fields

QR Video Projects

Updating on some projects that a few of us completed last year during the Edinburgh Film Festival and part of the New Media Scotland Atmosphere series.

Atmosphere is one of the research programmes at Inspace, the digital laboratory of New Media Scotland and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. First premiered at the 2010 Edinburgh International Film Festival, it re-imagines the concept of Atmospheric movie theaters from the 1920s and 30s.

Each expanded screening uses new and unexpected forms of video and audio projection technology, multi-sensory interactives and live elements.

fields and colleagues presented three pieces to accompany the following films: Moon, Mon Oncle and A Matter of Life and Death.

Co-Cinema / Mon Oncle

Sunday 27th June 2010

Co-Cinema by Duncan Shingleton is a ten minute interactive movie experience that involves three sequences from Jacques Tati films – ‘Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot’, ‘Mon Oncle’ and ‘Playtime’.

The cinema screen was cut up into 40 pieces, each piece corresponding to a seat in the audience. Each person sitting in the audience could  ‘flip’ their movie segment to one of three different film sequences by scanning one of three QR codes that were located next to their seat with their smartphone.

The experience began with one cohesive image, but as members of the audience ‘flipped’ their own parts, it became broken up as 40 people tried to watch three movies all at once.

Paper Zappers: cards with printed QR codes functioned as the buttons for changing the cinema channel.

Snapshot / A Matter of Life and Death

Saturday 26th June 2010

Snapshot by Gianni Corino, Jochen Ehnes, Chris Speed was a ten minute, live cinematic experiment in which the public experienced the creation of a memory map made of props extracted from the movie “A matter of Life and Death”

The project used a steerable projector installed in Inspace to visually extract symbolic and iconic props that could be found within the movie, and place them in a different space: a cognitive landscape.

For this event the artists used a symbolically rich part of the movie: the beach scene. The scene, that is toward the beginning of the movie, is loaded with objects and props that contribute to a sense of uncertainty about where the protagonist is located, heaven or earth.

Collecting and replacing the props into a synchronous landscape created a memory or cognitive map offering the audience a point of reflection as they considered the larger narratives present in the film.