Pretty Vacant Video

3 Beach Monkeys, 1997

Dredged up this ancient thing from the bottom of the sea.
File date September 15, 1997.

A 15fps Super Wide Production
3 Beach Monkeys
Starring Laurel, Troy & Brighton

We had walked along Garnet from Zanzibar to the pier, then headed south along the boardwalk for a way, to a bit south of Grand as I recall. Not much further. I sat on the crest of the beach, shielding the camera on its squat mini tripod, and just let it roll.

I was into weird video aspect ratios in those heady days, serving up composite still and video web page backgrounds, so this one got cropped down to its "action" rather quickly, the next day. 512x128 The bare essentials of sand, surf and sky; silly mortals playing in between.

Superbowl Sunday, 1998

I don't give a damn about football, and neither does anyone else who appears in this video.

A low-grade tribute to the classic films of Vittorio De Sica--may we once again develop a taste for realities we can live and represent to each other--this was shot, without planning, on Superbowl Sunday 1998 in Pacific Beach, California, while the "big media event" was going down a few miles across town at newly christened Qualcomm Stadium.

It's About The Ear Rings, 2000

A silent film (almost), with a happy ending, from one of the beaches at La Jolla, California, Summer 2000.

Margarita's San Francisco Dream, 1998

This 37k/sec WindowsMedia video stream was shot in 1998 by M. Baranova as part of an effort to test the acceptability of "video impressionism" as a potential populist medium--easy and inexpensive to produce and to distribute. Image "crispness" is deliberately sacrificed in favor of a "smooth" frame rate (5 fps for 56K modem reception). And image quality is further compromised for the "reality effect" of stereo sound.

ROGER UNIVAC LIVE WEBCAM