I am a fan of videomusic.  What is videomusic?  Well that’s simple, it’s music made from videos.  It’s a fun concept, which is basically “seeing what you’re hearing” and the instrument is the editing.  The first time I was ever really influenced by videomusic was when I saw the Kutiman You-tube mashups.  Basically, he downloaded a bunch of youtube videos of people playing their musical instruments in front of their webcams and cut them together into cohesive songs.

It so inspired me when I saw them that I decided to delve into a six month process of learning Max/MSP so that I could create my own live version of the concept for the monome, called 64(video)fingers (which is in dire need of a serious update).  But this post is not about that.  No, this post is about another artist that I find super inspiring who has been creating music with video for quite some time.  His name is Gabriel Shalom.

I was first made aware of Gabriel and his videos after he left a comment on my demo video for 64(video)fingers.  He linked me to a couple of his own experiments in creating Videomusic.  One of my favorites by him was a video called “Small Room Tango” where Gabriel walks into a room and begins playing the piano.  Except, through editing, he makes every part of the video a part of the music, like the sound of the door opening, the opening of the piano lid, and ultimately the piano keys themselves. 

Beyond the concept, musically Gabriel’s videos are excellent.  “Small Room Tango” is a unique and interesting melody.  I think what I like most about Gabriel’s videos is actually the rhythms and melodies that he creates.  They are complex to say the least.  Also check out his video “Beardbox” for a good laugh and a funky rhythm.

His latest series of videomusic films are some of his best, I think.  It’s a series of three short films called “Object Oriented”.  They are shot with high quality gear in a black room with simple, straight-foward lighting.  The mix of sounds, images and humor make them extremely entertaining.  It seems to me that Gabriel is putting all of his prior experience to work in these films.

One extra little technical tidbit:  I’ve always liked Gabriel’s videos for they’re unique sounds and rhythms.  At times, he’ll take a sound from an object and sort of granulize it.  I’ve always wondered how he accomplished this effect in a video editing software because the smallest they can get is a single frame.  A single frame is really not that small in auditory terms.  He enlightened me when I posed the question to him.  He uses Vegas Pro to edit his videos.  I have very little familiarity with the software.  Apparently, what makes Vegas unique is that it touts itself as both an editing suite as well as an audio mastering tool.  Every audio production software on the market absolutely requires the ability to zoom deeper into the sub-frame scale.  So, how cool is it that while you are editing you’re video you can simply zoom right into it and create these miniscule rhythms and edits.  Check out his film “Wash, Choose, Peel, Chop, Rinse” for some serious micro-editing.

Without further ado.  Please enjoy his three short videomusic films called “Object Oriented”

Production Stills – Object Oriented by Gabriel Shalom

Like always this mm-cc is a long time coming.  This will be the last mm-cc for a bit because it’s the last month of summer.  It’s not over forever by any means.  I told Jenny we’d do it monthly for the summer and then we could take a break.  Not that she dislikes them.  She actually looked forward to them because it was a time we could have friends come by and talk.  Just time to switch it up a little.

We decided to make this mm-cc an all-day BBQ.  I actually drank a bit more beer than coffee this time around.  Musically, it started off slower than most.  I didn’t have the instruments and mics set-up until about 11am.  After that we mostly sort of tinkered one instrument at a time.  Eventually, we got up some momentum and recorded a few songs with multiple instruments.  It was nice, though, that it was an all day BBQ because I kept the instruments up all afternoon and every once in a while I could take a break at the modular and start another small jam.

The players on this song were my pal Jeff Numainville on the Microkorg (really the star instrument on this one).  Jeff changed up the sounds of the keys quite a bit and each of them were right on.  I played the bass and the modular.  Actually, I setup the patch on the modular first and then we all played to that patch.  My buddy Mike Goggin played the guitar for a section.  I believe he added some xylophone in there somewhere as well but I can’t remember.  My friends Dantes Rosete and Inthia Seabrooks both composed some music strips for the music box and we recorded those separately, although it matched beautifully with what we had played.  Actually, the music box recordings really make the track in my opinion, my favorite part.  And finally, my buddy Rene Cardona added some percussion as well as a bit of harmonica.  I had my monome running an app called Mash and it was live sampling from one of my microphones.  Rene recorded sounds into Mash and played with them on the monome.  Finally, I took the 15-20 minute jam into ableton and condensed it into a 5 minute song.

The visual aspect of these mm-cc’s sometimes excite me more then the music.  I like the opportunity to listen to what we’ve done and think about what kind of visuals could go with it.  This time, for a about a week, I had no idea what I was going to do.  I knew I wanted to experiment more with macros and possibly fluids but I didn’t want to do the same oil and water stuff I’ve done before.  I searched out some fluid experiments on the net and found Ferrofluid.  I had seen ferrofluid videos before but this time I saw a “DIY How-To” video on making your own Ferrofluid.  I decided I’d try it out.
 

That same afternoon, with the thoughts of playing with magnets running through my head, I suddenly remembered iron filings.  I remembered playing with that toy where you could use a magnet to adorn a cartoon character with iron filing mustaches and beards.  Then I thought, “Where can I get iron filings?”  I found some DIY methods on the net, like tearing up a steel wool pad or taking a file to an iron nail and grinding it down but the best suggestion came from a youtube video where a gentlemen posed the same question to himself.  He realized that if you visited a local mechanic who had the ability to do brakes then you would find a plethora of iron filings.  Well, he was right.  I walked across the street with tupperware in hand to a nearby mechanic.  It was a little funny describing to him what I was looking for but once he understood he showed me to a giant bin absolutely brimming full with them.  I filled my tupperware and hit the road.

The ferrofluid didn’t work out unfortunately.  Not sure what went wrong but I decided I’d try again later using one of these recipes.  I did film the iron filings though and they looked really cool under the macro lens.  I made two towers out of books and bridged the gap with a little mirror I’d gotten from ikea.  And then focused my camera at the iron filings, lit them up with a small lightbox and began waving the magnets under the mirror.  My buddies Jeff and Matt joined me for the shooting.  It was quite hypnotic to see through the camera.  It had a natural stop-motion quality to the movement.  If you got in real close it suddenly looked more like a forest of pine trees than a bunch of iron filings.
 

After the shoot I didn’t feel like I’d had my fill of experiments.  The next day at work I thought about it some more.  I looked up DIY electro-magnets on the net and discovered that it’s quite easy to make an electro-magnet.  All you have to do is wrap a copper wire around an iron core (in this case a six inch iron nail) many many times and then connect either side of the coil to an electrical source like a battery.  I wasn’t thinking a battery in my case, I was thinking the modular.   I thought, “What would it be like to send a rhythmic pulse to the iron filings, for example an LFO?”  Well, it took a couple of tries to make an electro-magnet strong enough to amplify the magnetic pulse.  I decided coil two iron nails side by side to increase the size of the electro-magnets core.  Then I coiled the crap out of it.  The more coils, the larger the core and the larger the current all make for a stronger electro-magnet.  I taped the magnet to the bottom of the mirror I had my iron filings on and connected it to my amplifier via speaker wire.  Then I sent an LFO to the amp and voila, I had iron filings moving to a rhythm.  Pretty cool.  I played with this setup for quite a while getting all sorts of different angles, trying out different speeds, trying out different voltage sources, like an Envelope Generator, playing with the attack and decay.  I found it difficult to make the iron filings do anything other then flicker but nevertheless I thought it was super cool to be using the modular to control an electro-magnet.

So that is pretty much the story.  I cut the footage together and here it is below.  I hope you enjoy!

I have received a few emails over the past few months from people asking questions about my Slitscan Factory After Effects project.

Recently, I got an email from a fellow who linked me to this video and asked if this kind of effect could be done with my project file.  I told him it could be done and described to him the procedure as best I could.  Ultimately, I was so blown away by the video he sent me that I decided to update the project file myself.

So, for those of you out there with After Effects and an interest in doing slit-scans then perhaps this could be helpful to you.  It really is quite an easy process.  Just make sure you read the ReadMe file before you begin.

Finally, you must understand that the render times are arduously slow.  Some effects are slower than others but you will be able to read more about that in the ReadMe file.

If you would like to download the project, click here.

UPDATE: One important note. I have had some feedback regarding my instructions in the ReadMe file. I wrote that if your footage is 1920X1080 you should precomp it and scale down within after effects. What you should actually do is convert your footage completely to 1280X720 using a tool like Quicktime Pro or MPEG Streamclip. My friend was saying that his 1920X1080 footage, when precomped in After Effects, was taking almost 9 minutes a frame. After he converted the footage to 1280X720 the render time changed to 1 minute a frame. That’s a big difference.

To end, I’ve uploaded my own experiment using this slit-scan technique.  The footage is from a shoot for the music video I’d been working on, which had a bit of a postponement due to some personal issues within the band.  The video is still on but I have not been working on it for the past two months or so.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the test render!  The music is from an artist named Altitude Sickness.  The song is called “Lights”.  You can download more of his music from his bandcamp site here:  http://altitudesickness.bandcamp.com/

This mm-cc is long overdue.  Things have been absolutely crazy at work.  The past four weeks I have been working around the clock preparing pieces for this upcoming D23 convention.  D23 is like an epic convention for Disney nerds, where they can get a glimpses of all the upcoming film releases, park renovations and just about anything Disney.  People in all departments have been putting in some real hours to get ready for this.  I’m proud to say that I have three pieces showing in two of the main theaters.  I’ll probably write more about it in an upcoming update post because I have been working on some pretty cool stuff lately.  I mean, I need to be able to brag a little.

But more on this Morning Music & Coffee Consumption…

I have to say it was one of the most interesting mm-cc’s yet.  The reason being was because most of the people who participated in it had never met or played with one another.  Many of the usuals who come to these monthly events were not in attendance.  So, it began with a little trepidation and we all didn’t know quite what to do.  Never the less, the point of these things is to  make some noise and see where we end up.  By the end of it, we had all found our places and we actually made some very beautiful music together.  It was actually one of the most satisfying mm-cc’s because of that reason.  You have to throw your fears out the window to participate in these things and everybody who came was truly willing.

I must admit we had a bit of a ringer in the fact that Larry Salzman was there.  Larry is a true professional.  He’s a skilled percussionist that is sponsored by the drum company Meinl and whenever he comes by he always brings a bunch of goodies in his bag.  I’m always being boggled by the crazy interesting hand percussion Larry introduces us to.  Larry really helped to keep us all glued together.  Joshua Saddler, a fellow monome user, was back for his second time driving all the way up from San Diego!  He’s a good man.  This time he decided to use an application called Sooperlooper.  He recorded and looped much of what Larry was doing on the fly.  It worked out quite well.

Rene Cardona is an awesome local artist and an old friend.  This was his first mm-cc.  He told me afterward that he really let go and got really into making the music.  That was awesome.  You can see Rene’s Art at this upcoming Fullerton Art walk at The Violethour gallery.  Ryan Steele is an old friend as well and he made this mm-cc special by being the first person ever to add vocals to the music we were making.  The song that he sang to was the highlight of the afternoon and also the main track I chose for the video.  He also sampled quite a few of the instruments and I was surprised how good he was at the drums.

Finally, the last member of this serendipitous group was David Marks.  He is the producer of my friend Steve’s documentary film “The Reach of Resonance”.  It’s an amazing documentary film that I think everyone should see about free improvisor musicians.  (Not too unlike what we were doing at this mm-cc)  David and Steve have been friends since high school and David took a gamble and decided to help fund Steve’s travels around the globe to collect footage.  Not a surprise to me, the film has won much praise and has a string of screenings in some of the worlds greatest art museums, including the Louvre.  If you like documentaries and have a chance to see it then don’t let anything get in the way.  At the mm-cc David had fun experimenting with my soundlab and Larry’s kalimba but ultimately he added the guitar track that was the perfect compliment to our jam.

The video aspect to this mm-cc was shot just a day ago.  I have been so busy at work that I have had almost no time to get this video put together.  I decided to do a fluid shoot.  Once I got home from work I got out the record player from my harmonograph table and set it atop a stack of books.  I got my tripod in position and set a large softbox as my backlight.  I placed a small wine glass on the center of my record player and turned it slowly as I dropped food coloring into water.  I also played around with oil in water and food coloring bubbles dropped in.  It was a good shoot and reminded me quite a bit of that feeling I would get after doing one of my daily creative things.

For the video, I decided to play more with the mirror effect.  I have to say I have never produced such beautiful mirror effect shots until I put these rotating drops of color into the mirror effect.  I always think of Don Whitaker’s Totems video as a great example of the kind of beauty you can create with the mirror effect.  I think with these liquids I created something perhaps on par with his.

It’s funny because Jenny is always making cracks when she sees me on the computer with a mirror effect on the screen.  She says “Are you looking at your vaginas again?”  Well, the mirror effect in the middle of this video is actually quite…let’s say sensual.  I see much more than vaginas of course but that might just be me.  I’d love to hear what you saw in the mirror section.  Please leave a comment below if you wish to share.

Well, enough reading.  Please enjoy the video below!  To see other mm-cc’s please visit http://mm-cc.org

This is a video I cut together for fun back in 1998.  I’ve decided to share it with you.

I was in college and under the influence.  I popped in an old VHS tape of this TV show M.A.S.K from the 1980’s.  In the background was the song “Intergalactic” by the Beastie Boys.  I noticed how nicely the rhythms matched between the rapping of the Beastie Boys and the mouths of the M.A.S.K. characters.  Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.

Unfortunately, I’ve had trouble keeping this video on the internet without EMI coming in and claiming copyright on it.  Lately, I’ve been trying to think of a new way I present it on the net and without it being pulled for copyright.  This is how I’ve decided to get around it.

(By the way if you live outside of the U.S. I believe you can watch the original version without a problem.  Otherwise, you have to follow the instructions below.)

INSTRUCTIONS:  Click on my video below and let it load but don’t play it yet.  Then click on this link and load up Intergalactic song from the video on that page.  Once they’ve both loaded up, set each of them at the beginning.

Now start playing my video. You will see a countdown come up. Now get ready to press play on the Intergalactic video. At the end of the countdown you will see the word “NOW” flash suddenly. Quickly! Press play.

That’s it. You should be pretty synced up.  One way to know: the beat drops when the meteor lands.

I hope you enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

This one has been a long time coming.  It was just about a month ago that I filmed my friends Marcus and Amber for the music video I’ve been trying to work on here and there on weekends and whatever time I can find available.  I have been busy, which is something I like to say in these blog posts.  Nevertheless, it never ceases to be true.  Numerous times over the past month I have thought to myself that I should post something about my progress as it happened.  Unfortunately, I procrastinated regularly and now I am chronicling the full build in one post.

This is the story of my crazy lazy susan.

The shoot with Marcus and Amber was the first time I’d used it.  At that point it was simply a heavy duty lazy susan part attached to a circular piece of plywood.  My initial plan for rotating it smoothly and consistently was to create a channel around the circumference of the plywood and to then to wind it with fishing line.  Once I’d have my subjects placed in position on the lazy susan, I would then reel in the line and therefore spin the lazy susan at a constant rate.  Unfortunately, first tests proved that that plan was not such a great idea.  It was almost impossible to reel in the line with the weight of two people standing on the lazy susan.  For the shoot I decided to simply rotate it with my hands and I found it very challenging to spin it at a constant rate.

I knew then that I wanted to motorize this sucker.  The only way to get constant motion is to have some kind of motor or crank driving it.  In the edition of MAKE magazine that was out at the time there was an article about a drill powered go-kart.  I really liked the idea of driving something with a drill because a drill is something that is readily available and I didn’t need to spend very much money on it.  The second thing I needed was a bike to take apart.  I stopped by Goodwill and very easily found one for 30 bucks.  Nice!  The next thing I had to figure out was how to modify my lazy susan to use these bike parts.  I conferred with my co-worker Gage and he helped me design a method that could work.  The idea was to raise the lazy susan off the ground with some legs and to have the chainring from the bike coming down from underneath.  Then, I could attach the chain and spin it from beside the lazy susan.

This was a great idea because I wanted the design to be as simple and as portable as was possible.  I decided I needed to find someone who could do a little welding for me.  Luckily, my friend Rob Derry came to the rescue.  Rob is an awesome guy who works in the film industry.  He is truly a renaissance man and does all sorts of cool things.  I met him on Prince Caspian and he was in charge of servicing all of the animatronic heads on that film.  One of his favorite things to do is creating realistic movement in creature design with pneumatics.  One of his most prized creations was a pneumatic version of the the alien in Alien Vs Predator.  He has an amazing workshop full of awesome tools like CNC machines and lathes which he has so graciously (and perhaps mistakenly) offered me the ability to use anytime I have an idea.  I totally appreciate his help and he absolutely rocks.

Needless to say, my welding job proved to be no challenge for him.  He welded a galvanized pipe to my bike chainring for me.  I then attached the chainring to the bottom of my lazy susan with a pipe flange.  The next thing I had to do was stabilize my drill with something that would allow me to hold it steady and tight while I spun it.  Gage and I discussed it some more and we decided that the simplest method would be to use a plank of wood fitted against the legs of the lazy susan.

This seemed simple enough.  The only problem was that I couldn’t keep the chain from falling off.  The lazy susan would spin a couple of times and then the chain would fall right off.  I surmised that there was two reasons why the chain kept falling off.  One reason was that you don’t see many chain-driven objects out there that mounts the chain horizontally.  This way if the chain is not completely tight gravity will simply make it come off.  So, I knew I needed my chain to be nice and taut.  The second reason was because I mounted the pipe slightly off of the center of my lazy susan.  So when I spun it with the drill I could feel the chain tightening and loosening as it spun. So, I needed to design a chain tensioner.  I went as simple as possible and I ultimately decided to us a pulley attached to a spring attached to an eyelet which was mounted on one of the legs of the lazy susan.  This way I could keep the chain nice and taut even as it loosened and tightened while I spun it.

Finally, I had it working pretty darn good.  We filed down the bolt on the cassette from the back wheel on the bike so that it could fit in the drill without slipping.  I connected the smallest gear on the cassette to the largest gear on the chainring below the lazy susan.  This allows for the most amount of torque out of my drill while also allowing me to spin the lazy susan slowly.

We had a pretty good time at my office running the first successful tests with it.  I realized that, even on the slowest gears, if I held the drill at full-throttle the lazy susan would spin pretty damned fast.  I decided to give my co-workers a few rides on it at the end of the day.

After I finish this music video I may install some handles on it and turn it into a full fledged amusement park ride.  I haven’t tested it out on any of the higher gears but then again, I’m a little afraid to.

Check out the video showing off how it works!  I’m pretty happy with the results.

Well, it’s time for another Morning Music & Coffee Consumption post, or mm-cc.

Jared, the creator of the concept, had forgotten that I was hosting the first weekends of each month and ended up sending out the invite to his friends.  So, this time their were simultaneous mm-cc’s happening on either side of the country.  We decided that for the final product we should combine both jams into one.  We made it a truly collaborative creation.  I sent Jared our tracks from the west coast and he blended them into his recordings.  He sent me video footage that he filmed on the east coast and I created visuals to accompany the track.

I plan on also doing a cutdown of our (westside only) jam which I’ll post here eventually.  Not to be territorial (Westsiiyeed!) but just because it’s something that my friends look forward to, to see how our meandering tangents and misdirections eventually get cutdown into a pretty sweet little tune.

I would have had this video finished sooner but last week I had a sudden trip to Detroit for work that sort of stifled my momentum a bit.   Jared sent me seven short video clips from his jam session.  They were beautiful, roaming, narrow depth of field (probably his Asahi 50mm) type shots of various instruments and reel to reels.  I was a little worried at the idea of filling in seven minutes of time but I thought my visual concept would probably complement long drawn out takes.

I decided to do some time-based effects on the footage.  For those of you who know a bit of After Effects, I used the Time Displacement effect.  The Time Displacement effect takes some kind of black and white image, that you give it, and uses it to shift pixels and distort time on your target video clips.  It’s pretty dang similar to slit-scan (wink) but doesn’t quite pull it off on a per pixel basis.  It’s a pretty cool effect nonetheless.  The way I used it on the video below is I created a fractal noise pattern that evolved over time.  Then I Mosiac’d it into, either evolving vertical bars, or a bunch of squares.  Then I fed that grayscale mosaic pattern into the Time Displacement effect and it proceeded to slice up my video into random blocks of time.

The second effect I did, where you travel down a tunnel of video footage, was inspired by this short video I spotted a while back on vimeo.  I thought it was a pretty cool kaleidoscopic effect reminiscent of a New Zealand fern.  I didn’t quite put enough effort into really pulling off the fern effect and decided to call it a day.  It’s all right.  It looks pretty cool.

Well, I hope you enjoy this mellow trip into the void.  Thanks!

I just got back from a tightly-packed week-long family vacation in Wisconsin.  Go Packers!  Actually, it’s Jenny who’s originally from there.  But, it was a pretty full vacation, lot’s of driving around visiting various relatives, eating copious amounts of cherry and butterscotch dilly bars along the way.  We got back to California at midnight on Saturday and deflated all day on the sofa on Sunday.  Now, life is somewhat back to normal and I’m looking forward to shooting more for the Cue The Moon music video.

The week leading up to our vacation was quite busy.  I had to tie up a bunch of stuff at the office and I also had a shoot for the music video with my friend Marcus and his girlfriend Amber.

Marcus and I are very old friends.  He and I were in all the plays and musicals together back in high school.  He always got the romantic lead part and I always got the comedy part.  Ah well, what can you do?  I certainly tried.

After graduation Marcus followed his dream and moved to New York.  He had lots of success out there being one of the original cast members from “Wicked”, “The Flower Drum Song” and Twyla Tharp’s “The Times They Are A-Changing”.  Now, he’s out here in LA trying to get his film career going.  He’s doing okay for starters, he was just in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.  Check out his IMDB.  His girlfriend, Amber Waller, is also an actress.  Not only is she very beautiful, she also has the most familiar face to me.  I swore I had either met her or seen her before.  She told me that she gets that from people all the time, here’s her IMDB.  She is originally from Missouri and is also fresh in starting her acting career out here in LA.

This particular shoot was the first of three or four similar shoots I have scheduled where I’m filming couples (ie. my friends who are willing) in somewhat intimate situations to eventually be slit-scanned.  The sequence for each shoot is basically broken down into three steps: Man and Woman Apart, The Approach, and finally, Making Contact.  In this shoot, Amber sits on the floor and appears totally normal (ie. not slit-scanned) while Marcus approaches her slowly in slit-scan form.  Once he makes contact with Amber and settles into a kiss then Amber begins to move and they both become slit-scanned.

I filmed it in Marcus’s apartment and moved all the furniture out of the way.  Lighting it was the biggest struggle and yet one of the most satisfying parts.  When it comes to the type of stuff I usually shoot at work, it’s all interview or hosting-type stuff so a couple of soft boxes and a back light is the usual set-up.  This was fun for me to actually light something with some drama and shadow.

I was really lucky to have my first shoot of this type to be with these two actors.  They were so professional and willing that there wasn’t a single uncomfortable moment.  After capturing a few takes of a controlled slow motion kiss, I set them free and allowed them to move and kiss at whatever speed they liked.  They kissed for many minutes, moving from one side to the other and it’s one of my favorite slit-scan shots ever.   The final shot looks like they physically become that famous erotic scrambled television signal we all (at least, those of us who were born in the 70’s) peered deeply into trying to see something we weren’t allowed to see.

Finally, there was the last shot.  The shot on my little homemade lazy susan where the two lovers rotate in a twisting embrace.  I got down on the floor and turned the lazy susan manually with my hands.  I found it almost impossible to keep a consistent speed so the slit-scan has some wavy lines in it.  I have a slomo version of the shot cooking in the computer now so hopefully I can smooth out some of those wavy lines.  Although, I still think the slit-scan came out pretty cool.

This week I am adjusting the lazy susan in order to make it motorized for future shoots.  I am taking my inspiration from the Drill Kart project in the latest issue of MAKE magazine and planning on driving the rotation with my corded drill.  I will no doubt post about it in the next week or so.

 
I’ve been so busy at work this last week that I had very little time to devote to preparing this months mm-cc video.  After the last one, I vowed to have all my video elements collected ahead of time so that when it came time to cut I’d be able to move quick.  This was the big delay in posting the last mm-cc.  Well, this time I had all my video elements prepared but my work had me so busy I couldn’t start cutting down the audio until the weekend.

For those of you who don’t know, mm-cc stands for Morning Music & Coffee Consumption.  It is an idea started by Jared at uprlip.com.  The concept is simple.  Get together with your friends early on a Sunday morning and make some music with them.  I’m hosting one of them the first Sunday of every month over the summer.

This mm-cc was a much more mellow occasion than the last one, which kind of made it more pleasurable.  No stressing on technicalities.  I brought the modular out this time and began the noise-making with a patch.  It was a very peaceful sound which set us all off on some mellow tinkering with the instruments.  Eventually, we hit our groove and the jams meandered in and out of different rhythms, melodies and bass lines.

We started and stopped quite a few times and I recorded almost all of it.  I had trouble choosing which melodies to highlight.  I narrowed it down to two of my favorite ones.  Even though I knew that having both of them in full in the video was going to make it too long, I decided to cut a short snippet from the second one and tack it to the beginning of the video.
 

 
The visual elements in this video is some of the material I’ve collected for the Cue The Moon music video I’ve been working on.  For the past few weeks I have been rendering slitscan shots like a madman.  So, I figured I’d use this mm-cc video as an excuse to play around with some of those shots.  I’m still in the process of shooting for the music video.  I’ve ramped up as of late because Jenny and I are off to Wisconsin on the 17th of this month for a week-long family vacation.  I want to have as much footage as possible before then so I can take it with me and edit.  It won’t be all water shots of course but water just looks so beautiful in slitscan that it will be a major element.  In fact, I am shooting over the next couple of evenings on it.  This time with actual humans.  I’m kind of excited about it.  I built an extra large lazy susan for it.  More on that later.
 

 
For the video, I sort of pulled my inspiration from Don Whitaker’s video called “Liquid Meditations”.  In that video Don takes some of his many collected nature shots and, through the use of a simple mirror effect, creates these spiritual compositions out of it.  It’s really beautiful and I recommend checking it out.

Reuben Mahler – Guitar, Soundlab

Jeff Numainville – Banjo

Mike Goggin – Guitar, Bass

Bob Lexan – Drums

Charlie Visnic – Monome, Modular

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the song and video!  Check out other mm-cc videos here.

A little while back I was perusing vimeo and I came across this really cool video by Jason Drew.  I noticed a particular effect in it that I have always wanted to recreate but never knew how.

Now that television transmissions have gone completely digital you have probably seen this effect before.  Your watching TV and then suddenly the image freezes.  Then, instead of glitching back to the next shot, its as if the next shot appears to be wearing the information from the previous shot.  It’s a surreal effect that can be hard to explain.

Well, I commented on Jason’s video and asked how he did it.  He replied and linked me to a series of video tutorials that explained how.  It’s pretty awesome because all the software to do your own datamoshing videos is completely free.  I recommend checking out the tutorials.  Here’s part 1, part 2 and part 3.

I, of course, had to do a bit of experimenting myself.  I decided to take a bunch of the shots that I’d collected over the period of the 365 days of creativity and make my own datamoshing video.

It came out pretty beautiful.

The song is from my friends band Odelia.  I’m so happy to have used their song.  I have been wanting to do something with their music for a while now and I felt like this seemed like a good opportunnity.  The song is from their fourth album called “Don’t Go Down To The Water”.  The song is called, “Mande Burung”

Buy their music now on iTunes or Bandcamp!

I hope you enjoy!

 
Things have been pretty crazy lately.  I’ve been extremely busy at work over the past three weeks and it’s been a month and a half now since Jenny came down with Pneumonia.  It started as a bad cough which was sticking.  It got a bit better and then suddenly got much worse.  I had to take her to the emergency room at one point.  I’m happy to say that she’s feeling much better now but it has been a long and tough recovery for her.

During her recovery, I started work on a sizzle piece for Disney/Pixars upcoming release Monsters University, a Monsters Inc. prequel.  Pretty awesome, no doubt.  I’m always content to be working on anything from Pixar.  I’m lucky because I get to receive lots of cool concept art and Monster designs created by the Pixar artists.  I felt the same way when I worked on Up and Toy Story 3.  The artwork that I get to see from these films is stuff that may never see the light of day somewhere else.  I decided to google some of the artists and I found a plethora of them had their own blogs.

I started at Lou Romano’s blog.  I remembered his name from working on Up.  He is someone who did a lot of the visual development on that film.  In fact, he was the artist who painted the picture of Paradise Falls on Carl Fredricksen’s mantle.
 

His artwork is awesome and it’s so cool that I’m able to go back into his archives.  Then, I began investigating all of the artists on Lou’s sidebar.  Every one of them was super cool and had a style that totally appeals to me.  Seeing all the awesome art kind of inspired me to possibly take on a new challenge in the future.  A drawing challenge.  To try and draw something every single day.  It’s certainly not official yet but it would be such a good thing for me to do.  I love drawing and always have.  From the time I was six years old up until sophomore year in high school I thought I was going to be an animator.   I realized later that I probably didn’t have the patience.

Anyways, I want to describe the sizzle piece we made because I’m quite proud of the way it came out.  I wish I could just post the video of it but I would get into trouble doing that.  A sizzle piece is a mini-documentary or promo that is usually cut together while a film is in preproduction.  It tends to be used within the company in order to build interest and excitement amongst possible investors.
 

 
My work began with a flight up north to Pixar.  I filmed an interview with the director of the film Dan Scanlon.  I shot him in front of a full body green screen so that later I could place him into a virtual set in the computer.  (Interesting green screen tip:  I shot him with the one of the cameras at a 90 degree angle so that I could utilize as much of the resolution as possible.  When I brought the footage into the computer I could rotate him back 90 degrees and get my virtual camera up closer to him without blowing the resolution.)  I used this exact same shooting setup back on Toy Story 3, for this piece below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, for the past four weeks or so, my co-worker Gage and I have been busy at work creating graphics and structuring the sizzle.  Much of the Pixar promo stuff opens with a pedigree montage saying something to the effect of, “from the people who created Toy Story and Wall-E, etc…”   For this part, I decided to take my inspiration from the opening credits of Monsters Inc.  The opening credits are a cool 50’s style cutout animation beginning with shapes dancing to the music.  The shapes then form into a door and then into many doors.  The doors fly around and monsters inside of them form the words to the opening titles.
 

Click here to view the embedded video.

For ours, it opened exactly the same way.  Shapes appear and form into a door.  The door opens and we go through it towards a wall full of Toy Story clouds.  Titles pop up, synced to brass hits…”They’ve…Taken..Us…”  The camera pans down and lands on Andy’s bed with all the Toy Story characters.  A title behind them reads…”To Worlds of Imagination…”  Buzz’s wings pop open and a slimey blob arm appears and pulls the frame up.  The camera flies down into blue and lands on a Finding Nemo frame with a title that says “Under The Sea”.  A monster claw comes in from the side and shuts a door over Finding Nemo.  The door flies back to reveal it’s the door from the house in UP and it’s flying over buildings.  A title appears, “Up Above The Clouds.”  A dumb looking monster pops up behind the buildings and looks at the house.  We fly upwards above the balloons to see a flying door throwing words out of it.  The words form into…”And in 2013.  The door flings open to reveal a giant monster mouth (the same one from the Monsters Inc. opening) and we fly through mouth to see more title cards.  “They’re returning to Monstropolous…For A Brand New Adventure.”  Then, the monster you see at the top of this page (his name is ClabClaws) shows up at the bottom of the screen and grabs a letter “M” from above.  Each of his claws fight for the letter.  Finally, the “M” pops out of they’re claws and forms the title “Monster’s University”  Finally, we are off into the main body of the piece.

The way Gage and I worked was we pulled iconic moments from various Pixar films and recreated them graphically in illustrator out of simple shapes, like the logos below.  Then, we exported the shapes into After Effects so that we could animate them independently.  Gage also went about designing all of these amazingly cool monsters that would help us transition from one film to another.
 

The sequence shown above was ultimately cut from the opening graphic because there was the likelihood that recreating the logos was not going to be accepted.

It was sort of a risky thing to do to attempt to recreate such a style.  It’s not the norm or something that they’d expect from a sizzle.  And more often than not they’d replace something like this with feature footage instead.  In the end, I’m glad we did it because it turned out awesome and it was well received at Disney.

Like I said, I can’t really show you the piece itself but if it ever finds a commercial place or ends up on the internet then I will definitely embed it here when it does.

It’s made by Don Whitaker.  I’ve mentioned him before.  His video’s have been very inspiring to me.  
 
He has a numbered series of video exercises he calls brainblink.  This one is special.  It’s a stream near his house where the water flows over black rock.  He focused the camera on a spot where the water splashes up regularly and filmed it at 230 frames per second.  Then he brought it into the computer and used a simple mirror effect.

What you see is…well, I think Don describes it best, “Astonishing complexity and infinite variety are everywhere”

Watch the video for a while.  It takes a bit for it to kick in but when it does you will see what I mean.

What do you see?  I saw skulls, insects, ballet dancers, indian goddesses, a tiger, and a giant fish coming right at me.  The second time I watched it, I saw a whole new batch of things.

No.  I am not high.

Enjoy!

 
Photo courtesy of Don Whitaker

I have been having meetings lately regarding the music video I’m doing for Cue The Moon.  I initially was going to do a slit-scan based video that would appear to be a single shot panning around a room.  The camera would pass by various objects which would be under the effect of slit-scan.  I ultimately nixed that idea because A.) I felt like the special effect of stitching all of these slits-can shots together in the computer might not turn out how I’d planned and B.) I wouldn’t be able to use the ocean as a subject.

There is nothing quite like the ocean when it comes to getting beautiful results from slit-scan.  It all comes down to the movement and texture of it all.  The ocean has variations of color and whitewash and ripples all flowing at a consistent rate.  If you stand on the beach and look out at the water there is a natural slow motion quality to it.  These are the main reasons that the slit-scan results look so amazing and surreal.

I knew that I wanted water and the ocean to be an element in my music video for this very reason but I also posed the question to myself of “What else out there has the same qualities of texture and movement as the ocean does?”  My ideas for experimentation were, the leaves and branches of a tree blowing in the wind.  There is a natural slow motion beauty to the movement of a tree in the wind.  Another idea is a flock of birds flying together.  Birds most definitely don’t move in slow motion but there is a larger movement to the flock as a whole that would be an interesting thing to see.  The last idea was the clouds.  The movement of the clouds, when time-lapsed, can look surprisingly similar to the movement of the ocean.

Last weekend it was my plan to inaugurate the beginning of shooting on this music video with an early morning trip to the beach to film the water as the sun rose.  Unfortunately, Jenny has been sick and that mixed with bit of surprise rain / easter plans kind of spoiled that hope.  Although sunday afternoon as Jenny and I drove home from her parents house, I noticed the rain had let up a bit.  The sun was coming through and the clouds were beautiful and large and fluffy.  I decided it was an opportune time to do a time lapse.

I pointed my camera to the clouds and snapped pictures at an interval of one frame a second.  I let the camera go for about an hour and a half to two hours and the time lapse ended up being about three minutes long.

I sent the shot through Amnon Owed’s awesome slit-scan processing script twice.  Once running on the X-axis and the other on the Y.  Due to the large number of frames being input (4741 frames, to be exact) the images from the X-axis slit-scan were really wide at a resolution of 4741X1080.  The images from the Y slit-scan were extremely tall at 1920X4741.

The clouds looked really cool and interesting but also very squashed.  This was because of the actual speed of the clouds.  They passed by at an unusually fast rate.  I could have gone with an interval of two pictures a second and gotten even better results.

I brought the two shots into After Effects and loaded them into an HD comp.  I didn’t really like the way the clouds looked all squashed up so I decided to scale them up to 3 times their actual size in one dimension.  Basically, I took the X-axis slit-scan and scaled it on the X-axis to 300%.  I did the same thing to the Y-axis of the Y slit-scan.  I would normally never want to scale any image up by 300% but because I was only scaling up one dimension I was still retaining some sharpness from the other dimension.  There is some nasty artifacting here and there due to the enlarging but it also revealed all this amazingly beautiful detail and movement at the edges of the clouds.

It was that surreal effect I was hoping for.  It’s the texture and movement that we know from the clouds in the sky and yet there’s something foreign going on.  Cloud shapes appear to form like falling rocket trails out of thin air.  At times the clouds look like strands of long white hair.  I can see even more interesting variations coming about if I do more of these time lapses at different times of the day.

I decided to cut a little montage together last night.  It was great fun exploring around within these two giant panoramic movie files and finding the pretty moments to focus on.  With the two factors of each shot lasting for about 45 seconds and the other being that the scale in one dimension is so enlarged, there was an incredible amount of variety I could find at any particular time or position within a single shot.

I hope you enjoy it!  The music in the video is from my music box melody from Day 148 / A Lullaby To Life.  I took that audio and slowed it way down in Spear.  Then I took that audio file into Ableton and layered it with a reversed version of itself.

A couple weeks ago I received an email from my buddy Jared from Uprlip.com.  He is in the midst of doing his own creative thing-a-day blog.  He’s currently on Day 109.  He’s somebody I have talked about before.  He’s an inspiring musician.  Many of his posts are musical in nature and absolutely beautiful.  I thoroughly recommend perusing his blog.  There is a lot of inspiration to be had.  Also, check out his music here, of course.

Anyways, a while back Jared started this thing he dubbed “Morning Music & Coffee Consumption”.  Basically, every Sunday morning he would invite friends over to his place to hang out, drink coffee and make some music.  Afterwards, he would edit some visuals to an excerpt from the recordings and post it to his blog.  He was so inspired by the idea that he decided to start a site dedicated completely to this concept.  It can be found at mm-cc.org.  You can watch some of his previous recordings.

It’s pretty cool.  He’s even planning on adding a forum to the site because I think it’s his hope that it might grow into something larger and others around the country could participate in some way.  I started by uploading a sample for him to play with.

I think it’s a neat idea because doing something like this in the morning is unusual.  We are all used to sunday coffee, breakfast and then getting onto the chores we have for the day but I’ve never been invited to a musical jam session in the morning.  I’m used to staying up until 2am playing with music.  I figured the rest of your sunday might be a little better off for having done it.

Well, back to the email he sent me…He told me that he felt like he was spreading himself a little thin as of late and that he was hoping that I could substitute for this weeks mm-cc.  I was totally down for it.  In fact, I’m going to make it a regular once-a-month thing for the summer time here.

I got Jenny’s approval and sent out the invite.  It was completely embraced by my friends here.  We had a great turnout.  I unloaded my studio onto the grass in my backyard.  I provided a small drum set, electric guitar, bass guitar, a finger piano and my soundlab.  I was a little preoccupied with checking and double checking everything the night before that I forgot to check the mm-cc.org forum for any uploaded samples to play with.

Sunday morning, people started arriving and I was still hooking things up.  At first, I felt a bit self-conscious because I really didn’t know how to get the ball rolling.  It takes a lot of confidence to get up there and start it off.  I was pretty busy getting my monome set up.  My goal for the monome was to use an app called Mash to sample and loop the various instruments around me.  Eventually, I got it working pretty well albeit not perfectly.  I had to route the audio out of Mash through a 1/4 inch output of my audio interface and then back into it to go to Ableton, which resulted in a bit of annoying latency.

Eventually, the ball started to roll.  It began with experimental noises.  Violet, my friend Brandon’s daughter, started by playing around with the Soundlab.  Then, I looped some drums she was playing.  I didn’t really want to direct anybody because I didn’t want to have expectations of people.  I wanted, first and foremost, for people to enjoy the coffee and the company.  The music would hopefully materialize on it’s own.

More people began to arrive and eventually we had a serious mix of instruments.  Brandon brought a Banjo-tar and accordian.  My buddy Danny brought his upright bass.  My pal Reuben brought a cool circuit bent toy.  Finally, my friend Larry brought a bunch of sweet world percussion items as well as a jaw harp.

The real music started when my friend Wendy began playing the Banjo-tar into my monome and I began looping some of her licks.  It’s the first bit you will hear at the beginning of the video below.  It’s funny to me because she says to Jeff, “I’m pretending to be a musician” and I recorded that and looped it.  I felt like that was the perfect comment to get captured and turned into the music itself.

As the day went on we had lots of nice musical moments.  I recorded as much of it as I could.  I’m lucky because a lot of my friends are really talented musicians and they are also lovely open minded people.  It takes participation to make something like this work and I owe them a lot of gratitude for being a part of it.

Eventually, the crest of the morning crashed in a rousing bluegrass hoedown jam with Banjo-tar, upright bass, drums and monome.  It was awesome!  June was running around and dancing on the lawn.

I’m looking forward to continuing this as a tradition and seeing how the music evolves and how people enjoy the company.  I hope it grows from here.

After it was all over I had to sift through all the recordings and make the video.  I was so wrapped up into the monome that I didn’t take a single picture or capture a single video.  I know some friends did but I figured I should look elsewhere for footage to cut to.  I decided to download a bunch of random videos from Archive.org.

I cut the recordings into a sort of medley of the days melodies and edited it all to the random archive footage.  It turned out pretty awesome in the end.  I dig the music and I dig the visuals.  There is a bit of comedy in there as well.

Oh well, I hope you enjoy my addition to the Morning Music & Coffee Consumption tradition.  I’m sure you’ll see more of it as time goes on.

I wanted to test out this new and exciting slit-scan Processing script that designer Amnon Owed created.  I went searching for whatever video I already had on my computer.  Since the creativity project ended I have backed-up and deleted quite a few days and material is a little sparse on the hard drive at the moment.

I really didn’t care too much which shot to choose.  I just wanted something convenient so I could test out the script and see how fast it rendered.  I chose my time lapse of the sun rising over Hollywood that I captured on Day 318.

Always a discovery, I was happily surprised with how the shot turned out.  It’s really quite beautiful!  It rendered really quick as well.  I mentioned it in my previous post- It took just over an hour to render about a minute and a half of full HD video!  Awesome!

I think I should also mention that this script does only one type of slit-scan.

There are two major techniques that are popular in slit-scan and this script only performs one of them.  Unlike my Day 330, where you see a sort of cadence flow of scan-lines traveling up the frame, where anything that doesn’t move in the shot appears unaffected by the slit-scan, this script rather presents the life of a single particular scan-line over time.  A good example of this kind of slit-scan can be found on Day 297 and Day 301.

Now a more detailed description:  Imagine a virtual slit hovering over a single scan-line from the source material.  What you will see is the life of that single scan-line suddenly spread across the entire frame at once.  Now, as it renders, that “virtual slit”, that hovers above, travels down the source material and samples each scan-line as it goes.  When it transitions from one scan-line to the next, the life of whatever scan-line it hovers over, is spread out across the screen.

Make sense?  Yep, hard to describe.  Nothing to do about it.

Anyways, check out the video below and compare it to the source material on Day 318.  In the video below you will see two shots.  In the first one, the “hovering slit” travels horizontally and in the second, vertically.

It’s hard to tell what you’re looking at exactly, but what you may recognize is the white headlights from the cars going north on the freeway and the red tail-lights of the cars going south.  They end up looking kind of like this glittery strip of sparkling lights but if you look very closely you can tell that they are actually a ton of tiny cars.  About an hours worth of cars, actually, because that’s how long the original time lapse lasted.

All of the other very thin strips of light that you see flicker on and off come from all the city lights as the “hovering slit” travels over them.

I hope this description helps to illustrate what’s going on.  You can understand why it’s tough to predict the outcome of any particular slit-scan.

Anyways, enjoy the shots.  I think they are beautiful.  The music in the video is from an artist called Automatic Thoughts from a track called “Keep Right”.  You can download it here.

If you followed my creative thing-a-day project over the past year than you already know I’m pretty interested and inspired by Slit-scan photography, or the slit-scan technique.  Without getting into too much detail, in terms of video, Slit-scan is the effect where a single line of resolution, the slit, is the only representation of a particular frame in time.  So, with 1920 scan-lines of resolution running horizontally across a single HD picture thats the potential for exactly 1 minute and 20 seconds worth of time, represented in 1920 consecutive slits, that can be seen on screen at any given moment.

Understand?  No?  That’s cool.

It’s a very hard thing to describe as well as comprehend because it deals with time visually and spatially.  Once you begin to understand what’s happening, it’s like all these doors suddenly swing open inside your brain and all your left with is an insatiable curiosity for more.  At least that’s what happened to me.

My favorite aspect of Slit-scan is, hands-down, the discovery process.  There’s always something that surprises me.  Like, I wonder what a flock of birds taking off in slomo might look like?  I kind of know what the results might look like, but then, I kind of don’t.  The wind rustling through the leaves?  I have a hunch, but there’s really no telling until I test it out.

The downside in the past was accessibility.  It began as a photography technique but you would need specialized equipment and a whole lot of patience to get a single image, let alone many images to create movement.  Then, with the evolution of the partnership between video and the computer, came the ability to control the images in ways we could only imagine before.  But still you’d need to be a computer programmer to even experiment with this new visual medium.  In the past few years, the free open-source software called Processing has really helped the most in bringing slit-scan to the masses.  Processing users have donated slit-scan scripts to the pot that others can download and try for free.  The drawback was the processing speed.  It took forever for your shots to render.

When I started doing my own slit-scans I actually created them in After Effects because it was a software I had experience with.  The trouble was, again, render speeds.  It took all night to render 30 to 40 seconds of video.  Then, I got a lucky break.  An amazing individual on vimeo named Carl Rosendahl shared his own code with me.  It worked fast.  Light years faster than my After Effects project.  I still feel extremely lucky.  He, understandably, instructed me not to distribute the software.  Although, I hated having to turn people down.  I have received various emails from people asking to see if I would be willing to share it and unfortunately I have to turn them down.

Well, today I found what could be a glowing ember of hope for all of those out there wishing to do they’re own HD slit-scans!

I was perusing the newest slit-scan videos on vimeo yesterday and I saw that Don Whitaker had uploaded some new slit-scan videos.  Don has been experimenting with slit-scan for years now.  I have enjoyed many of his videos in the past.  In fact he has one slit-scan video that is quite popular and beautiful called “Surfing The 4th Dimension”.  Check it out below!  He also runs a website with his collection of free, creative commons, nature-based stock footage called Mothernaturevideos.com.  He lives in Oregon and is in the habit of taking his camera with him on nature walks, capturing the beautiful scenery and coastline.

So, when I noticed that he had a new video up I checked it out.  I thought it was quite beautiful but what really caught my eye was his description.  He wrote that he was testing out someone else’s script and that it was about 7 times faster than his own script!  Excited to read that, I followed the links to the developers blog.  The develepor of this script is named Amnon Owed.  He is a graphic designer living in the Netherlands who does some pretty amazing things with Processing.  I totally recommend checking out his other sketches as well.  I was ecstatic to find out that, in the spirit of open source, he was releasing the script to the public!  Thank you, Amnon!  You may not realize it but you are creating your own milestone in the history of slit-scan.  There will be people out there thanking you for it.

So, for all of you out there who have wanted to try slit-scan but were either afraid of the learning curve or simply disappointed with the HD options out there, then this is the script for you! It’s really quite an easy process to perform.  Even if you have no experience with Processing don’t let that scare you away.  Go shoot some video, or download some clips off of Don Whitakers stock footage site and run them through this Processing code.  Pretty soon you’ll be addicted to learning what other things around you might look like after slit-scans been performed on it.

Follow the instruction from Amnon’s site.  Make sure you run the Memory Barrier code so that you can figure out your computers cap on memory.  Also if you run the code using some HD video and it feels like it’s running a bit slow.  Just wait.  Amnon designed it to be batch-based which means that it renders for a while before very quickly spitting out a large number of frames, then it goes on to the next batch.

An important thing to note:  Use a JPG sequence as your source.  I tried using a TGA sequence because there’s less compression on that filetype but the render time was very slow.  Once I tried out the JPG sequence as an alternative the render time was smoking-fast.  It took just over an hour to render around a minute and a half of full HD video.  That’s pretty good!

Some quick tips for shooting for slit-scan:

1. Shoot for smooth motion.  The most fluid slit-scans come from material that moves smoothly.  Slow motion is always a good idea.

2.  Keep the camera steady.  Even the tiniest camera jitter is largely pronounced after rendering it in slit-scan.

3.  Shoot long takes.  Slit-scans are all about time.  It takes at least 1 minute and 20 seconds running at 24fps to record 1920 frames of footage.  That means that you won’t even fill the whole screen up until after 1:20 minutes of time.  Anything past that marker is gravy.  That’s where your shot really begins.

Now finally check out Amnon’s beautiful video below, Eternalism.  It was made completely from footage that he downloaded from Don Whitaker’s stock footage site Mothernaturevideos.com as well as another Creative Commons HD stock site called OpenFootage.net.

Enjoy!

Images Courtesy of Amnon Owed

The design of the Monome is ingenious, in my opinion.  I remember my first impression of it.  I thought, “How are you supposed to use this device?  There’s no labels?  It’s just a box of buttons!”  After further investigation I realized that that was the very thing that made it ingenious.  It’s less about what it can do and more about what people can do with it.  It’s all about the community.

The Monome is really nothing without the community.  I could write multiple blog posts on the people of the Monome community because they are an incredible group of talented artists and forward-thinkers.  It’s amazing to see the array of applications that are now available for the Monome and every single one of them was created by a person who donated their time.  There isn’t an application out there that you can purchase because they are all available for free.  I often wonder how this amazing group of people have serendipitously assembled together.

I think the crux of it all is influence.  One developer influences another.  One artist influences another.  I will see a video demonstrating someone’s mind-blowing app and then I want to do the same thing.  That’s how the community grows.  It’s a beautiful and natural process really.  Each person helps out the other and eventually you step back and realize that there is an extremely long list of accomplishments.

There is one artist, though, that I think could be called one of the most influential Monome users out there.  His name is Matthew Davidson, otherwise known as Stretta.  No one else has quite re-imagined the Monome surface in as many different ways as he has.  He’s created around 17 applications from what I’ve counted and I’m sure that there is one or two that I’m missing.  I have blogged a bit about Stretta before.  On day 191, I used one of his apps to compose a music box melody.  On day 228 I used his app, Press Cafe, to give new life to a set of samples and on day 267, I used one of his original compositions for my Final Eyes video.

His applications are incredibly imaginative and yet deceivingly practical and playable.  He has a great knowledge of music theory and he uses that know-how to his advantage when designing his apps.  I could go on and on describing all of the many nuances of his apps but really there is no better way than to see for yourself.

I want you to know that these videos are inspiring to me on many levels.  It’s not just a Monome thing.  It’s more of a music thing.  The Monome is not a device for making “electronic music”.  It’s an instrument, a compositional tool and a sketchpad for discovery.  Even if you’re not interested in the Monome, or your not a technical person, the videos below can reveal methods of making music that you might not have thought existed before.  Below is just a small selection of some of my favorite or most inspiring demo videos that Stretta has produced.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recently, the makers of the Monome, Brian and Kelli Crabtree, have, after many years of rebuilding and expanding the Monome design, announced a whole new product.  I wondered what they could come up with that would match the concept of the monome.   The new device is called the Arc.  What is the Arc?  It’s a knob.  A knob, you say?  Well, it’s two knobs if you get the Arc2 or four knobs if you get the Arc4.  Each knob can also be pushed down to act as a button as well.   But here’s the ingenious part – each knob has 64 “decoupled” leds surrounding it.  The decoupled bit is the special aspect that makes it a community-defined product.  This means that the leds can do anything you want them to do when the knob is turned, or pushed or pushed and turned.

Even though I’ve been a part of the community for some time now I was still a little skeptical about the Arc.  I mean, how could a knob meet the versatility of a Monome?  The monome has 64 buttons, the Arc has a couple knobs and two buttons.  It’s hardly a fight.  Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Stretta got his Arcs in the mail and quickly went to town designing new applications for it.  He posted his demo videos and now I am a full-fledged believer in the Arc.  He’s has shown me that not only can the Arc be just as complex as the Monome but it can be quite a bit more expressive as well.  He has completely redefined the knob altogether.  A knob, all by itself, can now be an instrument.

If you watch only one video off this page, please make it the one at the very bottom called “Holocene”.  It is a hypnotic and beautiful composition that is performed solely on four knobs.  It is the video that inspired me to write this post.  I watched it enthralled, like I was seeing some kind of magic happen before me. 
 
Now, I really, really want an Arc.  I want to write my own apps for it.  I want to re-imagine it just like Stretta has.  The price is too steep for me at present but  I figure in due time it will find it’s way to me.  I’m excited to see how the Arc will evolve and how the community will put they’re imaginations to work.  I know that it’s a matter of time.

I emailed Stretta before writing this post because I wanted to see if he would be all right with it.  In the process, I decided to throw a couple of questions at him.  As a confessed Math dimwit myself, I wanted to know if Stretta had some kind of natural talent built in for this kind of stuff.  I was relieved to find out that Math was not a natural skill for him.  In fact, he hated math.  He described the subject as “incompatible with his young brain.”  What he did have, though, was a natural curiosity in music and technology.  His love of electronics and music began with a Casio MT-40 but his interest in the computer as a tool in the creation of music began with the release of Apple’s Lisa Computer.  It was soon replaced with the 1984 Macintosh.  He composed music with a software called Music Works.  He started sampling with an application called Studio Session.  He applied to Berklee College of Music and got accepted.  He brought his macintosh with him.  His interest in electronics, computers and music grew from there.  It wasn’t until 1991 that he discovered Max.  He’s been using it ever since.

Like I said earlier, the way the monome community grows is through influence.  We are lucky to have someone like Stretta to influence and inspire us to think differently and to create.  I feel lucky to be a part of it.  I hope that nobody is discouraged by his innovations.  It’s important to remember that at the core of Stretta’s most amazing applications, is a very simple concept.

Now enjoy the magic I’ve posted below.

Photos courtesy of Stretta.

 
I saw this video a day or two ago and straightaway started researching for more information on it.  It’s a device called the Wobbulator and it was developed by an artist named Nam June Paik.  The Wobbulator you see in the video is the very same one that Nam June Paik built himself.

The modification to the television set is actually not that complex which is one of the leading factors in my interest in it.  Plus the fact that the resulting patterns you can get from it are really amazing.  It’s interesting to me that in the course of my creative thing a day the 365 day project I found myself getting interested in drawing machines and geometric patterns.  I can’t say I remember having an affinity for the stuff previously.  It started with the Harmonograph table and it’s stemmed from there to the Pinto-graph which I’m still looking to modify for variations.  Now, this television project seems like a natural progression.  I don’t know if I’m doing it on purpose or I’m being guided that way.  I feel the same sort of fascination when I see a beautifully symmetrical origami sculpture or a rune glifberg video in a way.  I will one day have to write a blog post on the artist and animator John Whitney.  Some call him the father of computer animation.  I learned about him while working on the Harmonograph and I very quickly realized he was someone I wanted to learn more about.

Anyways, here’s the rundown on the modification.  Within these old tube television sets is a coil of copper wire with four wires coming off of it.  It’s called the deflection yoke.  The deflection yoke controls the electron beam within the tube and focuses and positions the image onto your screen.  What you do, in the most basic terms is snip the wires coming off the yoke and connect them to an audio signal.  Two of the wires are for vertical modulation and the other two are for horizontal modulation.  If you send music into it you will see the beam in the television vibrate wildly to the music.  If you were to send, rather than music, slow periodic voltages (or for you out there experienced in music synthesizers, an amplified LFO) to both vertical and horizontal connections simultaneously then you can achieve a variety of geometric patterns.

There is an important caveat I must add in regards the dangers within a common television set.  There is a suction cup attached to the tube and connected to a large high voltage capacitor which holds extremely high voltages (30,000+ I’ve read) for fairly long periods of time after the TV has been turned off and disconnected.  So, if you decide to try out this mod please read up about it on the web.  I will provide a bunch of links to multiple sources on how to do this modification.

The TV set in the video above has further modifications which adds more yokes to the tube, enabling a variety of manipulation you can’t get from just the simple mod described above.  I think I plan on adding some extra yokes myself.  I will stop by my local electronics shop and see if any of the guys there can lend me a bit of advice.

I’ve got the perfect television set as well.  An old retro Sony that I picked at a secondhand shop a while back.  I think it looks very similar to the one Nam June Paik actually used.  If you are interested in creating the same one as above then you should check out this link and check back here later because I will share whatever knowledge I gain from attempting this mod that I didn’t learn from that documentation.

Here’s a few links to other tutorials detailing the process of doing the basic single yoke hack.

Instructable, Music Visualizer

Electro-Music Forum Topic (recommended)

Circuit Benders.com (this one links you to some other pages tutorials as well, I recommend reading multiple tutorials to get an overview of how the experience might be different)

Since the end of the creative thing-a-day project I have been coming home, watching a little television with Jenny and then going to bed on time.  I have been getting more sleep in the past two or three weeks than I have gotten all last year.  The funny thing is I am more tired.  For some reason, getting more sleep equals a more tiredness.

I think the creative thing-a-day added an element of excitement to my day that even though I may have had very little sleep I felt okay because there was something to look forward to.  There was a point where it got unhealthy and I’m happy now that I can pick and choose my days to stay up working late on stuff.

Well the other day I decided to take a look under the hood of my monome app 64(video)fingers.  It seemed like a nice relaxing thing to do that might conbat this feeling of tiredness.

When I first started creating this app I thought it would be cool to be able to switch between seeing one video clip at a time to seeing multiple clips at once.  I had so much confusion and frustration creating the router system inside of it that I decided to was too much for me.  The patch looked messy enough as it was and I didn’t think it would be a simple modification.  Well, turns out I was wrong.

I went on the forums at cycling74 and quite quickly found a patch that laid out the groundwork for how it’s done.  Now, I’m happy to say that I have a working app that plays about least four patterns on screen at the same time.

After a bit more research I’ve found a better way to go about doing it, allowing me even more control of where I place each of the clips on the screen.  I don’t want it to be a boring four quandrant multi-screen.  Instead I’d like the videos to overlay each other in a more pleasing way depending on whether there’s one, two, three or four patterns playing.  I hope to implement this soon.

Now, what I need to do is learn how to make the first pattern recorded set the tempo so that first time users can begin layering sounds and video without the use of an external clock or click track.

That still seems a bit complex to me.

I’ve got a big music video shoot coming up in april.  It’s for the band Cue The Moon.  I’m very excited about it and it’s been on my mind as the next big project to conquer.  It’s going to be a slit-scan extravaganza!

If you’ve been through my blog then you may know about all my tests and experiments with the slit-scan technique.  (by the way, I have been planning on building an analog slit-scan device that anyone can build using black butcher paper and one of my DC motors, but that’s for another day).

This music video will employ many of the things I’ve learned about slit-scan over the course of my creativity project.  The video should “appear” to look like a continuous single take from beginning to end but the reality is, it will be a virtual collage of many shots all tiled together in the computer.

The best way to imagine what I’m talking about is to think of building panoramic pictures.  The way you do it is you stand in one place and snap multiple pictures as you rotate 360 degrees.  Now instead of pictures, think video.  That’s what I’m going to do.  There might be a couple of physical camera moves bridging tiled moments together but more or less you get the idea.

I decided to find out if there were other people out there doing video panoramas and I found quite a bit on the internet.  There are a couple of methods out there.  You can’t necessarily employ the technique I described above without using numerous cameras forming a circle and filming simultaneously.  The reason I can do it for the music video is because I will have a controlled environment.  In the great outdoors there is no control.  If a car drives past you, you need to capture it from the front, the left and the back all at the same time.  Nevertheless, I did find a novel approach that makes it fairly simple to film 360 degrees around you with a single camera.

The simple method is to attach a mirror ball (Christmas ornament?) onto a sturdy pole that can mount on top of your video camera.  You want to mount it so that you’re mirror ball fills the frame to the edges and voila, instant 360 degrees.  Then, you need to unwrap the video to flatten it back into a rectangle using a Polar Coordinates effect.  This requires a software that can perform the polar coordinates effect which the only ones I know of are Photoshop and After Effects.  Perhaps Gimp has a way to import video because that could be an alternative.  Here’s a link to a cheap DIY method.

Anyways, check out the video below to see an example of what this effect can look like.  It’s pretty trippy to see 360 degrees at once.  There is also software out there that allows you to bend your video panoramas into actual quicktime VR’s that you can independently pan and zoom around within.  I can foresee a future where video panoramas work their way into all sorts of avenues of entertainment from video games to choose-your-own-adventure-type movie experiences.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Well, It’s been a while.  I had a comment from my good buddy Todd Burleson recently.  He just finished his own 365 day project and he warned me that I may feel a bit lost after the thing was over and boy was he right.

Coincidentally, I took down the last bit of left over stuff from the art show today.  It’s kinda sad but it’s all good.  I had a great time.  It was a real celebration and the perfect ending.  I’m already feeling a bit nostalgic about the whole thing.

My plan was to continue the momentum of this blog by writing about all the things around me that inspire me but the truth is it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like.  Sure, on the internet I can search and find all sorts of things that amaze me but often the reality is it’s too out of reach to fit within these pages.  I find the things that are most inspiring to me are the things that I could actually do.  Something that I could realistically work towards.  For example, the cyclo-trope.  I found this video on the MAKE blog and it was highly re-posted all over the internet but the reason I posted it was because I could imagine myself doing it.  It’s not that hard.  All you need is a bicycle wheel, a video camera with some shutter speed settings and a bit of patience.

Nevertheless, It has been hard to keep the momentum going.  I have to figure out how to keep doing this without the safety-blanket of having a creative thing to present.  Having that thing, whatever it was, made it easier to communicate my thoughts.  Little ideas and sparks would occur to me while in the process of doing it and I’d try to recall those thoughts when it was time to write.  Writing was a chore but because I had something to share it was okay.  Now, I’m feeling a little lost in regards to what to communicate.  I don’t want to do editorials, I want to share things that excite me and inspire me.  I also don’t want to turn this blog into a re-blog where you might as well find the info elsewhere.  I can promise you that you’ll never see me pasting someone else’s words here.  If I find something on another blog that truly gets my juices flowing I will certainly describe it in my own words.  Maybe I’d offer up a low-cost or weird alternative to it.

I know I have to change the tag-line at the top soon seeing as this is no longer a creative thing-a-day blog.  I still want creativity to be the aim but I guess it should be more general now.  If you have some thoughts I’m all ears.  Lay down some comments if you’ve got an idea for what it should say at the top.  Heck, maybe I could change it up every once in a while?  Maybe daily.  Maybe not.  Maybe randomly.  It’s really just a file on a server that can be overwritten quite easily.

Nevertheless, I’m still here and I’m still looking to share.  I just may be a little slower.  If you’re still interested in reading, especially in a few months from now, perhaps then I’ll have found my foothold.  We shall see.

I love interesting and creative mediums and Nick’s medium is really interesting.  It looks like a mixture of cut-up newspaper and old paperbacks.  His method appears to be the use of many small paper stacks of various lengths substituting as brush strokes.  I love the way he uses the colors on the edges of the paper and I love the way the stacks work as backdrops for the main subject.

Kind of makes me want to buy a small deep frame and stack it up with patterns of stacked paper.  Awesome stuff!  This idea would’ve definitely been a “must do” project if I was still doing the creative thing-a-day.

Either way, check out this awesome ingenuity!

Unfortunately, I got the stomach flu for my birthday.

I tried going to work the next day but went back home after a few hours.  I stayed home for the rest of the week.  It was pretty horrible.  I stayed in bed with no appetite.  Saturday afternoon was the first time I started experiencing even the slightest hint of hunger.  It’s funny to me because it was almost as if my body knew about the art show and was holding onto the sickness until after the last post.  After the final post went out it was like a decompression chamber opened up inside me and all the viruses within me were allowed to move.

Anyways, I’m feeling better now but still a bit aimless.  I need to get my motor running again.  Creative projects will never end in my world.  I have a music video that I need to focus on and hopefully you can all have a sneak peek into that.  This Friday the 18th will be the closing night of the art show and then I need to take it all down off the walls and turn my focus to the music video.

Come on out to the final show if you can!

There will still be all the bells and whistles like the Harmonograph table, the Pinto-graph, the music boxes, the video-triggering monome and the random sound installations, Plus there will be a great performance by a very skilled percussionist named Larry Salzman.

Come on out!  The address is:  225 West Santa Fe Ave. Fullerton, CA 92832