prisoner106 – Page 3

Making some Adjustments

As I had to get up early this morning I though I might make good use of my time. I popped into the Village shop and bought a screwdriver.

I wanted to have a closer look at the TV in my accommodation after last night’s blip.

I also need to get some more credits and decided on doing a wee bit of audio work. I am still trying to get an understanding of The Village by looking under the bonnet.

I had already taken a bit of audio from on of the surveillance tapes:

I ran it through the reverse filter in audacity:

Which was interesting and make some sort of sense if you are in a hypnagogia state. But it required further investigation. I found some instructions which lead to a new tool to add to my toolbox. PaulStretch is quite fascinating, and after spending quite some time testing the settings I fell back on the basic preset:

Feeding this into some video footage from the archives:

Tells us quite a lot about the state of Rover’s mind, or perhaps his master’s?

Some information

Movie clips extracted with MPEGStreamclip from video taken from dvd with HandBrake.

Movie clips concatenated with ffmpeg.

Slowed down with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i rovercon.mov -filter:v "setpts=4.0*PTS" rovercon.mp4
Which turned into mp4 too

Added the stretched audio:

ffmpeg -i rovercon.mp4 -i the-prisoner-backwards-strech.mp3 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -shortest rovercon-audio.mp4

I am finding ffmpeg interesting as you can try different variations out quickly.

Rover normally seems to be a cold mechanical creature, this view suggests something deeper, organic perhaps, hints of ancient chants and secrets. Perhaps the Village is not as rational as we think.

Croaking a Good Morning

speaker

For week two of prisoner106, one of the job we were asked to do was to take over the morning announcement for the Village for a day. Amid the recent disruptions I hope I can calm things down a bit.

Here is mine:

download good-morning

Announcement trumpet ripped from video file with MPEGStreamclip

Raven croaking recorded by myself with AudioBoo, a portent of upcoming events in the village?

‘Music’ more in the next post.

All put together in audacity, this post tagged for ds106 Assignments: Good Morning Message for The Village, 2 credits I think I’ll buy a screwdriver.

Adjusting the Set

As I’ve mentioned I’ve been mostly keeping to my lodgings in The Village, not going out, thinking and dreaming.

Sometimes when I am half awake, watch tv, strange things happen.

There might be a clue in this ds106 Assignments as to what is going on, and I guess that the RSS feed might need:

I’ll be hearing strange sounds…

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

As we move into Week 2 and get more information, it appears that a major theme in The Prisoner is repetition (a long with reflection and recursion I hope).

Before I start thinking about the audio assignments, I knocked up a few gifs from The Chimes of Big Ben:

oscilloscope 1

tape 01

lamp01

I repeat a well trod playflow.

Open video in MPEGStreamclip
Select in and out points
Trim (command T on a mac)
Export to Other Formats…
Choose Image Sequence
I usually click options and choose Jpeg and 12 frames /second
Export
Right Click on First File in export list
Open in Fireworks
Select all the other images in series & Drag to FW window
Cmd-A Select All
Open FW Frames window, Choose Distribute To Frames from the Window
This creates a series of frames.
Further editing and setting the Export Options in the Optimise Window
Export to Gif

I made a Say It Like Peanut Butter – YouTube video showing the process a while back. Fireworks, as I’ve blogged about before (more repetition), is great for gifs as it separates layers and frames. That make it much easier for me to understand.

Watch Repeat, Don’t Repeat

Dance-of-the_Dead01

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.

― Kurt Vonnegut

I though I was hitting week one in the village running, I’ve already, settled in, done a little prep, started some investigations and visited the office and filled in the forms.
I also had a strange psychological experience which seems to be par for the course.

I got a bit of a shock reading this weeks diversions. Lots too do!

I had started to review the video records of number 6 with a view to developing a plan, the office seems to have a different approach to the reels which I’ll have to follow. After starting watching The Dance of the Dead, I’d agree with:

Although aired originally as episode 8, many sources recommend viewing this as episode 2.

from: Dance of the Dead (The Prisoner) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, number 6 says, he is new and it feels like repeated phrases from the series, I’ll be seeing you are emphasized more than other episodes. I can only suppose that the official order was created to confuse rather than illuminate.

My aims and methods are still basically the same, rather that taking an intellectual approach to escaping I am going to concentrate of finding out how the village works, what lies behind the rational. My methods will be to approach the problem via the automated, serendipitous and random I will give a little information (not INFORMATION) about these methods as I go.

The idea being to understand. Number 6 went through some terrible ordeals continually butting his head against Number 2, my approach is to keep my head down, investigate The Village without leaving my room.

As I watch the other occupants of The Village arrive I am somewhat puzzled that they seem to be taking on roles in the village. Have they already become part of number 2’s team, or have I miss understood something basic?

closing-zoom