That Imp of Earth and Industry

03Jul2006 [film]

Download (Quicktime 6+ MP4):

• 320x240 8MB version
• 640x480 22MB version

Have just uploaded two versions of a film I made this past semester. It's a three minute experimental piece entitled That Imp of Earth and Industry. There's not really any narrative structure, but it is set up in a little voice over near the start: it's a dream sequence; it's about Fire. I kind of broke it up into three main arcs: the Ages of the Earth: the Age of Nature, the Age of Man, and the Age of the Machine. I've a suspicion that kind of detail is only there if you look for it, but I like that there a lots of little images if you're willing to look for them.

Outside of the experimental storytelling I was really happy with the way it turned out. It was made for a class at UTS: "Creative Techniques for Shorts", which is essentially an experimental class... Though that doesn't necessarily mean experimental film; it was really about experimenting with techniques we hadn't used before. So I took the opportunity to play with After Effects (especially the colour grading, which I'm really happy with: the shades of reds and oranges look beautiful) and to learn Final Cut Studio and Soundtrack Pro. I composed the soundtrack almost entirely from loops, and it turned out really well: a strange musical cacophony with lots of crunch. (At home with the bass turned up it sounds amazing, but I suspect the conversion for the web will have lost a lot of that beautiful bass!)

Okay, this is something of an experiment as it's the first video I've put online. Am hoping the conversion options are okay: I couldn't get much lower than 8MB without losing way too much quality, but at 2.5MB/minute that's not a lot more than an MP3 so probably not a huge issue. On dialup, though, that low-quality version will take 45 minutes to download... On broadband it's worth getting the larger version really. As I say, something of an experiment.

And theoretically the film requires Quicktime 6 to play, though I've not tested it widely. (But hey, it plays pretty well even on my mobile phone so it should be alright).

The film is licensed under the same Creative Commons license that covers this entire site (ie, everything under wintermute.com.au). The license lets you do whatever you want with the film as long as you make no money from it, you credit me, and you share/re-use it while retaining a CC license... The Creative Commons license basically encourages free information sharing; if you want to use the film for any other purposes you have to ask me for permission, which I'm likely to give.