Photos in Prep for Performance

Fun Photos From Class

We learned about UltraVideo as a tool to send video with lower latency.







Animator and educator Carleton Palmer visited our class to share his videos inspired by the events of 9/11. I really admired his video called "Ascension" and have asked to use it in my performance in December.







We took a look at potential diagrams for tech setup for our performance.

MIDI and Audio Demonstration

Professor Beyer instructed us in the ways of MIDI input and GarageBand. It turns out that GarageBand can be pretty sophisticated in terms of editing, etc. But the most sophisticated are Logic and ProTools.

The First Step

I just recorded myself reading an excerpt from a Tony Hiss 1987 article published in The New Yorker as a part of a work-in-progress for the December 10th concert.

This is mortifying - I hate listening to my own voice (am I alone?). Now I'll be able to sketch out some dance/movement, but I want to find some classmates to jump on board (especially helping to compose something awesome based off of this article (not necessarily me reading it, either!).

Volunteers?

Tony Hiss "Reflections" by ericafrankel

Where was I?

In advance of our concert on December 10th, which is a meditation on September 11th ten years later, we've been asked to share a little of our own story.

where was I on 9/11?

In 2001 I was a freshman in high school in Snellville, Georgia. School started early in the morning at 7:20am, so I was already entering my third period Latin class when I first began to learn what happened. Mr. Toda had the TV on in the classroom, and as the first of us began to filter in, he looked our way and chuckled. "Can you believe this?" He gestured toward the tv glowing in the corner, "some guy just crashed his plane into the World Trade Center tower in New York City. What a dumbass!"

At that point no one knew that this was not just an unfortunate accident in the friendly skies, but I bristled at his cavalier attitude. Throughout the day we learned more of the story, but classes resumed as normal. I remember being very scared for my family in New York City, but feeling very removed from the whole thing.

"It's Fine That We Were All A Little Bit Confused"

Today I spoke again with my collaborators from "The Grandparents Project" to follow up from our mini in-class experiment in October. As for the quote above, Anna remarked on the level of structure of the improvisation score and reflected that it probably worked well, in this short iteration, that the directions for the dancers (outside of the immediate tasks) were in some ways left quite vague.

An Idea for the December 10th concert

I feel really strongly about helping to produce a piece for our 12/10 concert at the Frederick Lowe Theater, but many of the details are still fuzzy. The concert will be an Internet2 Distributed Performance to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 Attack on the World Trade Center.

I have a half-fledged idea which I think could involve several of classmates as collaborators. As a part of my graduate seminar in dance, I read an incredible article by Tony Hiss in the archives of The New Yorker called "Reflections: Experiencing Places" from June 22, 1987.

Hiss reflects on the World Trade Center towers in a really beautiful way, in a time where our only associations with these buildings were their aspirational height.

I'd like to incorporate a reading of the text, some movement, some projection, and some music. I'd even be excited to get some Tisch ITP folks on board to help us conceive of bringing in some motion-capture or interactive elements. I imagine the very first step as recording a reading of the text and then creating a music/soundscape around it, through it, and over it. As you might have noticed, this is not my expertise.

Look forward to discussing more in class on Tuesday.

Follow up

An important part of the collaborative process is to follow up with your collaborators afterwards. What were their impressions? Was the process smooth? What could be improved next time?

In that spirit, Meg and I spoke briefly yesterday via video chat and planned to loop everyone else in early next week.

First Time on the Camera

On Monday evening I got to run Camera 3 at the Dinu Ghezzo concert. It was fun to find the sweet spot at which the camera would pan or zoom smoothly. Apparently I goofed by stopping the recording between pieces, since it makes the editing process difficult in Final Cut, but I hadn't gotten any guidance outside of "press record" pre-concert, so I'm trying not to feel too badly about it. It is all a learning experience, right?

I feel that my complete lack of technical background means I need to hear/see things more than once to understand. I still feel totally clumsy around all of the equipment in class, but I'm going to start doing some independent research on many of the fundamentals my classmates already understand.

Here are some photos from Monday.

Helping hand

Yesterday we assisted with the technical production of a concert at the Frederick Lowe Theater at NYU, which hits tonight at 8pm. The evening is a mishmash of dance, narration, and music in tribute to Dinu Ghezzu's 70th birthday, I learned when I arrived. I was originally supposed to be out of town at a dance residency on this Sunday, but thankfully we got home much earlier than anticipated and I could head down to NYU to be helpful.

Tonight I'm on camera duty.

Here are some pictures from last night's tech.

The Video

Watch the video, courtesy of Victor's phone, here:

http://vimeo.com/31219915

Password: nyu

Enjoy!

Last Tuesday

I can't believe that Tuesday's in-class collaborative performances are done. The preparations were so involved (hat tip, Michelle, who made sure everything was coordinated seamlessly) that the 6 minute piece I presented seemed like no time at all.

So, "The Grandparents Project" took flight! I did a lot of work to make sure that my dancers knew what what to expect, so getting started was pretty much a breeze minus the few inevitable hold ups that came with being the first on the program and the first to test the Skype connection. My classmates were really good sports, and shared thoughtful anecdotes about their grandparents for myself and the dancers to include in the improvisation. The video I edited worked well, I think. And, most gratifying of all, I got some nice positive feedback. Score!

Alissa's boyfriend came and blessedly filmed it for us, so I will share that video here soon. In the meantime, here are some photos that I captured on Tuesday.

The Project is Unveiled: Tuesday!

On Tuesday in class I'll share the first experimental version of "The Grandparents Project." I'm excited, but recognize that there's a ton to be done until then. Especially because I volunteered to help a classmate out with managing the performance (basically producer, stage manager, talent wrangler, etc.). I knew that I'd be unable to volunteer for (read: wholly unhelpful with) audio or visual tasks, but wanted to challenge myself to take lead.

Here's what I have to do before Tuesday:

1. Pick up video from midtown, where I dropped it off as VHS to be converted to DVD.

2. Edit video on my computer into a clip to be played/projected during the performance.

3. Write up movement improvisation score to be shared with my collaborators.

4. Make sure all of my dancers know what to do, where to go, when, and how (and for those who are local, how they will gain entry to the building).

5. Prepare writing materials for the audience.

6. Consolidate all of my classmates' material needs, space requirements, and tech specs into a Google Doc so that we can establish a setup, program order, and more.

There's probably other stuff too, but this is what I'm thinking about this moment. Let's do it!

Mapping the Space

Here's a map I've sketched of the performance space for October 25th's showing of "The Grandparents Project."

Click here for a link to the project album with a larger version of this image.

What I'll Need for the Grandparents Project

A brainstorm, to be followed tomorrow by a diagram:

- 2 projectors (one for the video content, the other to project my dancer from Israel into the performance space)

- A laptop (for Skyping with Leia, my collaborator)

- a DVD player or laptop to play the video content

- 2 cameras for shots of the dancing from multiple angles to be fed to my collaborator (and preserved for later)

- Small slips of paper and pens for collecting stories/anecdotes

I don't know if audio will be at all important. The DVD will produce sound on it's own, but I don't foresee that it will need mixing.

The Grandparents Project

On October 25th we've been tasked with presenting some sort of performance that involves collaborators in another location. This set the gears in motion for an idea I'm pretty excited to create. I'm titling it The Grandparents Project.

Allow me to explain:

There is a really old VHS video of my grandfather that was taped before he passed. It was filmed when I was 2 years old, so I'm actually in the video, but I have no recollection of the event. In the video he plays a bunch of old Russian/Yiddish/Jewish folk songs on guitar, tells stories from Russia before he escaped, and recounts his time on the Lower East Side of New York working at my great-grandfather's kosher bakery and hanging out with folks at the Henry Street Settlement (including Alwin Nikolais, I discovered!).

I'd like to create a movement improvisation score, invite some dancer friends, and create a short group improvisation in front of a projection of this video (possibly edited in some way). I'm interested in ideas of memory and recollection because I've been thinking about:

• my grandfather's memories that he recounts in the video
• my lack of memory of the actual filming of the video
• realizing, years later, that my grandfather was probably in the early stages of Alzheimers at this point
• the way ancestry/family shape our personal identities/narratives

And there's audience participation:

The movement improvisation score created for the dancers will include dancer-enacted short stories collected from audience members/classmates - short anecdotes from their own relationship with a grandparent.

Oh, and a collaborator abroad:

Dancer Leia Weil has agreed to participate in the improvisation from Tel Aviv. She will be Skyped into the performance and will interact with a story sent to her during the performance via Skype chat.

Multimedia in the Classroom

Speaking of multimedia in the classroom, my awesome cousin Emerie Whitman-Allen was interviewed today on WYSO public radio about the way she uses media (radio, in particular) as a middle school instructor.

Emie on Public Radio: Multimedia in the Classroom by ericafrankel

Look at her go!

A Whole New World: Audio

Tuesday's class marked my first exposure to (or even more accurately: consideration of) audio. Professor Beyer asked us to raise our hands if we had no experience with audio. My hand went up along with only a couple of other brave souls - the class, it seems, is predominately musicians and/or Music Tech students.

A dynamic microphone was passed to me in a bag. What do you see?, he asked. What kind of cord plugs into this? I waited for a classmate to volunteer the answer, and one did. This mic uses an XLR cord. Then the mixers came out.

Meet the audio mixer. This isn't even half of it.

We briskly moved through the "basics" - where inputs and outputs live, what the heck those fancy dials do, and we learned about something called the 'master mix.' What I took away from all of the demonstration was that there are a lot of things you can accomplish with a mixer, and a lot of different places to direct the sound. One can send a unique mix to someone's headphones on stage and a different mix to the audience. This can be useful if an instrumentalist wants to hear what everyone else is doing, and hear less of their own sound.

There are also several stereo hookups in the classroom. One can direct sound to the speakers in the floorboards versus the speakers in the credenza on the side of the room or to a third location. A fancy touchpad allows one to easily make these selections.

Michelle and Garvin speak to each other over microphones and we play with the mixer controls until we can hear them speak to each other. We learn about feedback, and about wireless microphones like the one Professor Beyer is wearing. We are impressed upon to set all controls to neutral before we even approach creating an audio setup - this is the only way we'll be able to effectively troubleshoot if problems arise.

After lots of experimenting and poking around I, embarrassed, bleat "What does 'EQ' mean?" My audiophile classmates must think I'm crazy.

Before next week's class we are asked to envision possible audiovisual setups for our performance in class on October 25th. We'll be using multiple computers, projectors, audio and visual mixers. The professors suggest that we take a look at JackTrip and UltraVideo (anyone able to find this one?). There is also a software on computers on the Steinhardt building's 8th floor, whose name I didn't quite catch.

How Very Pinteresting...

By the way, friends, I’ve just started a board on Pinterest to collect images and video that are inspiring to me, dancingly. I find it useful to share with collaborators those things/ideas that I find interesting. It’s called “Bust a Move,” and I’d love for you to pop on over…

Here: http://pinterest.com/ericafrankel/bust-a-move/

Send me stuff, if you think I'd like it.

Last Week at This Time

Dear collaborators, friends, and browsers, allow me to take you on a photo journey of last week's class.

I arrived feeling fairly nervous, having missed the second class of the semester the week before to dance for a week on a farm in Pennsylvania with SINecdoche Dance. I'm not a tech-savvy person, and I knew that I'd missed some crucial instruction on how to wrap cables, set up tripods, and other tasks central to our work.

Little did I know that we'd be asked to rig up 6 cameras on tripods connected to two video mixers connected to two computers connected to two projectors....and have these two computers speak to each other while projecting on multiple walls in the room. Our professor looked to us expectantly, provided only the necessary instructions, and left us to our own devices to figure out the mechanics.

Being rather inexperienced (and totally overwhelmed by the request), I stuck myself to a couple of poor, unsuspecting Music Tech students who slung phrases like "pass me the BNC cable" and "I'll grab the S-video" with ease. The best part of the experience, hands down, came when I was escorted up to the 8th floor of the building, where important-looking connector cables live neatly in an impressive closet of totally intimidating techno-scramble.

At the end of the day, it looked something like this:

Although there is no way I could re-create (or help re-create) this setup at this point in my understanding, I did learn about analogue and digital and how they speak to each other (or don't). By the end of class we had just enough time to witness the delay between the video and sound, and wonder aloud about possible solutions.

Check Out These Fine Future Collaborators

A post about my second (rather humbling) class this week coming soon, complete with photos. In short, I have much to learn about digital vs. analogue and the cables that connect and convert them.

In the meantime, a tasty tidbit: the website for the course inspiring this blog. Scoot around the page to peek at the blogs of my classmates (and future collaborators), see a rather unflattering photo on the homepage of yours truly, and listen to a fairly catchy tune coming at you from your laptop speakers.

You know that you want to click here:

Or, alternatively, here:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/gilbert/collab2011f/

Demonstrate Something About the Process of Communication

Peeking at my scrawled notes and etchings from our first class, I am amused by some of the sound bytes I captured from Professors Thomas Beyer and John Gilbert.

"If you're stuck with it, feature it."
"Memory is no longer a problem - there's space to store it."

"Different time zones no longer necessitate latency."

And then, on the back of my paper, our first in-class collaborative assignment: Demonstrate something about the process of communication...without speaking.

I was paired with two musicians, and we quickly began discussing our task. What are some of the characteristics of communication?, we asked ourselves. Just some of our answers -

• an exchange
• can be written, spoken, physicalized
• can sometimes be inquisitive, sometimes directive

We decided, rather than scripting something, to improvise our presentation to the class, and we passed notes to each other to decide what, exactly, we would do moment to moment. My paper includes three different individuals' handwriting, and reads like a strange set of stage directions:

Me: "Stand up and salute. Then decide what to do next."

Classmate 1: "Play a scale on the piano."

Me: "How should we conclude?"

Classmate 2: "Bow?"

I'm looking forward to formally starting projects with my classmates and others.