I’m on my second Canon Powershot right now, having gotten my first one in early 2003. These can take brief movies, but the Powershot is not really a movie camera, so I only took three- or four-second movies of things that I could loop. In November of 2004, once I had a collection of these clips and access to a Mac with iMovie installed, I took a few loopable shots of my daughter Alice playing the drums so I could tie the whole thing together with a regular beat and edited it into a trippy little movie.

The first shot has some kids spinning light things in the dark and my daughter Madeline jokingly complaining about Alice’s spinning thing hitting her, which gave the movie its title. In the four years since then, Alice has gotten a Ludwig kit with some entry-level Zildjian cymbals (the one in the movie sounds awful) and she’s also grown a few inches and improved on the drums quite a bit.

The strange capsule bouncing way up in the air at 1:11 has Dan Brickley in it, if I remember correctly. This was at a carnival on the Dam Square in in Amsterdam during the XML Europe 2004 conference. (If it’s not him, it has at least one of the members of the RDF All Stars panoramic picture that I took earlier that day while demonstrating the camera’s panoramic capability to Uche Ogbuji, who had the exact same camera but didn’t know about this feature. Dave Beckett, with his back to Leigh Dodds, lost out in the stitching of the images, which gives him the appearance of a disappearing ghost.) In addition to that carnival, a local Virginia county fair and a Jersey shore boardwalk arcade provided the more American-looking carnival images. Oxford residents may recognize the playground on Abingdon Road.

I recently got a Flip Video camera (whose logo owes much to the one from the Flip Wilson show in the early seventies). I’m having a lot of fun with it, although what I’ve done so far are outright home movies, which I won’t be putting here. I may bring it to XML 2008, though…

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2 Comments

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