Now that I’ve decided what to do for my Creative Pact this year, I figured the starting point was to review the bits I have and consider how to proceed. Of the three pieces I have, I’m not terribly happy with the first and I think I might redo that one later on. The other two I think work.

Shortly after handing in my project, I started work on creating some source video material. The first one I have was produced from a number of photographs of handmade paper in front of a window. I had been thinking that something abstract might be a good starting point, allowing for the Max/MSP improvisation part to inject more detail. This is the original video:

However, after a little while I began to think it was too busy and should be simplified, so I created a different version of it – same thing, but slower-paced.

I really feel quite at sea with this piece. With the audio-only ones, I was quite comfortable even though I didn’t know what the result would be, but with this I really do feel like I’m starting from scratch.

I went back over some of the early Jitter tutorials tonight and it’s starting to make sense, although looking quite daunting and complicated. But I’ve managed to do some super-basic things tonight, like load up a video and play it, both within the patch and in an external window, change the playback speed and direction. It’s not much, but it’s made me really think about my source material and I think the abstract idea isn’t really going to work. I think it might need something a bit more… natural than the static photo idea. But then the question is, of course, WHAT? What will then fit in with the general concept of the piece?