In class on Thursday, we were introduced to the powerful dom library in p5. According to the p5 reference article about p5.dom, the library allows you to interact with HTML5 objects, including video, audio, text, and your webcam.

I was immediately interested in trying a first pass at making an interactive film in which the user could click a button to jump to another film. I knew that I wanted to make some kind of super cut using p5.dom.

Here’s an unfinished, unpolished version of my sketch. I’m still working on it.

I was inspired by the Bob Dylan music video for “Like a Rolling Stone” in which users could “channel surf” as different individuals sing the lyrics to his song. I also was thinking a lot about video artist Christian Marclay’s art installation The Clock, a 24-hour montage of hundreds of film clips that make real-time references to the time of day. The video clips are all tied by one thing: The presence of a clock and/or time. The result is an eerie, fragmentary portrait of what one day looks like in the movies.

clock2_2353636b

I also wanted to access the webcam in some way. I’m taking my cues from Paul Ford’s insanely well-written and lengthly Bloomberg piece “What is Code,” which accesses your webcam and automatically prints a PDF certificate of completion with your picture when you have completed the 38,000-word article.

With that in mind, I wanted to combine both ideas and build a photobooth. You can switch between disparate clips of characters using a traditional photo booth in different movies by clicking the button “span time.” You can press “play” or “pause” to stop the film:

movieButton = createButton(‘play’);
movieButton.position(700, 500);
movieButton.mousePressed(toggleVid);