Abstract
The main framework of this project is amateur home videos of Turkish families. The main goal is to treat the media of home footages as a resource to investigate cultural aspects through amateur video. During the theoretical research, leading subjects will be collective memory, autobiography and authorship. On the practical aspect, the project will be a database artwork which will be an assemblage of Turkish family video records. The outcome will be a video installation, displaying the domestic video recording habits, as well as the traditions, the parental constructions of Turkish society.

Keywords: amateur home video, found footage, memory, autobiography, database, data visualization, video installation

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE

The Family Video Database

During the creation of the project, in April 2014, our family gathered all the videos shot between 1989 and 1998 (the VHS cassettes and DVCAM tapes) from our souvenir archives of photographs, videos and objects. Then, the tapes were transferred to hard drive as AVI format, divided as the time of being recorded. As a result, the database consists around 34 hours of footage, shot by the members of ourfamily.

The content of these footages have various environments with various subjects: spontaneous daily live events in YILDIRIM house, school ceremonies, meeting with relatives, weddings and engagements, medical operations and travels.

After having all the videos separated from the videotape lengths, divided in main folders and tagged with descriptive summaries, the design of the interface would come as the final phase.

Camera Movement Data

During the design of the interface, the motion stabilizing technique was converted into the opposite. The videos were tracked by their camera motions and the “path” of the cameras were used as reference. So, all the videos had their camera movement data, from their first frame to the last one. Here, a shot will be shown with its camera movement data:

The camera movement data can be used for stabilizing the camera shake, as well as for stabilizing the “scenery”. By moving the video frame itself, through the movement data line, the background would be stabilized and the video becomes the “gaze” of the camera operator. Now, the landscape is still and the video frame is the moving eye on this landscape. Therefore, with this technique, the video shots are being converted into the narrative eye of the camera operator. 

With the help of this camera movement data, all the frames of a video shot can also be interlaced to each other. Thus, a “semi-panoramic” imagery of the whole landscape could be illustrated as it is shown below: