Monday, 9th January, 2006

Picture The Scene

numpty ashtray

I'd like, if I may, to share with you some of the more mundanities of my life — the moments of banality that somehow conspire to make up the ephemeral somethingness of my personality.

It's 11.55pm. Siobhan is sat in her studio, wine glugging, fag burning, after a brief foray into Second Life to talk to a friend who's just spilt up with the avatar of his dreams.

Poor sod.

Retreating from her floaty-bliss (her non-killy floaty-bliss, you nasty World of Warcraft bully people), she stubs her fag out and lights up another.

My ashtray (she says, diverting attention for a second, and trying to set the scene) was given to me by a friend. It's a lovely hand-crafted thing from, um, somewhere south — perfect in all aspects of operation, except that it seems to get full rather quickly.

Anyway. I'm sat here, puffing away, glancing repeatedly at my IM client, wondering if I'm in a fit state to try and chat someone up, when I glance to my right.

ASHTRAY ON FIRE! ASHTRAY ON FIRE!

"Quick", thinks I. "Throw some liquid on it!"

Naturally, the only liquid to hand is the remnants of a bottle of rum.

Ack go on. Yous can work out the rest of this story by yourselves.

On Pissing People Off

random

I have a special talent, imbued somewhere deep in my soul, to be able to get on people's tits. It's not intentional — but it happens. If I had my way, then I'd swan through life on a permanent cloud of happiness, spreading peace and joy and love and probably panties, to untold millions.

But it doesn't always work out like that.

Sometimes, if I'm honest with myself, I manage — somehow — to offend people.

And if you're all nice to me — over the next few hours, while I'm tucked up in bed with the kittens — then I'll share the story of how I managed to piss off an entire nightclub-full of people.

Want That One!

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Screen

story drunk nightclub

I'm going to have to provide a certain amount of background context for this. Apologies therefore if you've been with me since the start and I end up going over old ground. That's one of the problems with writing a weblog I guess — not knowing at what point someone reading it has come in. When you have to delve into the past, you run the risk of generating an Internet-wide "Eh?, because you left out a certain piece of previously-blogged information.

On the other hand, of course, if you contextualise every single little thing, you quickly become the most boring waste of webspace out there.

Let's assume though, that nobody knows nuffink, and take it from there...

My name is Siobhan Curran. I'm a transvestite, a lecturer, and an artist — in that order. The transvestism and lecturing, I think, is self-explanatory, but I should try and qualify the "artist" bit a little.

I make (for want of a better word) stripes. Photographically, I make big pictures of 576 stripes in a row — these are lovely things that whilst I could go on some kind of arty-waffle about their significance, context, and symbolism, it's usually more effective if I sum them up by saying "They're pretty".

But this is irrelevent, because I need to concentrate on the films that I make.

I also make stripey films you see. Using deeply secret techniques that owe more to the inspiration of Norman McLaren than John Lasseter, I sit at a computer and while-away the hours making stripes dance across the screen.

Sometimes, people pay to watch these stripes. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes the stripes end up in magazines and film festivals. Sometimes they get completely ignored by transvestic stand-up comics.

But I haven't always made stripes — and I haven't always had what you might call "success" with my films. I only started making then in 2001 — before that, I made completely different things, for completely different audiences.

In 1999, I was an undergraduate on an art degree, somewhere in Leeds, having recently reached a point of dissatisfaction with five years of work in an office. I'd dropped out of Uni in 1993, got myself a job, then discovered that this "9 to 5" malarky wasn't really up my street (It was regularly "9 to 5 in the morning BTW — I was a tired and stressed little designer).

A chance comment, from one of my tutors (now colleague) one day — along the lines of "you could try presenting your photography as a moving image" — got me started on messing around with Adobe Premier, animating shapes and textures using rather primitive, frame-by-frame techniques. I'd sit there for hours in my flat applying tiny changes to photographs, saving the results, then importing them into Premier — not realising that there was a thing called "After Effects" that did exactly what I was doing, but automatically..

Ack well

The results were crude, yet interesting — I made a film set to U2's MoFo track, even going so far as to get copyright permission to use it — the only thing that puzzled me was where I could take this idea.

You know — it's all very well making little films set to music, but what actual point is there to that? Who's going to see them? Where are they going to see them?

These days, if it was me talking to me, I'd sit myself down and go through a long and detailed list of film festivals, internet-based distribution channels, and similar opportunities, but at the time I was really stumped.

Then, one day, I had a bit of an idea...

Wouldn't it be great, I figured, to be able to project these films in some kind of nightclub space? Wouldn't it be great to be able to mix and control the films so that they followed the pace of the music — in some way enhancing the night, by providing a visual element on top of the musical one?

I might expand this part of this story at some point, (for example, it's the basis of my "Forty-eight-day Render" story) because it's a significant moment for me, and because I'm intensely chuffed with what I ended up with. But, in the interests of brevity (and the fact that I have to do some work today), I'll go only so far as to say that the night that came out of it was quite a big success — eight hundred or so (she said, guessing) people all staring at my screen and having a whale of a time

It was such a success, that I got asked to come back and repeat it every fortnight. Every two weeks, I'd hike all my equipment down to the club, set it up, then spend four hours mixing floaty shapes and bouncy text along to happy-trance music.

God, I was in heaven

But this was 1999, and musical trends were changing. Students didn't seem to be interested in Trance and the like — preferring to go all 'ironic' and naff and mince around to music from the late eighties.

Gradually, the attendance waned, to the point where there were only a handful of people on the dance floor. Me and the lighting guy used to get really annoyed by this — we'd be sat there on our little podium, lamenting how people weren't dancing, but standing around with pints in their hands.

It was all a bit depressing really.

It would take us the whole day to set up, and the whole preceeding two weeks to put stuff together for the night. And it felt like it was being completely wasted.

Becuase of the dwindling number of people turning up to the nights, eventually the inevitable happened — it got pulled. It was such a shame, because I seem to remember that it was a really good night. Great music, wonderful lights, and a rather sumptuous visual feast (if I do say so myself).

In its place, it was decided to go all uber-cheesey, and give the students what they obviously wanted — a bizarre quiz-show-themed night, taking in elements from several quiz shows from the 80s, and wrappping it all together with Kylie and Jason.

*pah*

It was quite an ambitious plan, looking back on it — to try and re-create things like Play Your Cards Right and Wheel Of Fortune in a nightclub — and for it they needed someone to make some rather cunning visuals.

Actually, in retropect, what we made was incredibly slick and polished — I rendered some pre-determined film clips of spinning wheels and turning cards (and other stuff that I've forgotten) and put together what appeared to be a random outcome of events.

The idea was, that each game that was played on the screen, gave you a number — and at the end, the person with a ticket that matched all the numbers won a prize. All of the games that were played though had been rendered before — so we knew what numbers were going to come up. All except the last one, which (for some reason) I decided to make on the night.

This meant that I couldn't just play video tapes — I had to have a Mac with me. While everyone was dancing and stuff, inbetween the games, I was sat behind a screen making the piece of film for the last game on a 9500 with a miroMOTION video card sticking out the back of it.

...

I'm trying to set the scene here — and I'm probably going into far too much wordy detail — but there's something I need to explain about the video card I was using.

This was the days long before everyone in the world plugged their DV cameras into a FireWire port and happily chugged away in iMovie. In those days, it was a jumble of compressors, standards, and add-on bits of kit.

To get stuff to play out of the Mac and onto the projector, I had to encode it in a particular format — and anything done in that format went straight to the graphics card.

Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that if I didn't unplug the projector while I was rendering, then everything I was doing would end up projected into the club — and everyone would be able to see that it was a fix.

...

There's something else I need to explain to set the scene a little — it was the 18th of February, and as anyone who's read this thing of mine for long enough will know, that's the day before my birthday. And as the clock hit midnight, I figured I deserved a drink.

...

So, where exactly are we?

Siobhan is drunk, sitting behind a screen with a Mac that's connected to a projector that unless she unplugs, will display the contents of her screen to a club full of a good few hundred students. She's also quite grumpy about the whole thing — because whilst on the one hand the night is going well, she'd much rather be VJing like she was two weeks previously.

Grumpy and drunk, naturally Siobhan starts to rant.

And ranting, for Siobhan, involves typing words into keyboards.

Initially, it was pretty tame. I knocked together a little snidey film to play at the end of the night — after everyone had left. It wasn't anything special — just a slideshow of words that read "You suckers. It was all a fix. We knew the numbers from the start. Ha ha ha"

(A hilarious piece of satire, I think you'll agree. As did all the staff sat round at the end of the night as I played it.)

But gradually, I got more and more narked with things. "Little bastards", I thought to myself. "Here they are, dancing away like muppets in some kind of ironic parody of the eighties, and I'm reduced to making crappy game-show based films for their entertainment. This isn't what I went to Uni for..."

And so, I decided to take out my frustration by writing rude words. My drunken bravado took the better of me, and I started to write slightly more offensive things on the screen — making damm sure that the proector was unplugged.

In between each game — and in between pints of cider — I'd set up a little movie with rude things on it and hit the 'render' button. Just to let off some steam I guess.

...

At about 1am, we played the last game and someone won a bottle of champagne (or something). Content that the night was over for me, I settled by behind the screen and started to get ready to pack up...

...but not before letting rip one last piece of rantage. Just one — just one little bit of screen-based anger to get it out of my system.

I took a swig of booze, and fired-up Premier. On the other side of the screen, the DJ was launching into what can only be described as an "80s Megamix" — all the stuff that marks that decade out for being rubbish, rather than the good stuff from earlier on.

Incensed, I typed away at the keyboard, lay back in my chair pleased with myself, and hit the render button.

The progress bar slid itself to the right and then pinged. And next to me, on the projector screen, in letters three-foot high and in plain view of the whole nightclub, appeared what I'd like, if I may, to try and recreate for you, through the power of figlet...

                   _                  _ _ 
 _   _  ___  _   _( )_ __ ___    __ _| | |
| | | |/ _ \| | | |/| '__/ _ \  / _` | | |
| |_| | (_) | |_| | | | |  __/ | (_| | | |
 \__, |\___/ \__,_| |_|  \___|  \__,_|_|_|
 |___/     _                      _ 
    __ _  | |__  _   _ _ __   ___| |__  
   / _` | | '_ \| | | | '_ \ / __| '_ \ 
  | (_| | | |_) | |_| | | | | (__| | | |
   \__,_| |_.__/ \__,_|_| |_|\___|_| |_|
          __                    _       
    ___  / _|   ___ _   _ _ __ | |_ ___ 
   / _ \| |_   / __| | | | '_ \| __/ __|
  | (_) |  _| | (__| |_| | | | | |_\__ \
   \___/|_|    \___|\__,_|_| |_|\__|___/

I'd forgotten to unplug the projector.

It was only there for a split second. The moment I saw it, I dived for the reset button on the front of the Mac. The screen went black and I slunk back into my chair and breathed a sigh of relief. It must have only just flashed up for a tiny amount of time — and I couldnt hear anything that gave me the impression that anyone had seen it.

But, then I was a victim of a buffer.

On the computer screen, a little smiley Mac was grinning at me, as several extensions started to load themselves along the bottom. Ethernet, TCP/IP, AppleTalk, Quicktime, Adobe Type Manager, the miroMOTION driver...

Shit!

I'd forgotten that during the start-up procedure, the video card spat out the last frame that it had in its buffer. And so there, on the screen again, in the same three-foot high letters, was exactly the same text.

...

This time, I took much more definate action. I reached behind the Mac and yanked the lead out from the video card. Once again, the screen went black, and once again, the words had only been there for a fraction of a second.

I poked my head out from behind the screen, to see if anyone had noticed.

Everyone was still dancing, no-one seemed any the wiser as to what had just happened. My friends who ran the club weren't in sight — they were in the office doing the count for the evening.

For a brief moment — or at least until the next day — I thought I'd got away with it. We packed up all our gear, and sat around for a post-work drink while I projected my previously-rendered, tame little piss-take.

...

The next day though, I got a phone call. Seems someone had noticed. And of all the people to have seen it, it was the guy who was in charge of the University radio station.

I had some serious explaining to do after that. There wasn't too much fuss, and the whole thing died down pretty quickly. I hadn't meant to put it on screen, no-body was meant to see it apart from me. And I think everyone believed me.

Needless to say though, I never got asked to do visuals there again

...

The moral of this story BTW kids, is as follows:

Never let Siobhan loose with a keyboard when she's drunk.

But we all knew that already, didn't we?

Tell me more, Auntie Siobhan!!!!

Sorry Tiff. As much as I'd like to sit here typing for the next few days, I've got to go to Leeds.

Steph, if I can dig the video out from whichever box in the loft it's in, I'll try and stick a copy online. It wasn't the greatest thing I ever made — but it wasn't bad for its time