Andrew Gingerich

Filmmaker/Educator

About

Andrew Gin­gerich is a film­mak­er whose work explores notions of fam­i­ly, dis­so­ci­at­ed iden­ti­ties, region­al alle­giances, and the bound­aries of fic­tion. He lives and teach­es in Michi­gan’s Upper Peninsula.

WIT Video Tiles

  • Dig­i­tal sig­nage installation
  • HD video
  • Col­or
  • My role: Cre­ative Director/​Project Manager

A dig­i­tal sig­nage instal­la­tion fea­tur­ing pro­grams of study at West­ern Iowa Tech Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege, pro­duced with the help of my WIT Film & Media Pro­duc­tion students.

The WIT Cam­pus Tech­nol­o­gy depart­ment came to me with a real­ly inter­est­ing project: they had recent­ly acquired five Christie Microtiles, a bezel-less mod­u­lar video dis­play sys­tem often used to make large video walls, to exper­i­ment with their use as on-cam­pus dig­i­tal sig­nage. These orig­i­nal Microtiles were based on the same DLP tech­nol­o­gy Christie used in their cin­e­ma pro­jec­tors, and the col­or ren­di­tion was real­ly remark­able. They had placed the tiles in a ver­ti­cal hous­ing to dis­play a loop of video and still con­tent with the unusu­al­ly tall, nar­row aspect ratio of 4 × 15. The tech depart­ment want­ed to know whether the film pro­gram would like to pro­duce any video con­tent to fea­ture on the screen. I brought the oppor­tu­ni­ty to my stu­dents, and they decid­ed that we should cre­ate some short video loops fea­tur­ing some of the pro­grams of study that WIT offered.

Pro­duc­ing con­tent for this dis­play pre­sent­ed some real­ly intrigu­ing chal­lenges. Not only did we need to cap­ture tall, nar­row video (a feat we accom­plished eas­i­ly enough by mount­ing our FS700 side­ways, but we want­ed to be mind­ful of the seams where the screens met—there was no bezel, but there would be nar­row lines inter­rupt­ing the image. Beyond that, we need­ed to devel­op a visu­al lan­guage that made sense for this aspect ratio and instal­la­tion. Com­pos­ing visu­al­ly inter­est­ing shots that made use of the full height of the col­umn forced us to think very dif­fer­ent­ly from the way we approached com­pos­ing shots for a hor­i­zon­tal frame. Because we thought cam­era move­ment would be dis­ori­ent­ing to peo­ple glanc­ing at the col­umn as they walked past, we opt­ed for a total­ly sta­t­ic cam­era for all of our shots.

I built an After Effects tem­plate and direct­ed the first pro­gram video (fea­tur­ing our own Film and Media Pro­duc­tion pro­gram), and once we were able to deter­mine that every­thing was work­ing accord­ing to plan, my stu­dents each picked a pro­gram of study, shot footage, and edit­ed it into the After Effects tem­plate. The result­ing videos were looped on the video col­umn, which was placed at the main entrance of the col­lege to greet vis­i­tors and students.