During these past two weeks, Jan and I were working together on the portrait assignment for Video Sculpture class. Both of us are coming from Thailand and have a common interest in Thai politics. In recent years, Thai students and activists staged a series of protests focused on demands for constitutional change, reform of the monarchy, and education system. Therefore, we decided to make this video sculpture to convey the problem behind the education system and the monarchy of Thailand.
Every Thai who graduated from the university will have this graduation photo with one of the royal family members. We had to be trained to make the precise gesture to pay respect before receive our degree from the royal family member. Everybody needed to have the exact same gesture and the exact same speed as a robot in a factory. Without thinking, all of us have already been going through the process of obedience to the system. Without noticing, we have always been receiving or rejecting anything they want us to accept or reject.
Demonstration Video
Process
After we come up with the idea, we shot the hand footage on the left side. Then, we edited the action in the video to match with the commencement video on the right.
We decided to use two Rasberry PI 5'" screens as our monitors. In order to connect them together, we tried using a cheap HDMI splitter and connected them with Macbook. But, it didn't work very well. Both of the screens turned out to duplicate instead of showing distinct contents.
So, we decided to switch to a Windows laptop. We connected one screen using an HDMI port and another one using HDMI to thunderbolt cable. It was working, even one screen still showed the same content as the main laptop's screen.
After that, we used Isadora3 to control the videos. We followed this tutorial about how to play two videos at the same time by Matthew Ragan.