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This post should have been written in September, but laziness kept me. The video you see above I only got around to finishing last night. Depicted in the video is an art installation for Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda’s freshly opened art and technology space. I undertook programming duties in the project which I was invited to by Sebastián Skoknic and Francisco Fuentes.

The work uses an ordinary webcam to detect user movement, which causes stuff to happen on the screen under five distinct modes that the user can switch between via a menu that’s also motion-activated, located on the far right side of the physical space. This menu was poorly conceived, and causes plenty of user confusion due to how easy it is to obstruct with the body, which would cause random buttons being constantly activated. There are plans to scrap it in favor of a physical interface located on the ground.

An interesting feature is that it silently captures images as seen by the camera every thirty minutes. These might get collated later on and used for a video depicting users interacting with the installation over the months in sped-up form.

If you’d like to give this a try but can’t attend the actual physical space, there’s also a web version that can be used with your computer’s webcam. Go to the site of the exhibit and click the last button in that horizontal bar, the one that says ‘¡Muévete!’ Then, click on ‘Juega!’

For a few days around Christmas, I went to Lican Ray, a small lake town toward the south of Chile. This is the place I used to spend my summers at with my cousins and my grandmother, back a good few years. This summer it was my first time there in a while, so I decided to make a video, also taking the chance to use my new Zoom H2 to capture the environmental sounds. The video was composed out of sequences of photos, whose resolution made it possible to make it my first HD video. I attempted a sort of time capsule, showing the things that have changed in Lican Ray, and that will definitely change in the future.

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I made this video for a local competition of short format videos, called Nanometrajes. Sadly, I couldn’t come up with anything to make, until it was already only a few days until the deadline, so I came up with a simple plan. I didn’t have a video camera (the one I use usually is my dad’s), so I’d have to animate. I decided to use my photo camera to capture the zooming shots you see in the video, taking two steps between each frame. Since I didn’t have much of a story or context, I decided to make these oneiric, and basically make it all the interpretation of a dream. That’s how I came up with the narration, which, translated, goes as follow:

I dreamt that, in a fish tank, there was a whale. Every fish wanted to be eaten by it—they crowded in front of its mouth. The rush was such, that, shortly, only the whale was left in the fish tank. Alone, and without sustenance, the whale died.

I thought that a fable was perfect to complement visuals that didn’t have much to do with it. I meant it to represent the metropolis, but it can be read in several ways.

The other sounds all came from my own mouth. I used a Nintendo DS and NitroTracker to sample my voice, and to structure the sounds into what you hear. The video was made using After Effects. This whole project was completed in around 10 hours.

In the meanwhile, he released the EP the song is a part of; it’s called Moonfish Moon. I recommend you give it a listen if you liked Volcano.

This was about a week’s work, shooting around the neighborhood, here in Santiago, Chile. I filled up almost three miniDV tapes of footage, which seems to be a lot for under four minutes of edited video, or maybe I’m just not used to this kind of stuff. I also discovered only yesterday that this Handycam that I used has a manual exposure setting, which would have been useful for many of the earlier shots, but such is life.

I also got myself a new bycicle a week ago, which can be partially seen in one of the shots. It’s a cheap ‘beach cruiser,’ but I love my new bike.

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This is a video I made in 2007; it was my final exam for an experimental video class. It’s the story of a young girl, as she documents her own cathartic ritual. The script uses some stereotypes, to match the ingenuity and simple mind of the main character, and also to leverage immediate recognition. I also let many scenes drag on, despite the initial storyboard’s briefness, because I felt that such a contemplative style suited it best, and a fast editing would have done a disservice to the aesthetic. This was proved later, in fact, when I made a 30 seconds ‘digest’ (no subtitles) that didn’t really capture what I was after. That short version was created for an awful contest which I only entered because the topic matched perfectly: stories of sneakers, and it was an advertising campaign for a department store.

As you can see, the video could not have been made without the help of the star, Sigal, who was also the main camera-person. In fact, the concept was created around her, so, had she not agreed to help, I would have been forced to make something else entirely.

And since I’m on the subject, here’s another video I made for that same class, as an exercise in shooting and editing. All of the material was recorded at the Diana arcade in San Diego, Santiago. My original idea was to make it much more musical, but due to time constraints, I was only able to do so much.

Chile has a rather rich mythology, particularly from the island of Chiloé, from where the better recognized mythical figures, such as the Trauco and the Pincoya, originated from. That was the subject for the final exam of my workshop class, the second semester of 2007, with Jennifer King and Ximena Undurraga. What we created was a (loosely termed) dictionary of local mythological beings, a full book of them—since we were around 20, and everyone had to create ten, the result was around 200 pages worth of illustrations.

That was the final cover, I’m not sure whose design it is, but it showcases some unfinished illustrations pinned to a cork board. I created two concepts, but they were not selected (one, two).

And that is how the book looks on the inside. The page on the left is my own work. Some are better than others, but here are all of them:

• El balsero
• Brujo tonto
• Cahuelche
• Chinifilu
• Deñ
• Haucella
• Huala
• Piruquina
• Sietecolores
• La voladora