After further colour experiements I have discovered that it would be better if I render my hand animations from flash with alpha channel then I can do more controlled colour manipulations in AFX. BUT! Quicktime 7 doesn’t support alpha channel from Flash and Mac OS Tiger won’t let you install an earlier QT version. BORING.
But I have solved it by exporting a PNG picture sequence from Flash which supports alpha channel. But this is a drag as it isn’t a supported format of FCP where I have been trimming my clips.

I like having the hands as white lines on a solid dark color.
I will do a test with a projector to test how these colours look in situe.
Changing the colour with each gesture is too distracting from the original gesture. I will show an example of this in my presentation.

I have chronic RSI from rotoscoping. It takes me an hour to do a second. Longer for a two handed frame. My friend Luci suggested paying someone to do some of it for me. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I am aware that plenty of artists employ people to assist them, and always have done. Especially now in the field of digital arts. An artist wants to make some video art but might need someone to stabilize their badly shot footage or make them a DVD for the exhibition. But I feel that as it is drawing and the choosing of the actual frames to be rotoscoped, it is a creative part of the artistic process. But then again, I am running out of time.

After some experiments with colour I am starting to think that the piece works best in white lines on black. Solid colour with lines is too referential to those (damn) IPOD commercials.
And I’m not sure what actual meaning the colour adds to the work. From all my research into colour theory, there are no actual scientific links to specific musical scales or emotions. It’s all just human speculation. Not that my work need to have a scientific basis.

I have sampled some wonderful sounds from an old film called ‘The Red Shoes’. I find single notes from film scores are most useful. Sampling whole sections of music (even single motifs) brings too much of the original along with the sample. I like to use the feeling of the sound, how the note was recorded in that particular time and space, and the emotion it was intended to convey in the film, rather than the ‘tune’ or music itself.

It is interesting that a recording of a sound can capture a feeling of the time in which it was recorded. I suppose the same can be said of film and video. The visual equivalent of the sounds I am recording is early technicolour film.

I am definatly not interested in ‘electronic’ sounds for this work. By that I mean sounds generated from either an analogue or digital oscillator by means of a synthesizer. I feel that sounds created by acoustic instruments (even if they are sampled or recorded by digital means) suit the feeling of the visuals. I do not intend this choice to imply that I find electronic instruments without emotion.