Edinburgh - an artwork by Steve.

A piece of video art by Steve Eccles.
(6 min 19 sec - 23-Jan-2007)

I'd been looking around several Edinburgh galleries' winter exhibitions and was fascinated by some video installations. Its a few year since I did any film or video work - the usual travelog sort of movie - and thought this new approach to the medium would be worth an experiment. The tools are so simple now as even modest digital still cameras can record reasonable quality short videos.

I had an idea for a short film - how to illustrate that being partially colour blind I sometimes have to concentrate on odd details in a scene, which can lead to interesting effects in my artwork. So I decided to ignore the usual grand views of Edinburgh Castle and the gardens and concentrate on the street and what happens there - especially since last year's changes banning the daytime use of the road by private cars.

So armed with a tiny Exilim X60 camera and my walking stick (plus my idea) I took a walk along Princes Street, shot some video and stills and completed the set with some views from my hotel room (which happened to overlook the street). That evening I put most of the movie together in the hotel room, using an Acer tablet computer, and finalised it later at home.

I now present the finished version of "Princes Street in Colour". All the sounds are "real time" and the optical effects deliberate. I find it intriguing that to get the best aberrations I needed to start with the best quality video. Obviously the quality would have been higher if I'd used a tripod and a pro video camera - but I wouldn't been able to get the shots I wanted if I had to lug all that gear around then set it up.

Being able to film with such compact equipment as the Exilim camera is an exciting development in movie production and I intend to experiment further.