Being On Location :
The beginnings of
'Geo-Cinema' and 'Place Code'
All types of cinema now use a moving camera as major element of a palette, all used and designed to make a powerful experience for the viewer . This is used along with other cinematic devices such as editing and framing and sound.
But camera movement and camera positions have become a major part of filmmaking. From the early development of the language of cinema stemming from early 20th century film makers such as DW Griffith, who practically invented moving the camera, to the use of handheld camera by the French New Wave, we expect the camera to move when we watch cinema. The invention of the motion control camera,computerirsed movement, the use of steadycam have added to the diversity we now expect from moving camera in cinema.
Some structuralist filmmakers even became interested in the movement of the camera for its own sake, e.g. weather vanes attached to cameras on tripods, with the camera blowing in different directions only forced by natural elements rather than the filmmakers own hand. [ref: Chris Welsby - "Wind Vane" 1972]
With the advent of the current and future mobile devices, which often have movie cameras as a basic component within their structure, the idea of "hand held" camera and a "moving" camera are completely embedded in the concept of all portable camera communication devices.
With the advent of location aware devices, one logical step is to begin to understand what you are seeing, filming and recording, and exactly where you were when the image was recorded. The *exact* place where you filmed something, with the ability to return to the same place with pinpoint accuracy.
The possibility is to get more information embedded in your moving image other than what you are seeing. If we can send a picture of a place, why wouldn't we want someone else to find exactly the same spot? The same angle? The same longitude and latitude? The same Place.
the future?...recording everything all the time. We can decide what we keep and what we eliminate, maybe via filters, tags and interests. We revisit locations and become geocine bloggers.
This project has made a fusion of a global positioning system and a recorded moving camera video image.
Any image or sequence recorded creates a simultaneous and parallel record of the exact GPS location where it was shot, which is fixed on the screen. Like the Time Code, which fixes us to Hours, Minutes, Seconds and Frames we are approaching the era of Place Code - a Longitude, Latitude reference to fuse into the mix of information about our recorded image. This is an intriguing and fascinating prospect.
Although this might currently appear as a marginal innovation, it does in fact begin to change how we view the material we see and record. With an option to "Place Code" our recorded images, the notion of "being on location" is about to be transformed with the advent of a "Geo-Cinema".
Geo-Cinema is the new cinema of commuting, variable and ebbeded in motion, locations, and fluidity.
Pete Gomes
© 2004
technology/ team/ developments/movie
Ref: Karosta episode one
The film "Karosta -Part One" was made during the frst Locative Media workshop in Lativa, in 2003.
The entire film narrative was based on a fusion of real locations and real coordinates with fictional future scenario of how they might be used as navigation, and relate to memory, the unconscious and dreaming.
Prior to the casting and sourcing of locations for the film, in and around Karosta, Andrew Patterson and myself made a series of blue-tooth experiments, playing short range picture messaging with Vova , who ultimately became the lead actor in the film.
The extension of the renga-technology concepts will be explored' as part of ISEA in 2004, in Helsinki
These original bluetooth games using the principles of haiku poetry rule sets and the methodologies of its early group form "Renga", I think of as early geo cinema experiments.
All this work is collated in a short documentary about the Lativa locative workshop and fuses interviews with participants and documentary material shot on the set of the film.