I made these in 2016-2017—something something about the persistence of societal visions and impetus. The additional element of shifting meta-camera perspective is always interesting to me.
The above images were created to explain ideas around relationships between subjects, storytellers, and audiences for a pitch for a TV series.
A title card design I created for a documentary film directed by my friend—her film helped to turn the tides on an 11th hour multi-million dollar fundraising effort to save an endangered ecosystem. Included elements: Florida Mouse, Burrowing Owl, Saw Palmetto, Indigo Snake, and of course the Gopher Tortoise and her inimitable burrow.
Digging into my archive of explorations. This was documentation of an idea I was exploring in one of my favorite mediums: SketchUp. I’m not in this oracular headspace at the moment but I can glimpse in that drawer of memory something here to articulate again around the essential notion of radiality, and time as a function of space, as well as the optics of light and observer perspective…spinning disc theory. This isn’t quite spot on, but more on this later.
In 2017, VR and intellectual property was a Wild West—and probably still is, though I have turned towards traditional film media again to remind myself of some of the foundations of narrative storytelling. I was interviewed by a prolific VR podcaster—posting here for archival purposes:
https://www.roadtovr.com/situational-knowledges-vr-narrative-role-place-perspective/
We plan to pair light and auditory cues [energy waves] - expressed via a logarithmic demarcation [our created "time" is divided twice as fast as the original time period's "half-life" is exceeded, and so on] to expand and deepen our understanding of human perception.
Our basic premise is to create a [science-fictive] speculative object to synthesize a nonverbal understanding of the difference between human time-scale and linguistic/culturally based time perception and TIME AS IT REALLY IS. How are these things different? Can we sense that? Can we articulate that via immersive, interactive experience [perhaps analogous to the way a film manipulates time-perspective]? How?
Other Questions:
If dominant language or culture did not dictate our perception of time would we make different decisions as a species?
Does our cultural understanding of time [you are born and told you will die within a certain span of time] have a large role to play in our arrival at the Anthropocene?
Does an astrophysicist [or a neurologist, or an anthrologist, or linguist] understand time differently because of their knowledge base?
What are we told about time through our language and our culture?
What kinds of decisions do we make based on these 'facts' about time?
Notes:
As we get older, we understand what a minute "feels" like on a factorial level. I have been alive for over 15 million minutes. I have experienced what a minute feels like millions of time by now.
Some visual reference for non-verbal manipulation of time perception (James Turrell, Elias Olufssun, Thomas Wilfred, Helen Pasgian, Kubrick (2001). Interstellar's time-space representation)
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My master’s thesis is a design framework for computational analysis Hollywood-style cinematic storytelling.
A use case for the development of a human readable data architecture for parsing film and a sketch for a probabilistic algorithm for teaching it to neural networks.
VIMEO PASSWORD: FRAMEWORK2016
catherine_Rehwinkel_Thesis =
[{a:['A computational, Bayesian model for film theory',
{b:{‘a use case': 'a conceptual design for a science-fiction universe', {'an android protagonist's: [' embodiment', 'algorithms', 'understanding of human perception of causality through film language and film narrative', {who:('experiences the world as if she is watching a film', 'expresses probabilistic/persuasive courses of action', {to:(human peers, family members)}, {via:('film language', 'narrative structure')})}}}},
{c:{design:{‘a hierarchical data architecture for machine learning to': 'parse film as an n-dimensional film-frame index’}}},
{i:{‘algorithms': {1: 'trains a neural network on director intention and audience reaction'}, {2: 'parses the features correlated with the persuasive success of a film’}}}}];
Digital service (Netflix Instant Streaming) reframed as product. Two measures: First, determining kilowatt hours based on router hop-count from AWS to end user (using only router power - excluding cooling of larger systems and other infrastructure the energy costs of which could not be accurately confined to one year) and coal mass equivalent. Second, we ballparked electron mass of one two hour Netflix encoding (based on a bit's swing voltage) delivered to all US Netflix subscribers (40M) over the course of one year. Assumes every user watches at least one movie during a year of Netflix subscription.
For Product Autopsy. Project collaboration with Gabe Weintraub.
research https://docs.google.com/a/nyu.edu/presentation/d/164lcWOTesGK0jiWSeAXWss0H1HMaeHLxbDYoufXyIiA/edit?usp=sharing
A way to preserve space-time logic of ‘inertial film frame’ system utilized to cover event chains running in parallel in a mapping to traditional screenplay format. This mapping is both low-resolution/reductive and complete.
This sketch of a ‘4D’ story grid shows all the defined spatial parameters of a given story. In this case there are 9x subspaces. Observer movement traverses the spatial grid in extra-temporal transitions so that a traditional camera becomes a meta-camera with a noninertial frame of reference, which transitions demonstrate the separability of time as a coordinate within the story system.
This original research posits: ‘Fictitious forces’ may include those forces acting upon an entity-chain event (the depiction thereof) as previously described by formal film language’s camera technique. In a sense which is borrowed from special relativity physics, ‘fictitious forces’ are to be understood in all cases as those subjecting “bodies in non-inertial reference frames to so-called fictitious forces (pseudo-forces); that is, forces that result from the acceleration of the reference frame itself and not from any physical force acting on the body. Examples of fictitious forces are the centrifugal force and the Coriolis force in rotating reference frames.” (Wikipedia contributors. "Frame of reference." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2 Jan. 2019. Web. 20 Feb. 2019.)
Adaptation of physics logic to film first developed as a logical framework for traversing narrative space in 360 VR by Catherine Rehwinkel in 2016.
Sketch describing ontology of camera coverage of a narrative scene includes:
a mapping of concurrent story subspaces (entity-events; i.e. 'S1, S2’)
multiple, possible observational camera perspective states (inertial frame of reference; i.e. ‘P1, P2’)
intra-temporal spatial transitions between subspaces (noninertial frame of reference, ‘T1, T2’)
opportunity to describe ‘fictitious forces’ visible from perspective of noninertial frame (see special relativity physics)
concurrent subspaces described within a discrete instance (V1, V2)
A preliminary sketch for the film analysis architecture and interface described in Camera, Chronology, Causality: A Calculus of Cinema. Copyright 2016, 2019 by Catherine Rehwinkel.
Collected film stills showing ECU inserts.
A brainstorming sketch for inputs to a specially designed data architecture for film analysis framework.
perspective variables: FoV and Field of Instance
This is 90 instances of a horse rotated 90 degrees from the horse-object's center. In the top of these two frames: FOV is 120 degrees which allows fewer instances of the horse to be seen in the frame with more of each instance observable. The second frame is 1 degree FoV which allows for more instances to be viewed.
previsualization
some casual iphone documentation of the event set up. park rangers came to visit.
Somewhat cryptic but the visuals I started out with were striking to me. An attribute to add to my film analysis framework. Normalized, spatialized, agential trajectory, frame, meta visual data architecture. ;)
A scene from a story-within-a-story: when android Semi pens a story about the collective non-human animal experience of the final destruction of globalized human society all the human characters are puzzled as to why Semi would find it interesting. This miscommunication between Semi and her humans signals the end of communication as we know it.
A south Florida porn house undergoes a psychic transformation when an experimental virtual reality production escapes control.
below are perspective-design boards for a spatio-temporal ghost story involving choir children in an austere Van der Rohe confection. Perhaps my framework can bring the intellectual interest I have in horror and the supernatural to the immersive screen.
Below is a multi-perspective design sketch for a single, frozen time frame (1/24 of a second). It serves as a teaser for a futurist colonial story set in an unspecified 'preserve' upon which humans live in a fish-bowl like biodome which serves to protect the remainders of a ravaged environment from them. Looking in from the outside as safe observers wild animals project their mental energy into the protective space curious about the human drama within.
