Phase Shift

Micro Projects

2010-01-20T21:16:00.002Z

Beginning to rework the material presented via Twitter over Christmas and New Year, which will be shown as part of the What If? Festival in Brighton and London in March and April. Wisp - shown below - is one of five micro-works to be installed at the Siobhan Davies Studios as part of a programme co-curated with Lucy Cash; Gill Clarke; Becky Edmunds and Claudia Kappenberg.

In addition, Binary Form was MiShorts Film of the Month in November ’09, and has been shortlisted for the ‘Film of the Festival’ prize at 700is, Iceland in March.

Twitter Video Project

2009-12-13T13:22:00.003Z

The final element of the Phase Shift project begins today - five micro-pieces delivered over the next twenty-three days via twitter. Four of the pieces use footage originally filmed for Memory Pool, but the final piece - Improv 1 - uses footage filmed at Chisenhale in August, and is shown here in its entirety, rather than as a series of six tweets, as a sneak preview.

Improv 2

2009-11-22T19:40:00.003Z

Having created all of the micro-works for the Twitter Video Project, footage from one of the improvisations filmed at at Chisenhale in August shaped itself into a one-minute piece - too long for a tweet, but standard length for a Shiftwork piece.

Threshold filter was applied after editing, and I like the way that the shadow - against Chisenhale’s distinctive brick back wall - appears to continue the movement sequence while the performer is off-screen.

Improv 2 from shiftwork on Vimeo.

Phrasemaking stills

2009-11-14T14:39:00.002Z

A stage in the process of creating Phrasemaking, earlier this year. The finished piece uses different text, but inverting the brightness values resulted in some interesting stills.

L.E.D.

2009-10-29T19:12:00.002Z

Completed over six days of edit, the first Shiftwork piece filmed in HD uses minimal technical intervention, and relies on the rhythms of the original improvised footage. The ankle-attached lights proved to be too distracting, and were masked, leaving only the finger-mounted light source.

L.E.D. from shiftwork on Vimeo.

Screenings and spectatorship 3/ New Work

2009-10-25T18:06:00.004Z

Over the last six months, Binary Form and Vector Paths have been showing in partnership at screendance festivals including Dance:Film09 in Edinburgh; Il Coregrafo Elettronico, Naples and Xontakt in Split. Binary Form has also been shown at non-dance events - Derapage in Montreal, Abandon Normal Devices in Liverpool, Oblo Film Festival in Lausanne and Cream in Yokohama, as well as dance-identified festivals Danca em Foco, Brazil; EDIT in Budapest and FRAME Research in Portugal. The new Phase Shift material has also been seen at DanceDigital’s symposium in Chelmsford in May, and in a research context at the University of Chichester in October.

Text Field, created in 2002, is still going strong on the festival circuit, programmed this summer by Andy Wood for Cinemoves in Wakefield in June, and by Doug Fox for DFA’s Dance and Animation programme in Hong Kong in August, at Shnit Short Film Festival in Berne and Cologne in October, and Video Vortex, as part of Cimatics in Brussels in November.

A new round of submissions for festivals in 2010 are ongoing, with editing on a new piece underway. Footage filmed at Chisenhale in August is being whittled down to a series of short, rhythmic movement sequences, with experimentation on visual manipulation scheduled in as a series of overnight renders, with the image below using the software program Motion in a development of a tracking technique first used in Trace in 2005.

Chisenhale Footage 2

2009-10-11T18:43:00.004+01:00

Initial viewing of footage and selection of stills feels like the start of a lengthy process involving further stages of edit, addition of effects and sound.

A nine-day intensive work period at the end of October should allow time to get back into the editing groove.

Filmed in HD

Lit by finger and ankle-attached L.E.D.s

Chisenhale Footage

2009-09-23T15:25:00.003+01:00

After a long break, filming again - and with a variety of cameras - at Chisenhale Dance Space in London during August, with editing time scheduled for late October.

Filming of movement in HD

Filming while moving with flip and mobile phone cameras

Snowglobe

2009-03-27T15:35:00.004Z

Using footage originally shot at Trent Park in March 2005, with a snow-effect created using a particle emitter in Motion.
(With new work still being created, Phase Shift pieces continue to be screened. Within a research context, the new work has been shown in seminars at Surrey and Middlesex Universities, with Vector Paths showing as part of Agite Y Sirva in Mexico in April, and Binary Form shown at Synthetic Zero in New York in March.)

Screenings and Spectatorship 2

2009-02-28T19:08:00.002Z

With the project begun in July of 2008, there is a sense of a 'mid-way point' being reached, with a variety of pieces currently in development, while others are completed and are now being shown.

Out in the world, Binary Form had its first public screening at Lateral Movement, an experimental programme shown in February as part of the Adelaide Film Festival, and Vector Paths has another screening within the global circuit of screendance festivals at Sans Souci in Boulder, Colorado, during March. Both Vector Paths and Zoetropic are being shown within a gallery context as part of Screendance at the Park in Falkirk during April and May. Meanwhile, within an online context, Binary Form and Frame Rate are accessible on Vimeo, and Zoetropic is featured on Doug Fox's Kinetic interface blog.

Phase Shift Showreel - Work-in-progress

2009-02-28T18:48:00.002Z

This was created earlier in the week as part of a residency application, but is seemed suited to a blog entry of its own. A more developed showreel will be created later in the year, when further pieces are made and added, but this seems like a good beginning to the process.

Phrase-making

2009-01-25T19:34:00.004Z

So far, Phase Shift has relied on recycled footage, mainly from the Memory Pool project, with movement material from Breaking The Frame featuring in several different works. This piece takes the whole of Breaking the Frame, using the original edit and sound content, and has added a layer of text, distorted by a displacement map, with the background removed by a luminence key.
As a result, the piece explores the creative base-line common to the processes of movement improvisation, writing and editing.

Fragmentary

2009-01-25T19:23:00.003Z

This piece uses material originally from Kinetic Empathy, with the movement sequences pared down to explore how minimal the motion content can become. Gaussian Noise was added to the footage, simulating a distressed film grain effect, and viewers can shift between a linear viewing loop and a non-linear, randomised version.

Spectatorship

2009-01-25T18:59:00.002Z

The distinctive nature of online viewing has been a particular Shiftwork area of interest, and the website - active since 1999 - has allowed viewing figures for individual pieces to build over time. Traffic is drawn particularly from the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany and Norway, with a surprisingly high proportion of viewers spending over thirty minutes to an hour or more on the site. Many returning visitors are fellow screendance and filmmakers, with RSS feeds allowing new work to be viewed soon after posting.

Frequency Response

2009-01-25T18:46:00.003Z

The piece is a realisation of a Shiftwork idea dating back to 2002, and uses footage originally from Evanescent. Assembled in Flash, short sequences of movement are positioned and scaled randomly on a vertical axis, while the end-user horizontally controls the view-port.

Vector Paths Screenings

2009-01-04T18:59:00.004Z

Since completion in July '08, Vector Paths is beginning to be shown, with screenings at Frame in Portugal in November, and at Dance for Camera in Brighton in December. In the new year, the piece is included as part of Crossbreeds in Vienna, Le Festival International de Vidéo Danse du Breuil in Burgundy and Dance and Media Japan's International Videodance Festival, Tokyo.

It's an interesting part of an unfolding process to see work made at the start of the project begin to be shown, as new pieces are completed and sent out, with ideas for future work still in various stages of realisation and development.

Binary Form

2009-01-04T18:07:00.005Z

The piece uses short sequences of improvised movement, recycled from Breaking the Frame, and translated into binary form, with each frame animated using sequence replicators within the programme Motion.

Currently being sent out to festivals for 2009, the piece is an obvious development on from Text Field, and makes use of the construction of image as an integral element of the work, and contrasts the regimentation of rows of zeros and slashes with the incrementally-revealed fluidity of the movement style.

Frame Rate

2008-11-16T18:15:00.005Z

Using footage filmed at Trent Park in July 2005, the work comprises six short fragments from a single improvised movement sequence, arranged in two-second increments and selected randomly by scripting.The number column at the image edge corresponds to the randomly chosen start frame of each two second segment.

A linear version of the piece - viewable on Vimeo - is accompanied by a non-linear counterpart, where the viewer can modify frame rate by means of a slider.

Frame Rate from shiftwork on Vimeo.

Zoetropic

2008-08-24T14:27:00.005+01:00

A development of techniques used in the Memory Pool research project, extending the parameters first explored in Zoetrope into the realm of end user control, and using footage from Breaking The Frame, which was filmed in Cambridge in November 2004.

Mainly Spam 1 - 3

2008-07-20T18:36:00.007+01:00

This trilogy continues a fascination with the interrelationship of aural and visual, and the rhythmically-governed appearance of visual material which is traceable to pieces including Text Field and Splice. The texts are taken from authentic spam collected over the Christmas and New Year period 2007/8.

Vector Paths

2008-07-20T13:06:00.006+01:00

Created in July 2008 using footage filmed at Middlesex University's Trent Park campus in March 2005, as part of the Memory Pool research project, and initially used for the piece Trace. A single sequence of improvised movement was translated into Vector Paths using the application Motion, with the original sequence manipulated to appear three times, in differing directions and speeds. The particular and distinctive visual patterning was uncovered by accident while exploring a motion blur filter. The resulting output shows the filter's calculation process in action in what is effectively a diagnostic mode, not intended for visual display.

The piece has not yet been screened anywhere, and is currently in the process of being sent out for inclusion in festivals during Autumn/Winter '08.

Created for Rebecca Feiner's ongoing Fictitious Exhibitions series in London in March 2008, the piece reduces the journey by road from Oxford to St. Matthew's Gardens, Cambridge to a time frame of one minute. The piece was created by inputting the start and endpoints into Google Earth, with the journey recorded using screen capture software, and the resulting video altered in speed using Final Cut Pro.

Text Field

2008-07-20T11:34:00.011+01:00

Text Field is a zero-budget piece, created as one of the first Shiftwork projects in 2002, using footage filmed in November 2001 at The Robinson Studio Theatre, Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge. The footage was then translated into an ascii-based animation using the program Pict2ascii, and was structured as a single continuous sequence in order to qualify for inclusion in Dance On Screen's One Minute Wander strand. The piece was not accepted for screening for the 2002 festival, but from 2003 onwards, it has been shown at a wide variety of events worldwide.

In Britain, Steve Hill first programmed Text Field as part of the sadly no longer operational Northern Exposure festival in London, and it received its first international screening as part of Videodance'03 in Athens. Since then, the genre-crossing nature of the work means that it has been included in a wide variety of screendance festivals, animation, digital arts and Flash-related events, and was included in the Pocket Cinema mobile phone strand of the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival.

During summer 2008, Text Field has been included in London-based Renderyard Film Festival's One Minute Film Challenge; Lumen Eclipse's typography programme showing on a public screen in Cambridge, Massachusetts; LACDA's Digitalart.LA exhibition and the Microcinema-curated Virgin Mobile Festival in Baltimore.

Full screening history can be accessed here.