The Taiwanese animated version of DSK ‘in action’

Muvi in action

Finally, I got around to trying the Muvi camera. For unknown reasons, it took over two months to arrive from Amsterdam by mail. Too late for my students, unfortunately, who wanted to use it for a ‘bikers diary’ documentary. After the test with the video sunglasses, I was planning to do exactly the same football game – same time, same place – with the Muvi, for easy comparison, but there was just no way I could motivate my son to leave the house today, so we did a game of indoor golf instead.

In the trial, the Muvi camera is attached to my forehead with a strap that comes in the ‘extreme sports set’ that I ordered with it. I don’t know if ‘indoor golf’ qualifies as ‘extreme sport’, but when I opened the box, I got very excited about the possibilities. It’s a very cool little kit with all kinds of straps and bolts, mainly meant to attach the camera to the handle bar of a (motor)bike. The head strap is supposed to go on your ski helmet – or wherever you like it to go, of course.

Muvi, Trial 1: indoor golf from Bregtje van der Haak on Vimeo.

Depressing results
The results of this test are pretty depressing. The microphone is truly horrible and I can only bear to watch the video if I turn off the audio completely (and I recommend you to do the same). Also, this camera is even worse than the video sunglasses when it comes to movement. It only works well if you keep your head still and look straight ahead of you all the time, which happens to be the case when you’re skiing or biking. I had no idea I was moving my head so much! It’s really scary to see and it makes me feel I should consider yoga or meditation.

The resolution of the Muvi is also less than the video sunglasses (Muvi = 640×480 @ up to 30 fps, using motion JPEG recording to AVI format on a micro SD card of max 8GB) and the camera angle is only 72 degrees, which is not much when you have no viewfinder and cannot see what you’re filming at all. I also did some tests with the camera strapped to my arm. It generated less shaky video, but is totally uninteresting as a viewing angle. Really, the only reason I see to use this camera is to record a very specific point of view from a moving object that is going in one direction. And I would never use he sound.

One inch

The bright side is that it measures only one inch, it costs only 100 Euro (1,000 HK$), and the design is nice. It’s 50 grams of polished black metal, rather than a piece of plastic. The controls are also more user friendly than those of the video sunglasses because, luckily, there’s no MP3 player or photo option. It still takes learning some morse code to understand the language of the lights flashing in different speeds and colors.

In summary, the video sunglasses are a much more interesting addition to the toolkit of a documentary maker than the Muvi. Recording what you see with your own eyes, when you see it, is conceptually very different from a small camera attached to your bike or your forehead. So I only recommend this camera if you like showing off your biking or skiing skills (but only downhill, not slalom).

What’s next?
In a design store, I saw a very small HD video camera with a built in viewfinder, about three times the size of the Muvi. That would mean an enormous improvement of the image, I suppose, but it’s much closer in size to a ‘real’ camera like the FlipHD camera (starting at 200 US$), which has a viewfinder, an optional built in image stabilizer and instant video playback.

And this week, AP Photonics and the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Lab (Astri) presented an extremely small optical photo camera (one centimeter), which has a built in image stabilizer and allows you to take sharp photos while riding a horse. Sony, Apple and Ericsson are interested and will start using the new camera in their smart phones this spring. The Hong Kong government invested US$1.6 million into the project and the price of the camera will be: US$1.50 each!

Please note the comment by Jonathan Marks below, who recommends Kodak Zi8, which seems to have it all, including an external microphone.

Video sunglasses in action

My first trial with the video sunglasses involved just leaving the apartment with my son to go play in the park across the street. The second trial is wearing the video sunglasses during our game of football.

Video sunglasses, Trial 2: playing football from Bregtje van der Haak on Vimeo.

There are some positives and many negatives to report.

Negative – Some of the problems I encountered:
– The video sunglasses record sound and image, but the sound runs out of sync with the video image. So if you want to use both, you have to sync it manually. That’s a lot of work.
– There is no way to know exactly what I’m filming, because there is no viewfinder. I can only roughly guess the angle. 
– The controls for starting and stopping video recording don’t work very well and, as a result, I had no clear idea of when I was filming. Also, there is no visible indicator that shows you’re recording when youre wearing the glasses. Sometimes, when I start recording, a woman’s voice will say:’You are recording now’, through the ear phones, but it’s not consistent.
– The camera comes with a remote control, which is convenient, but not very reliable.
– My hair blows in front of the lens, so it needs to be tied back.
– Any movement of the head is not well taken by the camera and produces a shaky, interrupted image. I had no idea my head was moving so much, until I saw these images.
– The video sunglasses also include an mp3-player and a photo camera, but this only confuses the issue and diminishes user-friendliness. I would have preferred just one option: VIDEO, but better.
– short shots (2 minutes) work technically better than long takes. After a few minutes, the camera starts to behave strangely, although it supposedly supports 2 hours of continuous recording, stored on 8GB built-in memory.

Positive – On the bright side:
– No one notices the glasses when you walk into a shop or a restaurant. I could really blend in without anyone asking any questions. This is appealing for spies, I guess.
– It is possible to record reasonable video in very small and badly lit places, for example in a dressing room.
– Both audio and video are pretty good quality: video resolution is 736×576@30fps, AVI format and fine for posting on websites.
– In low light, at the end of the day, the image obtains a wonderful, grainy, cinematic quality, which reminds me of 16mm. I shot a Nan Lian Garden and although my movements are crap, the image is mysteriously beautiful. I love the colors.
– Especially without sound, the point-of-view (POV) shooting can obtain a poetic quality. I imagine it could work wonderfully well as short segments in a larger HD documentary, representing a particular – subjective, poetic – POV of one of the characters, with music.

Conclusion – Summarizing my first experiences with the video sunglasses, I am disappointed by the lack of control I have over the recorded image. The a-sync sound is also a major problem, because it means editing is required for sharing a simple video, including blog posts and web video galleries. I will continue to experiment with the glasses though, because I love the POV capacity and I am pretty sure the user-friendliness and resolution of video glasses will be improved very soon. 

As it is now, I would never rely on this camera for crucial scenes in a documentary. I would only use it for filming in highly secretive and otherwise inaccessible places, which brings along all kinds of ethical questions, which I will not go into right now. Filming secretively is not really my thing anyway. I would like to use video glasses to record a particular point-of-view or to avoid interrupting reality with heavy equipment and a camera crew, but not to hide the fact that I am filming.

Soon, I will do a try-out with the MUVI camera attached to my forehead, and play football again, for comparison.

Video Sunglasses

On my way back from a recent tourist outing with friends to ‘The Peak’ in Hong Kong, I stumbled upon a talented salesman of ‘Exclusive’ video sunglasses. The sunglasses looked liked regular sunglasses to me, but concealed an invisible video camera inside the frame. Of course, this cool gadget opened the door to my wildest fantasies about ‘point of view’ filmmaking, and in true Hong Kong style, I had to buy it right away (for about 200 Euro).

May I record your point of view, please?

Think about it! How many times in the past didn’t I wish that I could have filmed with my own eyes? The thought of having a hard disk inside my brain, a camera built into my forehead, and a USB stick protruding from one of my fingers has always been very appealing to me. Something that would come to the world inevitably, but maybe not in time for me to make good use of it.

Just imagine, if only we could record what we see when we see it, and then edit… Life would be so much easier and documentary films would be so much more interesting. In our films, we would be able to engage with life as it is happening in front of our very eyes, rather than with staged and uncomfortable reenactments of it.

Fly-on-your-face films

Incredibly small cameras like MUVI (discussed earlier on this blog) already offer something quite close to the direct cinema ideal of the camera as a ‘fly-on-the-wall’, but a camera that is visibly attached to your forehead – no matter how small – still takes away some of the natural interaction. And mounting it on someone else’s forehead feels close to a medical procedure.

Video sunglasses promise that all this will be over and I can now just walk up to my subject and kindly ask: ‘Would you mind wearing these sunglasses today? I would like to get your point of view on this matter’. And a few hours later, I would be able to see the events of that day from my subject’s perspective on my screen. If that’s what technology can do for documentary film, it seems a very valuable contribution to me. After all, many problems in the world arise from the fact that we are not capable of see matters from ‘the other’ person’s perspective.

Well, so much for the potential, now the harsh reality. My first trial with the  video sunglasses involved simply leaving my apartment, walking to the park across the street and playing soccer with my son. I will show and discuss the results tomorrow.

Video sunglasses, Trial 1: leaving the apartment from Bregtje van der Haak on Vimeo.

Elihu Katz on empathy

One of the underlying assumptions of this research blog is that media exposure can produce identification and empathy in viewers. But is that true? What is the psychological effect of  immersion in mediated stories? For example, do media images of suffering in far-away places really produce identification and empathy in viewers? And when will they resort to action? These are relevant questions for storytellers who are interested in using new technologies to connect viewers to the social issues and political struggles of our time.  

In a recent talk at City University, the eminent sociologist and scholar of media effects Elihu Katz surveyed his his own 60-year career and recalled being struck intellectually by the introduction of the concept of “empathy” by Daniel Lerner in the 1950s. Lerner proposed that media affect modernization by expanding individual horizons, inviting identification with remote others and the trying on of new identities.  Katz says:”Lerner attributed empathy to the kind of media exposure which produced an ablility to provide a substantive reply to a survey question like: “What would you do if you were editor of the local newspaper?” Or:”What would you do if you were Prime Minister?” Rather than answering, as most people did, “Who, me, editor of a newspaper?”‘ there were other, more media literate respondents who could imagine themselves in these roles. Lerner argued these were the newly modernizing individuals, who had psychological access to the world outside the village; they were the harbingers of a radical transformation.”

These survey questions of the early days of radio (and the very start of television) resonate remarkably with current questions about immersive journalism and the psychological effects of using interaction and first person perspective in new media storytelling. Have these types of studies been reproduced for television and new media ? Scanning the field, 84-year old Katz concludes that empathy and identification are central concepts in Film Studies, but are largely absent form the catalogue of studied media effects in communication reserach. Katz:” Most research effort has gone into the persuasive effects of political communciation and advertising and, ironically, what we have to show is only how surprisingly ineffective the media are in this domain. Even though we hardly believe it ourselves, the truth is that propaganda and advertising don’t persuade very well.”

Katz feels that more communication research on empathy and identification in the current (new) media landscape is needed and points out the emergence of a new field of communication research focused on “distant suffering”, which includes work by Luc Boltanski, Lilie Chouliaraki, Paul Frosh, Amit Pinchevski and others. Katz: “There is a sudden rush of interest in the emotional, cognitive and, especially, moral aspects of mediated witnessing of widespread tragedy. Under what conditions, these authors ask, do people rise to the challenge of doing something to right a wrong, or save a life, in response to what they see on the nightly news or learn about from internet? When do people get up from their TV sets to demand that their governments intervene? When do people mobilize to donate money to cope with a far-away disaster?”

With ubiquitous online news and information, moral questions resurface with increased urgency.  And, I would add, with increasing immersive media storytelling, reality literally flies in your face.  Katz: “We have run out of ways of saying: ‘I didn’t know’. That’s why the concepts of empathy and compassion have been resurrected in order to explain everyday arousal and action, and to revive the idea that the media have the power to empower.” Maybe the news iscurrently  not brought to us in ways which allow for identification and empathy. I guess it’s  is my job to work on improving that.