Section 3: Learning Cameras

I learned to use video cameras in the places of my domesticity. Because this learning largely coincided with my 20s, those places were in a slow state of flux in both literal and affective sense. I moved between houses in Oakland while I was a student at UC Berkeley, I moved between apartments in Los Angeles. I lived with roommates, friends, siblings, a partner, alone then with my spouse and our pets. Along the way I learned a succession of cameras that reflected the industrial evolution of the market from standard to high definition. Home was the easiest place to start learning a new camera because the environment could be quiet and controlled and I could take my time. I learned what each camera could do, how it rendered light and motion in ways that were similar or different from the other generations. I could use it in my own way, but I was still receiving and adopting a set of tools shaped by forces larger than myself and people I would never meet. As I looked for myself in the images I made, seeing how I spent my time and where I carried out the mundane tasks of living, I learned to be alone and I learned how I wanted to live. I also learned that I was like the camera, an independent body capable of novel action, but inextricably linked to all the flows of all the world.

This section is made up of two parts of the larger work, parts three and four, that mirror themselves. I didn’t design or plan them that way, and reflecting on them now it is part four that seems the apt beginning. In fact, I made part four as a standalone piece before I dove properly into this work of archive touring. I made it as a test, my first time authoring video for the IMAX screen at USC. I had already been shooting 4K video for about a year on the Panasonic GH4 micro four thirds mirrorless camera system. I had taken it on my honeymoon to Nicaragua and made it my main camera on One More Shot, replacing the Panasonic AF100 HD camera that I had been using. But I didn’t know what it’s images would look like on a giant screen. On my computer screen and the few other classroom size projection setups on which I had edited and screened footage from the camera, I liked the detailed presence of the 4K image. I also liked how small the camera was, making it easy to pack and carry. The smallness was a tradeoff though that came with the cost of feathery handheld shots. The sharpness of the image made some of my favorite Nokton lenses unusable for the sense of fuzziness they imparted at anything lower than f2.8, which was precisely the point at which the lenses became most useful and aesthetically pleasing when paired with the HD resolution of the AF100.

I knew the IMAX screen would be different. It would be unforgiving in its magnification of every aspect of the image. That it would change the sense of resolution and scale, that framing and pacing and timing would be as important as the technical, objective qualities of the image as produced by the camera lenses, sensor and encoding. So I took the GH4 and shot around my house and my neighborhood, my office, my campus, my commute and my friends. I also wanted to see a mix of sources on the giant screen, so I made screen captures from my computer and pulled up MiniDV footage from my 2002 trip to Europe with my brother and my cousin.

The MiniDV footage became the cord connecting these two parts of the larger work. The haphazard resonance of the content that bled into the structure that bled into the way I live in the world of today and 15 years ago. My home is bigger now and more full of life. The cameras capture more detail and hold up to the scrutiny of a screen more giant than I ever thought I’d use to project my thoughts. But the concerns are the same; the search for the quiet moments, the intrusion of violence, the power structures underlying the various systems of image making and distribution.

In Part 3 I pulled MiniDV tapes out mostly at random. They’d been in boxes in my office and I wanted to digitize as many as I could. I found some from the fall of 2001. I had remembered the trees from my porch and the rally in Berkeley, but not the conversations, not the direct address to the camera, and not the heavy news cameras on their tripods. In Part 4 I had fresh memories of the radio reports of the Paris shootings but no memory of the news reports from 2002 on the TV in the hostel room or the big 35mm camera setup outside the Sacre Coeur filming something I won’t ever know.

When I was making video in Berkeley I used a Canon GL1 MiniDV camcorder. It was the first video camera I ever bought. It’s body was a little bigger and longer than most consumer camcorders at the time, it had a top handle and a focus ring as well as other features that let you easily control the image. It was a camera aimed squarely at the growing ‘prosumer’ market, a little sibling of the larger XL1 that sported interchangeable lenses and an XLR module for audio inputs. The XL1 was much closer to the professional video market. The GL1 was perfect for a student with creative ambitions and my particular circumstances as a student at UC Berkeley were conducive to a self guided education in the craft of video making.

I had changed majors from English to Film Studies and was immersed in coursework dedicated to film history and theory. There was no practical component to this work and I felt a need to add one for myself, to see how suture theory held up when I was the ones making the cuts for myself. Already at that time there was a kind of internal identity crisis of the technology in that the GL1 offered proto-features that made the video look a little bit more like film. There was a ‘frame’ mode that got as close to the look of a progressive scan as possible without actually being equipped with imagine chips able to do so. There was also a 16:9 ‘stretch’ mode that threw away image information from the top and bottom of the sensors in order to create a widescreen frame. This combination of feature could result in video that was more easily viewed as ‘narrative’ or ‘filmic’ but it came at the sacrifice of raw data, visual information, smooth motion.

I went back and forth between the two myself. Personally, objectively I liked to keep the images as technically robust as possible, but there was something alluring about the look and feel of the filmy effects and I did employ them most consistently when working on discrete specific projects that I knew would have an audience. They made the video more accessible as a cultural or social object separate from me as an individual, digestible onscreen, distant enough not to feel like a home-movie view into one person’s life.

I kept shooting 4:3 interlaced video for myself and in quantities and durations I couldn’t totally justify or explain. Just letting the camera roll on the trees on the clouds on my friends and myself. Tape was cheap enough and spooled in length enough to let conversations flow across it without hurry. Introducing a video camera into social settings was a remarkable event, it required at least a word or two about why I liked to shoot with it, how I was learning to use it, that I didn’t have any plans for the footage except to make it, but then it mostly faded away, leaving only a framework for a slightly more self-conscious performance of self. It made us more deliberate in our demonstration of thought, the articulation of how we were learning to think and be ourselves. Listening to each other to understand what it was like to be someone else, to come from somewhere else.

I kept each tape, I never recorded over them. I have an archive now of that phase of my youth. I began it before Facebook or YouTube existed and I’m grateful that it grew at a time where the space it took up in my life was almost completely private, where viewing and sharing was laborious and selective and there wasn’t a built in market replete with generic conventions and aesthetic values waiting at the periphery to shape my view.

The tools continued to develop and progress continued to be marked by the degrees to which video could be made to look like film. I supplemented my experiential learning with everything that I could read in online forums peopled with video enthusiasts especially invested in the social identity of video, proponents of alternative terms like ‘digital cinema.’ The power of those online communities pushed the changing landscape of the tools.

Panasonic introduced the prosumer DVX100 that was the first to be capable of a true progressive 24fps video stream embedded within a standard 60i stream but retrievable through a pulldown frame removal process in Final Cut Pro, essentially mimicking a reverse telecine. Then the Panasonic HVX200 brought high definition disc based recording to the prosumer market via expensive proprietary recording media that severely limited record times. These were still 3-chip CCD cameras. Canon pushed the market into single chip still camera video recording with the 5D Mark II. It made a messy video camera but could produce a beautiful look. I was skeptical of the change, but the market forces were inevitable. The Panasonic AF100 was the first single chip video camera I used, but it was still very much a video camera in body and soul. It created great HD images and was capable of very long record times on cheap and accessible SD cards. Finally the cult of resolution brought me to the GH4, a Panasonic camera that was very much a stills machine first and a video maker second. But one that offered so much information in the video stream that I had to see it for myself.

The GH4 trades-off in its compression. The resolution of the 4K video is great, but its color space is limited and its bitrate is low. If you accept it as it is straight out of the camera and keep it at a true 24 frames per second, you get a beautiful video stream at 4096x2048. But you won’t be able to push it or pull it or grade it very much. I don’t mind that much, the built in color profiles are fairly natural looking and that’s mostly what I want. And the native video that comes off the card fits beautifully on the IMAX screen.

The camera gave me the idea to author for a giant space and that idea made me open my archive and look at it again. That’s how I came to see the giant canvas for its potential for this reflection and projection. To find the footage that reminded me how important it is to find your own way to use the tools and your own way to see, understand and frame the world for yourself.