My film, ‘Me at the Zoo Too’ is an attempt at thinking as the medium of film.
It depicts, or rather interprets, or rather ‘thinks about’ the first ever youtube clip to be uploaded, the celebrated and widely written about ‘Me at the Zoo’ by Jawed Karim which has currently had 270 million views and counting. It was uploaded on 23rd April 2005.
My concept involved transfering this clip to 35mm motion picture stock as a way for the analogue photochemical film material to ‘quote’ or comment on not just the clip itself and its place in history but also the whole system of online video and user defined video.
Simplistically seeing it as a moment in the history of moving images therefore necessitated its archiving and preservation for the future and the best technique for this is motion picture film.
The clip is very short, 19 seconds. In my film it appears twice.
In the frst clip it appears as a very small, stamp like image in the middle of the frame.
The size is not arbitrary. In actual fact, its the relative size in pixels of that first clip (320×240) within a full frame 35mm image. To be projected properly it requires a cinemascope gate or aperture plate and the correct lens for scope BUT MINUS the animorphic adapter. In effect it is the same as for a fox movietone 1.19:1 film, a film with full frame and optical soundtrack.
There is then an interlude to change lens and gate.
The second clip is sized according to a DVD video image (720×576) within a widescreen (1.85:1) frame, hence the cropping. On the screen the grey coloured area is masked out by the aperture plate so there is an argument to keep it black. But, film is not ONLY projected, so I wanted something to indicate all the factors at play. The sound is mono, printed as a cyan VA optical soundtrack.
These different factors are variables afforded to or intrinsic to the film medium. Therefore they act as parameters that add some level of interaction with the clip that is forever recorded into the piece of work.
The QR code at the start is a link to this website. It only occurs for 1 frame though so references the manual viewability of film, ie a when a person handles the film to rewind, examine, etc.
An error occured during the digitisation of the clip (wrong colour space defined) which has resulted in a weird colouration. It looks more grey than it should and there is no blue. I quite like this though because the presence of Elephants is an important conceptual one.
Another idea for how this work engages with the notion of the internet is what happens when it is viewed in cinema spaces.
The online original has every viewing counted and logged. As an artifact, outside of that system, individual viewings can not be easily counted (ie a print projected infront of an audience) and so the qualifying value must reside in some other (than metrics) dimension and I would argue this is the social basis of cinema.
So screenings of this film in cinemas or galleries to a congregated public, are diametrically opposite online viewings.
Another aspect of this idea is that it could be exhibited as an object. That is in a vitrine or diplay case with notes etc.
This is another dimension afforded to analogue mediums like film. They are objects and artifacts that can embody an idea or concept in multiple dimensions of time and space.
It comes with projection instructions if anyone wants to screen it. Two copies have been made. I am considering getting more made using the correct colour space.
I am working on other films and Art works that use similar concepts.
Me athe Zoo Too formed the ‘practice’ component of a MRES (master of research) that I did at UWE which had as one of is aims to explore how a film archive / lab can act as an experimental production mode.
