Day 235 / Video Feedback

My boss has been clearing out stuff as of late and the other day she offered me the chance to take this really old RCA video camera.  It’s a really early model, before they even had a place to put a VHS tape.  This camera merely has a cable that comes out the back and connects to a box which you would then connect to your recording device.  It’s a tube camera, so you can get those cool burnt-in light-streak effect that you so often see in music videos of the 80’s. Needless to say, I was super excited.

Well, I still have yet to test it and see if it even works but I’m totally looking forward to taking it out on the street some night and shooting with it.  No, this evening I shot with my Canon 7D but thinking about that old RCA reminded me of an old RCA my parents owned when I was a kid.  It’s the camera I started making movies on.

I used to enjoy experimenting with it and one of the experiments I remember doing was plugging my camera into a TV set and then pointing it back at that same TV set.  It’s kind of like stepping into a room with mirrors both in front and behind you.  It always confused me to think about but I would spend hours zooming in and out of it.  When you do this with a camera there are so many possibilities.  I remember the imagery  at times looked exactly what I imagined flying over the surface of the moon might be like.  The digital cameras of today don’t achieve the same effect but they do something different which is equally interesting and beautiful.

In the video below you will see some things that you may not know what they are.  I will explain in the order of appearance.  First, you will see the exposure meter that you normally see in the viewfinder, but because I am recording my own camera’s vision you can play with all those little icons that display on the screen.  Then, I play with the reflection of a recessed light in my ceiling.  Then, I cut out a rectangle from a piece of paper and taped it to the television screen.  That will be the concentric rectangles that you see in the video.  Then I start playing with the “Record” icon in my viewfinder which is a big red circle.  Finally, I go back to the reflection of my recessed light to end it.

Many thoughts come to mind in regards to the images that I see.  The recessed light looks like some kind of digital moonlight  that would be cool as a background element in some other composition.

Anyways, enjoy the video.  The song in the piece is a track from the latest Monome Community Remix Project by an artist named Quaziks.  The song is called Oyasumi and it is really quite a beautiful track.  You can download all of the tracks from this Monome Community Remix project here.