Europe Trip 2002
In the summer of 2002 my brother Sebastian and I took a quintessential backpacking trip through Europe. I had just graduated college and he had just graduated high school. Our cousin Andrea joined up with us about halfway through the trip.
Along the way, I shot a little over 27 hours of video footage on MiniDV tapes. I can still remember which pockets of my backpack were dedicated to storing tapes.
Along the way, I shot a little over 27 hours of video footage on MiniDV tapes. I can still remember which pockets of my backpack were dedicated to storing tapes.
I wanted to include this archive of footage as an example of living through video for several reasons. Although I shot a great deal of video during college in the context of my daily social and academic life, this trip presents a neatly bounded experience with a distinct catalog of recorded material.
The tapes have mostly sat in storage. I did make copies onto VHS at one point for Andrea, but I didn't review them as I made the transfers. For many years, it was prohibitive to transfer all the material to disc based media due to the cost of storage. Each of the 27 tapes represents about 13 gigabytes of data.
Now, in the context of creating this project, the material represents a useful case for me to explore the questions of living through video. How do our memories and experiences interact with the mediated image? I know that the experience of the trip was a formative and important transition moment in my life; helping to mark the end of one period and the beginning of another (moving to LA and starting graduate film school) and that my experience and my borther's intersected and intertwined through the interface of this trip. I also know that the act of making the 27 videos was an important thread of that experience in and of itself - it influenced how I saw the world around me, how I moved, where I looked, how I interacted with the people around me, be they my relatives or the people we met along the way.
When I made the tapes, it was simply out of a desire to document the experience and an enjoyment of working with a camera. I was used to making videos and to using the camera socially. This moment just barely pre-dated the popular explosion of social media, and the idea of instantaneous sharing of personal photos and videos was a long way off. I didn't have an expectation of sharing these videos with my friends and family. At least not in an immediate sense.
But knowing that the records would exist was satisfying. Knowing that these traces would give me a way of returning to moments and places opened up a different dimension of the experience. There was the present tense life and adventure, and the camera had a role within it, but it also carved out a future that I'm only just arriving at today.
Over the past several months, I've slowly and sporadically ingested each of the MiniDV tapes onto disc based media. I had to dig up a working DVCAM deck and get it communicating with my computer. I had to revisit a workflow I hadn't used in a long time and it took some time to get it going properly. Even with new, larger storage devices, I was concerned about the massing data, so experimented with transcoding the DV files into h264 once they were on my computer. Eventually I decided both to transcode and keep the full resolution files. I was afraid that the tapes would have deteriorated but found them to be robust. I saw some dropout frames and time code breaks, but all in all, the transfer was painless.
Each tape had to transfer in real time, usually while I was working on other tasks seated at my office desk in the Media Arts + Practice suite at USC. The DVCAM deck gave out after a while and I resorted to using an HDV Video camera as a deck. Both devices have view screens, and I would occasionally glance at them during the process. In a way, I relived in 1-to-1 parity the time of the recordings; playing out traces of an old life in the midst of my contemporary day to day. And I would scrub through each file to make sure that it was in sync and in tact. And even in these brief glimpses, moments would jump out with the force of memory.
Some moments I have always remembered clearly and was looking forward to revisiting on tape, knowing that I had captured them. Some moments I had completely forgotten, but when I saw them there on the screen they came flooding back in total recall. Many moments I have no memory of at all, even as I see them playing out. And at least one moment I've come across so far, startled me because the event itself has always been a clear memory, even a story I share or reminisce over with my brother, but I had had no memory that it was caught on tape; that, somehow, had given the memory a different feel, and confronting and comparing the two, my memory and the recording, was an interesting experience of almost a divided or multiplied perspective of self.
So what do you do with 27 hours of home made travel footage? How do you view and access it? What is there to get out of it? That's what I'm setting out to explore in this thread - to create and then experience the archive and reflect on that experience within the Scalar platform.
My first thought was to upload everything to Archive.org. Philosophically, this seemed like the right way to approach the project. I prefer to have it stored on servers that are meant to last, to preserve knowledge and experience, and that are not simply there to derive profit. Practically, archive.org presents benefits and challenges. It allows you to upload large, long files. It preserves the source files and makes them accessible to anyone; most video sites make this hard or impossible to do, wanting only to stream transcoded derivatives of your footage. I also very much like the thumbnail gallery view that the site creates, linked to each minute of your file.
But YouTube has advantages too. They used to be restrictive of size and length, but have recently become much more expansive, allowing uploads of 128gb and 11hrs. I don't especially like the commercial nature of the site, but what it does, it does very well, and you are mostly able to control the way your work looks, especially when embedded outside of the YouTube environment. One thing I do not like is that YouTube's content algorithms identified copyrighted music in several of my files, impeding what I can do with them and the control I have over ads displayed on top of them. Each instance was simply of a song playing in the background of some shot. I was honestly kind of amazed that it was able to find such small snatches. I plan to dispute the claims and to argue a fair use rationale.
Ultimately, I chose YouTube because of the video player itself. In YouTube, you are able to change the playback speed under settings, slowing down or speeding up the video. I find this level of control extremely useful and encourage users to try it, especially for scanning through these long videos, which can be productive at double speed. Or taking moments of shakiness or brevity and extending them, smoothing them and exploring them at quarter or half speed. I also very much appreciate the scrubbing in YouTube videos; that you can drag the playhead and see thumbnail previews as you go.
This is what I'm doing now. I won't watch all 27 hours in real time at normal speed. But I will experience each tape of the archive. Looking for places, memories and moments, and I will annotate, curate and reflect on how this set of video experiences enriches and informs the concept of the video method.
