Streaming Video

The second series - Streaming Video - was also shot in the Canadian Rockies. The two videos produced in this series contain the same set of thirty shots. The shorter version, Streaming Video 1, is conceived as a “foreground” experience that supports continued attention. It is designed for audience screenings as an art video, suitable for festival exhibition, and has its own accompanying music track. Streaming Video 2 is longer, slower-paced, and silent. This version is designed to be a true ambient piece, a “video painting” for the home or gallery. In each of these Streaming Video works, the water gradually grows in scale, power and speed from gentle streams, to turbulent rapids, to a large and impressive waterfall. Time is again explored as a creative variable. These works were shot with fast shutter speeds and then rendered in subtle slow-motion in post-production, giving them a visual grace and elegance.

The major creative breakthrough of the Streaming Video series is a deep exploration of the layered transition technique begun in Rockface. There are no hard cuts in any of the thirty shots that make up the Streaming Video films. The approach to ambience in these works utilizes multiple layers and complex transitions to support a sense of constant but subtle change from shot to shot. This is a major creative shift in the fundamentals of traditional film and video construction, which relies on the use of the discrete shot as the basic building block of visual sequencing. In Streaming Video, each shot is fragmented into visual zones, and the transition from one shot to the next happens in stages determined by the graphic and motion components of each composition. This engenders a constant state of transition, as pictorial components layer, wipe, and fade in an unending series of changes. At any given time, the image on the screen is a seamless shifting collage, consisting of parts of two or more camera shots. The effect is one of visual flow, metamorphosis, and an overall sense of "magic realism".

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