Visiting Shinsuke Yoshitake’s exhibit at the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art on a rainy day.
Tokyo to Kanazawa by Shinkansen
The first full day of our extended visit to Japan. We spent the morning exploring the Tokyo Station neighbourhood and took a Shinkansen train to Kanazawa.
Skiing on Vancouver Island
We have just came back from the last skiing trip of the season, and coincidentally, I’ve finished sorting through the video footage from our first trip of this year (see below). The 2023-24 season at Mt. Washington started really slowly. During our first visit, just before Christmas of 2023, the was so little snow that we were constantly concerned that the resort would close. Only a couple of trails were open, and it was raining a lot. I didn’t even shoot any video because of the poor visibility. Still, we ended up skiing every day and enjoyed the change of scenery.
During the second trip, which we took right after the New Year, the conditions improved a lot.
Take a look!
Things that went well
Exactly a year ago, as the first COVID wave swept through Canada, our university switched to an online teaching mode, which is still in affect. Our daughter’s school also went to remote teaching after coming back from the spring break. Summer travel plans went up in smoke and regular activities like camps were canceled. So we scrambled to find other things to do to keep active and sane during the lockdown: paddle boarding, biking, painting, playing music and taking the dog on long walks. We also decided to vlog about the things we did, as a way of keeping a diary that we might enjoy re-visiting in the future.
As it is the case with most activities, it is far from trivial to maintain the motivation and discipline to vlog regularly. But even if we failed to bring many video projects to completion, the mere exercise of looking at what we did trough the camera lens gave us a better perspective and appreciation for the things we were still capable of doing, despite the pandemic.
One thing that went well is that because of staying at home last summer, I had an opportunity to resurrect my old hobby of building plastic models. A few days ago, I looked through the video footage my daughter and I shot last July, when we started building our first Gunpla kit (she’s grown up so much since then!). Here is the glimpse into those days (better late than never!)
Photo vs. video
As I’ve been working on my video-making skills during the COVID-forced remote teaching terms, I’ve noticed that photo- and videography offer very different experiences both from the creator’s and the viewer’s standpoint. I tried to analyze why this is the case, and came to the following hypothesis.
A still image creates a synthetic experience for the viewer. All the information in the picture is presented at once, so the viewer can make up their own version of the story. This doesn’t mean that it’s a synthetic experience for the creator, though. Actually, it takes a series of distinct, sequential steps to create a still image. For example, in the photography context, it could mean setting up the lighting, taking the photo and post-processing it. The sequential nature of still image-creation is even more apparent in classical painting, which involves sketching, mixing colours and painting multiple layers to render the form to various degrees of detail in the different parts of the image. The the finished painting is presented to the viewer, they see it all at once: the entirety of the shapes, colours and all the paint layers. It is then the job for the viewer’s brain to synthesize this information and formulate a story.
A movie, on the other hand, is an actual story. The viewer cannot ingest it all at once. The information has to be consumed as a sequence that was deliberately laid out by the author. Ironically, the process of creating a video is, in a sense, synthetic in that the author needs to have the entire process in their head, from how the footage needs to be shot to how it is going to be edited. Of course, post-processing is a big part of still photography too, but when I shoot photos, I am generally not making specific plans of how I am going to process them. With video, though, I am constantly re-evaluating how the footage I am capturing would be spliced together in the final product.
I think this difference in how the still and moving images are created and consumed is the reason that the emergence of mainstream video production did not result in extinction of still photography. The two genres are simply too different.
Optimizing fun
A conversation I had with my nine-year-old daughter:
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“The videos I’ve been making for my class.”
“Do you have fun making them?”
“I do, but it takes a lot of time, so I am thinking about how to make them faster.”
“So you would have less fun?”
“… No, I would still have fun, just faster.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
…
I think she has a point…
On the value sketching
I realized a while ago that sketching is a good exercise for developing observation skills and, more generally, memory. It requires full concentration, because the subject is usually not standing still, and one needs to be able to consciously think about which features of the subject are essential and which are superficial. The deliberate thinking is important, because it is the mechanism that allows committing the visual information to long(er)-term memory. The short-term memory (the one in which information lives for a couple of seconds) is not sufficient for preserving the visual details until they can be captured on paper.
Lately, I’ve been recording video highlights to supplement lectures in my Advanced Fluid Mechanics course, and one of those is about the importance of being able to make conceptual sketches of flow features for understanding of the underlying physics. Incidentally, one of the forefathers of studies of fluid mechanics was Leonardo da Vinci, whose approach was based on (some would say it entirely consisted of) observation and sketching of the natural phenomena. We are not aiming at Leonardo’s level of artistry in my fluids course, but observation is an important skill for a scientist and an engineer, and sketching is way to develop it.
The book I am recommending in the video is “Boundary-Layer Theory
Salmon run video
I have just finished sorting through a bunch of video footage that my wife, daughter and I shot while watching a salmon run at Goldstream Park, which is just outside Victoria along Highway 1. Checking the date stamps of the files, I found that we went there almost exactly on the same day of the year – on November 11 and 12 in 2017 and 2018. It’s a good time of year to see the salmon run. Although the timing of this mysterious natural event varies from year to year, early November gives you a reasonable chance to see a lot of fish while not being nauseated by the smell of their decaying corpses. That would be the unavoidable scene later in the season, typically sometime in December.
I first saw a salmon run at the exact same place, in Goldstream Park, when we moved to Victoria. It had a tremendous affect on me. In fact, the second blog post I’ve ever written was about the salmon run. I felt like I was in the middle of some incredibly important event, and yet, I didn’t know what it was, exactly. It was so significant that thousands of animals were single-mindedly participating in it, paying no attention to the humans with their pathetic efforts to explain what was happening as a purely zoological phenomenon. Biology aside, what these powerful fish demonstrated was an unmistakable and tremendous sense of collective purpose. Perhaps unconscious, but a powerful will nonetheless. And I could only stand there and marvel at it, realizing that I was given a glimpse into something mysterious and so primal that thousands of animals move like a single organism to die for it.
Since then, we try to see the salmon run every year, and every time it moves me emotionally.
Back in 2017, when most of this footage was shot, my then seven-year-old daughter was keen to help with the underwater filming by sticking a GoPro into the shallow stream next to the huge fish fighting for breeding grounds. That was before she discovered that she could talk into the camera, imparting to the world her opinion on every subject that enters her sphere of attention, like any good blogger should. So this is, perhaps, one of the last videos where she is mostly quiet. Enjoy.
On teaching
My academic work is nominally divided into research, teaching and admin stuff, with the first two categories taking up the majority of time and effort. One of the issues with teaching, as I personally see it, is the lack of continuity. Once a particular course is finished, it feels as if nothing tangible remains of the work that went into it. Of course, I do realize that the real impact of teaching is in the knowledge transmitted to the students and, hopefully, in the positive impact it will have on their lives. This is all fine, and it does indeed make teaching rewarding. Still, at the end of each term, it seems like I have just emptied a bucket of water into a sea – some work has been done, but the result is not visible.
In that sense, our rapid transition to online teaching in the face of spreading COVID-19 virus has had an unexpected positive effect – it prompted me to make short videos of historical tangents and anecdotes to accompany my otherwise dry lecture notes in fluid mechanics and energy conversion. I did it in response to feedback from my students, who wrote that these tangents indirectly helped them internalize the information and convert it to knowledge. During normal, face-to-face lectures, I would use the anecdotes to break up the monotony of the material. Once we moved to remote teaching, I found that planning, recording and editing the videos provided the motivation for myself to keep going with teaching.
Somehow, when a video is published, it is satisfying to know that it will have a life of its own in the inter-webs long after the course is finished, the exam is written, the marks are assigned and the material is largely forgotten by the students.
Here is an example of historical reference from the early days of computational fluid dynamics (CFD):
And here is a funny Greek metaphor for extracting work from mixture separation:
First GraviTrax marble runs
We started building GraviTrax marble runs with my daughter about six months ago and immediately thought that it would be fun to shoot videos of our creations. Today, we finally put together a clip of our first takes. Looking back at it after several months, it was nice to find some value in it beyond simply being a memory of spending time with my daughter. One thing about activities like GraviTrax, Lego and other construction sets is that the experience of playing with them is fleeting. You put a relatively large amount of time and effort into building a project, but after you take it down, it kind of ceases to exist. In theory, Lego models could be preserved if one has unlimited storage space, but with GraviTrax the pieces are supposed to be reused, so the old projects are definitely not permanent. In that sense, having a video of previous attempts turned out to be quite useful as a reference for the layout, height of the elevation platforms, etc., as we found today when breaking out our new expansion set (a video of that is coming up, hopefully sooner than in six months). In the mean time, here is a look at our first marble run projects.