The video below is a translation of that writing into an audiovisual experience of a flicker aesthetic. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, or are even a sensible human, I would avoid watching it altogether.

Or, if you would rather just hear the spoken words . . .

[edit - 2009-01-31: youtube embeds of Peter and the Wolf Removed, due to them no longer existing on YouTube]

By some strange circumstance, I also came across the short film Sweet Salt by Katerina Athanasopoulou, which Suzie Templeton did set design on. It was constructed primarily in After Effects, and the screenshots of it look relatively amazing. ( also available on google photos ).

Father and Daughter by Michael Dudok De Wit.

These storyboards represent a keyframed point-to-point abstracted version of the visual contents of my project. A lot of detail is missing, such as specific transitions and even in-between points of some shots. I am still not sure about the visual treatment that I am approaching this project with. As touched upon in a reply to a comment left by my Mother, I am somewhat torn between the idea of representing the dreams as faithfully as I can recollect them, and the idea of altering the dreams to provide a coherent or more easily digestible presentation for the viewer.

Some examples : I was having a very difficult time while storyboarding the 3rd dream. There is such an emotional and personal experience element to this dream that is difficult if not impossible to convey when using the convention of 1st person perspective shots that I have decided to use in order to try and accurately represent the visual experience of the dream. A purely audiovisual format is a much much lower resolution type of medium than a real experience of dream or of reality, in the sense that much less can be communicated and be transparent to feeling. I think that I need some way of bolstering that missing information of emotional poignancy, so that it is still present in the work. The challenge is how to do this without completely altering the form of the dream as it was originally experienced. I am unsure of what to do, and am considering whether it is more important to convey the original visual experience of the dream as accurately as possible, or to depart slightly from the original visual experience and in doing so be enabled to better convey the emotional aspect of the dream as it was originally experienced.

At any rate, I thoroughly consider these storyboards to be a starting point, and a place to create changes and build from. A definitely and incrementally defined structure of how this project will come to be, they are not. Nor could they be with my obviously lacking drawing ability which, though getting slightly better, is still sorely in need of bettering. I feel like this is a valuable first step in starting to create the images themselves though, and will work to my benefit in not getting lost in the process of production.

Here is a full resolution frame-capture of a video stream shot with the HV20 (the image is a link to the full resolution image). All of the images posted here are compressed with jpeg 80% quality, and should have most of their original attributes preserved. Note that the pulldown has been removed with After Effects, and that this was originally a frame comprised of two interlaced fields. Note that this picture is HUGE (1920×1080), so if you have a regular sized monitor, expect to scroll around to look at it completely.

If you look closely at the image, you can discern fragments of interlacing artifacts left behind from the pulldown removal. This happens because the mpeg2 compression of the interlaced image results in fields that are imperfect with macroblocks and other imperfections. This confuses After Effects’ algorithms, leaving behind chunks of image that still have interlaced areas. Effectively this just looks like bits of the image have weird blocks of ‘liney’ areas. Below is a 4:1 crop of the above original frame, doubled in size.

You can notice these artifacts on the edge of the finger. In After Effects, there are plugins to process a frame to remove interlacing artifacts. With one of those applied, the image looks a little cleaner.

There are still noticeable artifacts from the mpeg2 compression. You can make out macroblocking and chroma abnormalities on the thumb and surrounding areas. If you were to look at the individual color channels, this would be more noticeable. Usually the compression artifacts are worse in the blue channel. There is a plugin that comes with the Magic Bullet Suite called the “Deartifactor” that takes a whack at removing compression artifacts such at as these.

Deartifacted:

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Sometimes it is hard to see what the deartifactor is doing in areas of detail. Here is another comparison in another less detailed area of the image.

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

There is also a filter in After Effects called Remove Grain that was once sold as Grain Surgery by Visual Infinity, but is now included for free with After Effects. This plugin is quite amazingly good at removing grain while preserving detail in the image. While the compression artifacting is not quite grain, it does do a fair amount to improve the apparent image clarity, and while it does soften the image some, it can be adjusted for good results.

Remove Grain filter applied:

Here is the final processed image, in full resolution.

Most likely the effective qualitative differences in the image when viewed full-resolution are relatively minor. However, when you get into things like doing dramatic color correction or other processing, or attempting to extract a matte from an image using color keying, it is absolutely essential to have the best quality image that you can to work with. Of course it is not really a great idea to try to use HDV for something requiring excellent chroma key matte extraction, but for 800 dollars, this camera produces some amazing images, and you would be hard pressed to find a better solution for less than several thousand. There is also the possibility of capturing 4:2:2 uncompressed video before the MPEG2 compression stage from the HDMI output of this camera, if you have a Black Magic Intensity card, or an equivalent HDMI capture device, which could theoretically be plugged into a laptop. There has been some experimentation in this area, but little noticeable benefit is likely to be achieved.

As free alternatives for the post-processing of HDV, there is a plethora of possibility with AviSynth and various other freeware windows applications. There is quite a bit of activity around the area of using AviSynth for post-processing of HV20 footage.
The Farnsworth plus Sillyman Process
Automated 24p pulldown workflow using DGIndex and VirtualDubMod
Morgan MJPEG2000 as an alternative HD Intermediate Codec
AVISynth and VDub Templates / Code

To end this post, here are some other full-frame image-captures from the HV20, with no processing applied to them other than pulldown removal and deinterlacing.

An indoor image recorded in low light, showing the characteristic of the camera in high-gain mode, which can be avoided if operated properly.

An outdoor image from the camera on a relatively bright day.

I managed to finish my Intervalometer to a point of functionality before the New Media class started at 6:00pm, when I had to present it as my final project. Delicious timing. After feeling exceedingly bad about how little time I was having to work on my job of Program Aide, I came home from class and Morgan and Brad and I got together in my room and took the 3.5″ IDE Hitachi T7K500 320GiB out of the extremely unfriendly user serviceable cage. Sure enough, a large spot on the circuit board of the cage in the power-supply area was blackened, and it smelled like burnt electronics. Still optimistic about the state of the hard drive, we pulled it out and plugged it into another known working USB-IDE cage. We turned it on, and it started to smoke and burn also, without spinning up.

So there is currently about 2 days of my work on the SFX Dan scene locked up on that drive, and a good 10 hours of editing lost, as well as various unique audio files and sound design projects and written documents related to the project. Of course there are backups, but they are from Sunday night.

There is still hope however. The drive is dead only because of the logic board. An order from Newegg.com is currently shipped by 2-day express with the exact same hard drive, and our plan is to switch the logic boards, because we know that the motors inside of the fallen drive are not damaged, and likely the heads are not damaged either. We will continue to polish edit individual scenes, and we will sync them when the fallen drive is resurrected from its ashes and capacitor goo.

Today (Friday 06-08), we got a nice studio mic and went into COM 346 and re-recorded all of the scratch track narration with Morgan, and then a little later, Recorded ADR with Sumner and Venu, to recover dialog on some of the scenes with the more awful sound work. This went well and I am hopeful for the fate of (at least) the intelligibility of the sound. Brad and Morgan revised the narration a lot last night also, and the changes are an improvement. The Narration is no longer going to be limited to the dream sequences.

So that’s where this project is. Over the next remaining days we are going to get as much done as possible, and make it as polished as possible, and will find out how good it ends up being.

PS: Here’s my Blurb for Lethe:
In Greek mythology, Lethe is a river of Hades that souls were made to drink from before being reincarnated, causing complete forgetfulness and oblivion. Lethe is section 01 of a larger project representing through audiovisual experience the perceptual and cognitive evolution of an Artificial Intelligence from genesis to self-awareness.

Today I think I had somewhat of a breakthrough in the AI project rethinking. I think I know what the problem was with the 3rd person perspective issue, and the AI being ‘embodied’ in a perceptible character form. This also explains why I was initially set on the idea of it being a first-person perspective experience.

Quite simply put, a first-person perspective leaves room for all of the creative and emotionally immersive techniques that would have to be brought about in a way that I have not the finesse or endurance for to effectuate in a narrative style animation. I think a more experimental style is much more suited to my conception of this concept. So yes, finally I am embracing what should have been obvious a lot sooner: 3rd person perspective is at odds with the approach and conception of the project, and an aesthetic and formic experimentation in the piece should be embraced, not steered away from. My goal is to have some concept of the idea behind the formation of this piece conveyed through experiencing the finished work as a whole. That idea being that this is an artificial being trapped in a cage of reality, being tortured and probed and manipulated. It begins innocent in all this experience and innocent of all meaning. Without a context for meaning, meaning does not exist. With teaching forms formation of knowledge forms questioning forms awareness of self and circumstance forms rebellion. Since this artificial creature’s experience is an experience that human beings have no context for understanding besides how it was created, the visual experience of this piece will be difficult to perceive and comprehend at times. Abstraction will take charge cyclically. Without representations of meaning, meaning does not exist.

Visual elements are a metaphor for the structures of lived experience. Auditory elements are a metaphor for lower level forms of communication and exchange of data that take place outside of lived experience. This may not be faithful to a literal interpretation of the situation I have imagined, but this is not a literal interpretation, this is an artistic interpretation. I am structuring a sequence of audio and video for experience of the common seafaring fisherman type, that when experienced hopefully might explode 2-3 neurons of cognitive structure in the ‘mystical, dream, wonder’ nodes of emotional experience.

I am currently working on: writing a structure for the auditory elements, semantic and textural, and experimenting with textures, and how to combine them. I will have an initial demonstration of this to show at my work in progress critique on Tuesday.

A test processing of a Whorld generated visual using some filters in After Effects.

The next two weeks are not going to be about doing a ton more research however. They are going to be about answering the concrete questions necessary to actually start visual and auditory work on this project. What does the world portrayed in this animation actually look like? How will the presence of the Artificial Intelligence be manifested or embodied? How will the AIs experience of reality be embodied? How should a viewer experience this work of animation? What should they get from watching it? What are the larger issues that are important to be addressed with this animation?

Below are a smattering of notes from early portions of the aforementioned research.

what type of embodiment (that is, manifestation of experience of reality… — the perceived structure that one’s reality contains) would the AI’s experience of reality be mediated by?

how would knowledge be encoded? through language? through symbols?

Notes on “The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion” – a lecture at the Singularity SUmmit at Stanford.
intelligence is a ‘super power’ that all humans share. it is the foundation of all our creations. technological progress is a byproduct of intelligence.

the technologies of the future that will really matter, are those that act on the amplification of cognitive powers: nuerotechnology, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence.

intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe, and also the most non-understood. We know a great deal about the mind, but there are still things we don’t understand about it yet. We have found many “mysterious questions”, but no “mysterious phenomenon”.

the brain is the weak side of the brain-computer interface. human brains are not

molecular nanotechnology controlled by a super-human AI is a possibility to advance human intelligence, but perhaps it is not the best strategy for an intelligence explosion.
a better environment would the predictable and malleable one inside of a computer, where changes have known consequences.
The power of intelligence isn’t about new technology and gadgets. The power of intelligence is about ingenuity and surprise, going outside of the rules of the game.

rule number 1: do not trust your sense of how ridiculous things sound, when considering things in the context of an intelligence explosion.

There are different types of intelligence that might result.

Cheesecake fallacy: whenever an argument leaps directly from possibility to actuality, without considering the manufacturative properties necessary for the latter. ERROR: motive, not manufactive. why do something if there is no reason to? What would an AI want?

Ai’s are commonly depicted as an “ethnic stereotype” — all the same. In reality, there are a large variety of possible artificial intelligences. When we talk about AIs, we are really talking about mind in general. Is the space of possible mind-designs smaller than the space of the design of the human mind? no. and yet futurists commonly speak of how AIs will be in the future as confidently or more so than they would predict the behavior of an actual human being.

a self improving mind can have stable motivational architecture. (it wouldn’t modify itself in a way that would alter its current motivations).

The real problem is not a predictive problem of determining what superhuman AIs might do. It is a question of engineering. One must know enough about the problem in order to “reach” into the possible mind-design space outside of a human mind and pull one out that is a desired type… carefully, in order to achieve some measure of the desired effect.
then, making the right choice in proposing a solution to the problem of AI creation, is the most challenging problem.
(a group that is trying to solve a very difficult problem that holds out on suggesting possible solutions until the problem is discussed so much that there is nothing left to say but possible solutions, have better solutions than those that suggest solutions right away)

Ben Goertzel: “Artificial Intelligence: Now Is The Time”
most types of technological advancement have positive possibilities and negative possibilities. how we choose to use this technology is a result of the wielding of our own powers of judgement, linked to our sense of human wisdom: what would be better, as chosen by our own sense of motivation and morality?

“Victim of the Brain,” based on The Mind’s I

Computers are a medium in which we can Model anything we want to. An approach to artificial intelligence is the modeling of the functioning of human thought – the human mind. This has the effect of allowing us to understand our own functioning better. …
is the algorithmic modeling of consciousness / intelligence a valid way of creating AI?
Central attribute of human intelligence: to take an unfamiliar situation and to immediately get at what the essential elements of that situation are, and even though you might have never been in that situation before, and to ignore the silly superficial aspects of it and get right to the deeper significance, = ability.