Paris. One could also muse about the different kind of influence the city had on the different musicians accompanying the video as well.

There is actually one more street walk that was shot for the project but it never made it into the turned in project due to time restraints and lack of computing power.

Cinema Urbanity and Technology- Project 4

So, this is Justin's, Jessica's and my video project for class with Tristan. The concept of the class is "mobile cinema" which refers to the ability to have portable video. Specifically, we used iPhones because of their GPS and internet functions. This project is filmed in Bastille at the main circle. The concept was for a user to be standing at the center of the circle in Bastille and be able to look at one of the streets that is on the intersection and be able to see what is down the street and around the block without actually having to go there. This would help the user to decide which direction to go from the circle, based on what was interesting to them. So the user would be able to scroll through the panoramic photograph that you see before and between the clips. We used three frames in the movie to give a superhuman view, so that the area can be understood in a larger way. Eventually we want to make a device that can hold the cameras at certain angles, because we filmed it by walking beside each other with the cameras at their particular angles, forwards and BACKWARDS down the streets of Paris. We originally did this process for 3 streets off of Bastille that each went to different Arrondisements, and we found that there was a completely different atmosphere in each of the directions. In the interest of time [in editing] we only have two iterations: North, into the 11th Arrondisements, and Southeast around the Opera in the 12th.

Posted by John Tankard on Saturday, January 10, 2009