My typology machine is a system for capturing ‘human speed’ videos of squirrels in my back yard interacting with sets that allowed for their behaviors to be anthropomorphized in a humorous and uncanny manner. It was important to me that the sets and the animals interactions felt natural but off, playing with the line between reality and fiction.
I used the Edgertronic high frame rate camera to capture these images, and over the course of 4 weeks have trained the squirrels in my yard to repeatedly come to a specific location for food.
Initial question: what lives in my backyard? what brings them out of their holes? and can I get them to have dinner with me?
Inspiration
Typology
Project link: https://www.lumibarron.com/sciuridaes
instagram @sciuriouser_and_sciuriouser
Process
Bloopers: https://www.lumibarron.com/copy-of-sciuridaes
Sets Images:
Set Up:
Observation window set up – 100ft Ethernet cable leading from camera in greenhouse to laptop – image projected onto an external monitor for larger view and to allow other work to be done while waiting for the squirrels to make their way to the table.
an initial table set up – while still attempting to get the squirrels to sit in chairs. Soon realized that this was not feasible. Squirrels are incredibly stretchy.
Challenges:
One of the greatest challenges arised from the limitations of recording time and processing/saving to memory card speed capabilities of the Edgertronic. At a full resolution image (1280X1280) at 400fps the longest possible recording time capped at 12.3 seconds. The then processing time for this footage took just over 5 minutes. This heavily limited the amount of footage or interaction captured, as often once the video was done saving to memory, the squirrel was long gone with much of my tiny china in tow.
I ended up setting the image capture time to a shorter amount – approx. 2 seconds. This made for a significantly faster processing time and more opportunities to capture multiple shots of a squirrels interaction with the set. This also meant, however that if an interaction was captured too soon or too late, the interesting/looked for interaction was often cropped short or missed entirely. With this camera a motion tracking trigger system would not have been a useful tool to use for this project.
Another limitation/challenge was the dependency on very bright light for good images on with the high frame rate recording. Clouds, indirect sunlight, shadows from trees, too little sunlight all significantly darkened the images. I was not able to find a set up for the external light that kept it safe from the elements for an extended time and successfully lit the set as well. Footage had to be taken in a limited time window and luck of weather played a very large part in the success of the images.
Initial ideation:
Project Continued
This is a project that I will be continuing to work on throughout the semester for as long as the camera is available. The squirrel feed has attracted deer recently and I would like to begin to play with sets for different backyard creatures at different frame rates (from insects to deer, chipmunks and groundhogs). This is a project that I have enjoyed doing immensely and I have set up a system that allows me to maintain my other work activities while simultaneously observing the animals.