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

I’m sitting at a local coffee shop in Fullerton called McClain’s and thinking about what to write for my final thoughts.

The first question that pops to mind is “What did you learn from this experience?”.  That’s a good question.  It’s a tough question because there are many answers to it.  The best answer is I learned a lot.  I learned about different techniques of art, I learned about illusions, I gained respect for other artists.  I learned about time management, I learned about myself, I gained confidence.  I learned that no man should need to do one creative thing a day (but I don’t regret it).  There were days where I felt completely rundown by the blog.  Many times over the year I would refer to it as, “my stupid creative thing”.  It became a job and like any job, no matter how perfect it might seem, there are days you just don’t want to do it.

The way I felt about it went in waves.  When I look at my “THE YEAR SO FAR” link on the site I can even see the waves from a sort of birds-eye view.  When things were good, they were good for days in a row and when they were bad they seemed to go for longer.  The ups were usually a complete surprise to me, like “The Fruitiest William Tell” or “Light Cables”, which oddly enough, happened only a couple days apart.  There’s “The Swayze Beat” or “Room Tone Rhythm”.  They all spawned from a simple and small concept but the results were surprisingly satisfying.  The downs were the days I just wanted to get it over with, “my stupid creative thing”.  They were usually a tutorial of some sort, or a modular patch or a quick drawing here and there, “The Fall-back”.  The music box tunes became a fallback-type project for me but I always seemed to feel better for doing them.

I must admit I put a lot of pressure on myself.  I tried hard to keep it random.  I think a little of it comes from a small dose of showmanship that has always been in my blood.  The moment I realized that there was an actual audience out there looking in on my blog I wanted to, for lack of a better phrase, keep it entertaining.  The only way I knew how was to keep it random.  My usual analogy is nobody wants to see me practice guitar every day.  So, this added a level of pressure and weight.  It also made certain long term projects very hard to do.  I was okay with that though because there was something exciting to me and almost easier about doing something random each day.

As I reread the paragraph above I feel like I’m only thinking about one half of the project.  As I got closer to the end I got more impatient.  It’s called “senior-itis”, when your close to graduating high school and you start cutting classes and you start caring less about the grades.  The same sort of thing happened to me in the last days of the blog.  When I started the blog I posted every single day, then I started posting them the afternoon the day after.   Eventually I was  holding onto two or three days and posting them in clusters.  By the end of it, I was posting full weeks at once because it was so hard for me to drum up the energy to organize the photos and write something.

The other frustrating factor was that I really wanted to work on long term stuff at my own pace.  Instead, I was forced to do something small.  You can’t get to the bottom of something in a day.  You can only touch the surface of things.  I did continue to delve into many things that genuinely interested me like slit-scan, animation and artistic techniques but it still felt like I was only skimming the surface.  Now that the blog is over I am going to relish in the steady pace of things.  I plan to study processing and arduino much more.  I want to practice rhythm on the monome.  I want to make more films but I want to spend a lot of time in preproduction.  I am so looking forward to this next year.

I feel like I’m making it this experience out to be a downer.  It’s most definitely was not.  It was one of the most productive, eye-opening years of my life.  I can remember the year and see my daughter change in such a unique way.  I have been completely changed by the whole event.  I believe I can do just about anything I put my mind to.  I have learned a ton about myself and what I like and what I don’t.  I’ve discovered a new love in paper-cutting and collage.  I’ve learned that creativity is all about seeing what someone else has done and taking it somewhere yourself.  I’ve tried to always share where my ideas come from and the internet has been a great source of inspiration.  There are so many talented people out there and they are all available at your fingertips.

I wish I could sum it up.  It was an experience.  A great learning experience.  A satisfying experience.  I want to thank you for reading.  Without you, whoever you are, I might’ve given up a long time ago.  Knowing that someone is listening is part of the experience and without all your wonderful comments of encouragement I would’ve really had troubles keeping it up.  So thank you so much for your eyes and ears and your wonderful words.

I should talk about the future a bit because I will continue to work on things and I appreciate the connection to all of you.  At times I reference to it as the ending of “the blog” when I should say rather “the project”.  The blog will remain on the internet and the 365 day project will always be archived here (as long as I can pay for the hosting service that is).

I will continue to blog but it will most likely be about more varied things.  I might see another artist that inspires me and I might blog about that.  I may simply have an idea I’d like to share.  I will still blog about my personal projects but it may be more few and far between.  I will always try to keep the theme of the blog as something I hope inspires people.  It will be like, “Look at this amazing thing I saw today!” or “Check out this ingenious idea somebody thought of?” or perhaps sometimes even “You know what I really hate?”  I hope that you all will continue to read and comment your opinions.

I want to warn you as well that there is the hope that I can turn this blog into something that can possibly make me some kind of extra income.  This brings up the topic of advertising placed somewhere on the page.  I, personally, can’t imagine ads complementing the aesthetic of my blog but it is one of the best ways to receive income from doing a blog.  I am just toying with the idea in my head but I would make sure that whatever ads are placed are in line with the kind of content I post about.  I hope they will be ads to companies like Adafruit, Grand-Illusions and others who are providing the tools for creating and inspiring.  I hope that I can find a clean way of implementing it into the blog.  I hope that the prospect of ads does not turn you away.  But, like anything, we will see how it goes.

It has been a wonderful experience.  I want to extend my support out to the others out there doing their own 365 day project.  If you decide to take one on I will post a link to it on my “links” page.  Please check in on uprlip.com and comment on his site as well.  He is doing some amazing things over there and I’m sure he’d love to know people are listening just like me.

In the end, I hope this blog doesn’t end but continues in some other form.  It won’t be a sudden transition but a gradual one as I find my new foothold in the world of blogging.

It’s kind of amazing to me that I am here now writing these words.  That the project is actually over.  I will see what it’s like to go back to normal life.  I’d gotten into the rhythm of doing these creative things that it will be something new to drive home without the goal.  I’ll be sure to blog about that it as it occurs to me.  I have liked the reflective quality of blogging.  The freedom of expressions and the forum to express it.  There is a sadness to seeing it end.  But there is also the undeniable realization that I need the release.  I started the blog to re-invigorate my creative self and it certainly did that.  Now, I need it to end in order to truly fly.  I hope that I can still offer you something worthwhile as the blog continues to change.

Anyways, I guess it’s time.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for checking in on me and offering your support.

Now, go do something creative and blog about it!

All the best,

Charlie Visnic

Last night really felt like the end of the blog to me but I still had two more days to fill.

I knew I wanted to do something that wasn’t hard.  The perfect idea came to my head- ginormous bubbles!  My buddy Jeff had some success last night with the bubble maker so I connected with him and put out the facebook call that at 4:30 we were going to make ginormous bubbles at the top of Hillcrest Park.  Be there!

Jeff and I met up at the gallery around 4 to pick up the equipment.  We were shocked to discover that Vince, the guy who cleans and tends to the gallery, saw the cooler of my bubble mix and decided to empty it!

Jeff and I jumped into action and quickly drove to Albertson’s for distilled water and Ultra Joy and then off to CVS for Pure Glycerin.  I updated the facebook post so people would have some warning.  We mixed the bubble mix in the back of Jeff’s truck before heading to HillCrest.  1-part UltraJoy, 8-parts distilled water and 1/4 pure Glycerin.

When we got to the top we saw Jenny and June.  We opened the cooler and started making ginormous bubbles right off the bat.  They still weren’t as awesome as that guy from Stinson Beach but they were pretty dang good.  Eventually, a good group of friends had gathered and we all chilled out at the park and watched ginormous bubbles float by until sundown.

I stayed up all night in the gallery mostly setting up the installation pieces for the show.  There was the 3D Zeotrope which consisted of a table, a record player, a small television and a video camera.  There was the video display which was set up in a room off to the side.  It consisted of a large flat-screen television mounted on C-Stands and my monome ziptied to a music stand.  There was the music box table which would have 4 music boxes bolted to a coffee table in the middle of the room.  There was the dry erase animation stand, three sound installations consisting of an amplified paper cutter, my ikea finger piano and finally my wow & flutter device.  Of course there was also the Harmonograph table and the Pinto-graph, which unfortunately was missing it’s arms!  I thought they were in my backpack and they weren’t!  Luckily, I found them much later in the day in my toolbox of electronic components.

By morning I had the Harmonograph set-up and the video room half set-up.  I had a very long and very specific “todo” list stored on my iphone.  It was a little daunting how much I had to get done.  I was so extremely lucky to have Jenny there to finish off the taping of pictures to the wall.  (Like I said in previous days, without my friends this show would have never gone off)

I hit the road to collect my stuff.  I started at U-haul and bought four large-sized cardboard boxes.  They were going to be make-shift podiums for my three sound installations.  I had a square of plywood in my garage that measured 38 inches square.  It was left over from the construction days of my harmonograph table.  I realized that if I cut it into four halves they would be the perfect size to cap the cardboard box podiums.  I drove the wood to my dad’s garage and employed my dad to make the cuts while I continued setting up.  I stopped by the hardware store to pick up machine screws to attach the music boxes to the coffee table.  I went by my storage facility to pick up a little television for the 3D zoetrope setup except I couldn’t find my key!  I had to “borrow” the kitchen television from my parents house.  I needed more pens and paper for the Harmonograph.  I needed clamp-lights and batteries and lots of other random crap.   It was a very intense morning.

I got back with hours before the opening and I continued my work.  Chris Hill came through in the clutch because he made the rest of the trips for me while I set up.  I started with the 3D zoetrope.  I moved onto the cardboard box sound installations.  Inside each of the boxes was a small guitar amp which friends have so kindly loaned me.  Chris attached the music boxes to the coffee table.  I went on to the dry-erase animation stand and then ended in the video room.

I opened my 64 (video) fingers app on my computer, which is used to trigger my videos from the monome.  I began dragging my movie files into it.  I created something like 95 videos over the past year so it took quite a lot of concentration to make sure I was putting each one into the right button on the monome.  I began to play with it and suddenly realized it wasn’t performing well.  It would play about five videos fine but eventually would trip out and not play anything!  I had tested it a while ago and it worked fine but I probably dragged in a total of five videos rather than 95.  With 95 videos it was crapping out.  I decided to batch convert every video into Motion Jpeg movie files which is the recommended codec.  I crossed my fingers that it would work.

I then started setting up my salad bowl speakers which would be hanging around the television set amplifying the videos.  I discovered that I was missing a battery holder.  Thank goodness for Chris he was able to run to Orvac to pick me up another set.  (ah, friends!)

It was six o clock.  People started to arrive and I was sitting indian-style on the floor of the video room smelling of body odor and wearing droopy two-day old clothing futzing with my salad bowl speakers.

At about 7pm I left to go take a quick shower.  By the time I got back the show was in full swing.  The place was pretty packed.  My videos had finished converting and I repeated my setup with the monome.  By some insane stroke of luck my app performed beautifully with these new files and the video display was in full effect.

Whew!  I apologize for pounding all these details out like this but it’s all very vivid in my memory.  It was like I was running a race the whole week.  I’ve never experienced anything like it in my entire life.  I have been in situations where I might have to edit something in a very short period of time but nothing has compared to all the details involved in pulling off this show.

By the time everything was done I was prepared to drink.  I was excited to drink.  Not to digress but, I remember my editing teacher in college telling me once that the television directors of big sporting events, the guys who watch a giant wall of monitors and communicate with multiple cameras and editors, are prone to alcoholism.  It’s because it’s such a rush that when it’s over they went to let it all out at the bar.  Well, I experienced that sensation a little at the opening of my art show.

It was a wonderful night!  People were enjoying themselves.  All the stuff got played with.  Music boxes were being used, drawings were being created, dry-erase animations were being made and overall people were having a good time.

I pulled out the bubble-maker and ginormous bubbles were made right there on the sidewalk.  My friends Jeff and Chris mastered the bubble maker and entertained people for a couple of hours.  I would be hanging out in the gallery and suddenly you could hear applause in the distance.  It was another giant bubble that caused it.

The night couldn’t have been more special.  It will remain as an unforgettable memory that I will treasure.  Truly.

Near the end of the night, The Sweaty Caps and Altitude Sickness performed.  It was like a dream to see everything go off as it did.  It was a great night!

I had planned on filming the opening night with my camera but once it began I really didn’t want to.  I wanted to simply drink my sangria and spend the rest of the night hanging out with friends and enjoying all that was around me.  Luckily, my buddy Dantes had decided to film it.  He ended up cutting the video you can watch below  It’s pretty funny because Dantes made me out to be some kind of Willy Wonka.  Jenny and I cracked up into tears after watching it.

Thanks Dantes!

Finally, I need to reiterate that this thing could not have happened without the loving support of my family and friends.  I truly bit off more than I could chew and the people who dug me out of it were my friends and family.  So at this point, I want to simply shout out and thank some specific people.  Without the help of the people below I could not have thrown this amazing show off.

Chris Hill, Dean Ethington, Corky Nepomuceno, Ryan Steele, Colleen Wheeler, Shana Lengyel, Dustin DeLeon, Jeff Numainville, Danny Johns, Barbara Toennies, Todd Roisman, Mom and Dad, Rosie and Blaine and most importantly my wife Jenny!

THANK YOU GUYS!

I still have content I’d like to add to this post including the results from the Dry Erase table.  Stay Tuned!

 
Also I should note one mistake I made that is shown in the video.  Just before packing up my printer before the show began I knew I had to print the days leading up to today, the day of the show.  In the rush of that process I missed a day of cutting and mounting.  The days all blended into one and I ended up labeling the day of the opening as Day 362.  It actually should’ve been Day 363.

Day 362.  One more day until opening night of the art show and we only had 169 days on the wall.  Jenny was pretty concerned and so was I, except I began to come to the conclusion that whatever happens is what happens and that just might be the way it was meant to be.  I couldn’t let the pressure get to me.  I had started this project and there wasn’t any turning back.  I just had to put my head down and keep on keepin’ on.

I headed to the gallery to continue my work.  At this point I was getting a little concerned with the impressions of the owners of the gallery, Candace and Mike.  Candace was would walk by every once in a while taking care of things around the gallery and each time she came by I’d try to impart some confidence.  Of course, it was tough to be upbeat and confident when you have less then half of the show up after two days of work and only one day left.

I have to thank Candace and Mike because even though things looked pretty grim they never put any added pressure on me.  They knew I’d maybe bit off more than I can chew but they never made me feel bad about it.  In fact, they were very encouraging to me.  I was very lucky for that because I felt very self-consciouss through this entire process.  I mean, I’d never put on an art show before and on top of troubles with the setup I also had to contend with the thought that maybe this stuff wouldn’t be of interest to people.  At the gallery next door was some amazing work by some extremely talented artists and here I am taping an ugly unfinished collage up on the wall.

Anyways, like I said, I knew I had to just put my head down and keep working.

I had a new method this morning which worked quite well.  I decided to lay out as many pictures as I could on the ground next to they’re respective label.  I’d found a problem in previous days that when friends came to help it didn’t move all that much quicker because they still needed me to direct them to the right image and label.  So, if I could get a friend to help me today, they could very easily see which picture comes next and I could keep working on the spray mounting and cutting simultaneously.

I was very lucky to have my buddy Dean come by to lend a hand.  He was super helpful and we were making progress quite quickly.  Jenny found a baby-sitter for June and she also came by to help.

Dean had to pick up a friend later in the afternoon and I had to drive to Burbank to pick up a TV set and some other gear for the installation part of the show.  I waited until Dean got back from picking up his buddy to drive out to Burbank.  When I got back three hours later I found Jenny, Dean and two of Deans roomates, Shana and Dustin all working together posting up my pictures.

It felt so great to see them all there.  I suddenly began feeling more confident that it could actually happen, that the show could actually get done in time.

I owe so much gratitude to my friends.  Without them, this show would’ve no doubt been incomplete.  By the time Dean and Jenny left I think we had something like 260 days up.

I spent the night at the studio and started the process of setting up the installations and spray mounting things to poster-board.  I had to get all the spray-mounting done by morning so that Jenny and friends could finish taping days to the wall while I set-up the rest of the show.

As I worked, I created a long “to do” list on my iphone for tomorrow.

March 2nd, 2011

Today didn’t feel like another day to me.  Instead it felt more like an epic continuation of yesterday.  I didn’t sleep at all and I just worked through the morning.   Cutting, mounting, taping.  Over and over and over again.  The biggest drawback to this show was that if I simply had to make a label I still had to make that label 360 times.  The numbers were not working in my favor.

I worked all day.  Any piece of artwork I made over the course of the year, whether it be a painting, drawing or simply some notes on paper, had to be spray mounted to poster-board before they could have gaffers tape applied to them.

Chris went home to get some sleep this morning and I put an alert out on Facebook asking for anyone in Fullerton that owns a pair of scissors and has nothing else to do to come on by and help out.  My friends Colleen, Corky and Ryan answered the call.

It was pretty late by the time they came over and I was completely dazed.  I think I was up to about Day 140 on the wall.  Colleen took on the boring job of making tape loops while Corky and Ryan placed things on the wall.  Since they appeared to be handling things in my stead I passed out in a chair.

I was awoken by my buddy Chris.  Corky, Colleen and Ryan had left and they had gotten to Day 169.

I was out of it and went home to get some sleep.

This morning I moved into the art gallery.  I called upon my friend Chris Hill to give me a hand.  Chris is the guy I always call upon for help because he is usually up for it.  He’s the guy that helped me install hardwood floors when I moved into my house.  He’s the guy that helped me build a shed in my backyard when we needed the space.  He’s actually scheduled to build a shed for our friend Mike in the near future.  Not only is Chris the most helpful guy I know he also has a preternatural knack for design.

I was concerned with the art of laying all my pictures out on the walls.  I had a lot of pictures of random sizes to get up and I wanted the layout of the show to feel clean and linear while also being all over the place and a little random.  I wanted Chris to be there to help validate that what we were creating was looking good.

You should check out Chris’s blog.  He has a bunch of creative endeavors including a really hilarious podcast called “The Electric Ape Power Hour” which records in my studio and stars our pals Steve Green and Matt  McCollum.  I thoroughly recommend listening to them.  They are hilarious and amazing databanks of knowledge regarding films, television, comics, the weird and the supernatural.  On top of that Chris manages multiple blogs about artists that interest him and whatever else he deems “cool enough”.

Anyways, in true to form Charlie Visnic we spent most of the morning driving around picking up crap from various arts and crafts, office supply and hardware stores.  We finally started putting things on the wall around 4pm.

I told Chris that this art show felt like the end of the first “Lord of the Rings” film.  It’s that feeling where you realize “this is going to be a long journey”.  It was midnight and we only had about 30 days up on the wall.  I tried not to calculate that into minutes per picture because it didn’t bode well.  The big delay was in part to the process.  We had to cut every picture before hanging them and if they were larger sizes we had to spray mount them to foam-core, cut them out with a utility knife and then put them on the wall.

We used gaffers tape to mount everything because the walls were made of textured concrete and there were too many pictures to use any other means of mounting.  My thumb turned black from all the repetition of pulling, tearing, looping and pressing.

We worked all night.  Neither of us got a wink of sleep.  We took some pictures of the sunrise.  By morning we had about 60 days up on the wall.  Scary.

Today’s June’s birthday.  Jenny and I got up and took her to Disneyland for the day.  Jenny’s mom, grandma Rosie, also spent the day with us.  It couldn’t have been a better day at the park.  It was Monday and the park was completely empty.  I don’t think I remember seeing it so quiet there.  The longest wait in line for a ride was 20 minutes.  Junie had a great time.  At around 4pm we had lunch and I left June with Jenny and Rosie.

I drove off to the hardware store to pick up more binding posts.  I was hoping to get started on building this larger version of a previous project called the Pinto-graph.  The binding posts are what I use to connect the arms together.  The arms I’m using are from a mirror I picked up from ikea.  These arms are about three times as long as the arms from my original Pinto-graph so the drawings it makes should be about three times the size.

I arrived at my parents house and began assembling the arms together.  I had to drill out the holes a little larger to make them big enough for the binding posts to fit.  After that I had to grind the surface around the holes with my dremel tool to remove some sharp shards of bent metal.  Once all the pieces had been smoothed over I assembled the arms together with the binding posts.

After it was done, I made the arms extend and retract and I was shocked to feel a large amount of weight pressing back.  I became concerned whether my motors would have enough torque to handle it.  My hope was to have the drawing surface mountable on a wall as you watched the drawing take place but with that steep of an angle the weight might be too much for my motors.  I’m sure the motors could handle it if the drawing surface laid flat on the ground but that takes up a lot of space and isn’t as cool as having it on the wall.  I was hoping to get it done in time for the art show but I began to realize that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

I could’ve run some tests with my motors but I didn’t want to burn them out only a few days before the art show.

I called it a day and went home to continue the printing.  I still had over a hundred more days to get printed.  I stayed up pretty late in the studio printing my images.  I made a patch on the modular as I printed but I was too lazy to setup the recording equipment.

I went to bed after a few hours of printing.  Tomorrow I move my stuff into the gallery.

February 27th, 2011

Sunday Morning.  Last night I printed until very late at night at my dad’s office.  I woke up fairly late this morning and posted my previous days to the blog.  Later this evening, was Junie’s birthday party.  June’s actual birthday is tomorrow but today was the party.  It was just a small get together with our family.  We had planned on throwing something larger in the park but we cancelled it because there was going to be rain all weekend.  The actual weather turned out to be pretty beautiful, but random.  It snowed in Burbank yesterday.  It was sunny for most of the day with little spots of rain.  Although it was quite cold all day.  Anyways, Jenny and I were both a little relieved to be celebrating low-key this year.  With the prep for the show happening simultaneous we just felt better taking it easy.  It was a fun day and June had a blast.

I decided on this particular creative project on the way home from Junie’s party.  A good while back, my friend Jeff Ponchick sent me a link to this video where a group of artists were creating these interesting swirls of color by pouring small cups of paint on top of a wooden box sculpture.  They called it “Tall Painting”.  Jeff thought it might be a good project for The B-Roll.  I thought, “well, that seems easy enough”

The only drawback to this Tall Painting project is that it seems like a pretty expensive project with the amount of paint they’re using.  Luckily, I had this box of paints in my garage that I picked up at a garage sale for 20 bucks so I felt like I was in a good position to try it out.

It wasn’t as easy as it looks.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  It seems easy if you set up your pieces correctly.  One of those pieces is something called paint consistency, which I had very little of.  Most of the paints in the box were dried out, many of them halfway there so that when you squeezed it out it came all lumpy.  I sifted the bottles to find the good ones and set them aside.

I laid down a sheet of plastic and placed a cheap plank of wood down, mine came from an old ikea table we used to own.  On top of that I taped two cardboard boxes on top of each other.  I leveled everything out so that the paint would flow equally in all directions.

I squeezed out my first bit of paint and it just sat there.  It was too thick.  OK, I cleaned off the boxes and drove to the nearest market and I bought a package of mini paper cups.  I decided I would dilute the paint with water so it would flow better.  That seemed to start working but it was quite hard to create the same level of flow between the various paints.  Nevertheless, it seemed to be working better and I felt like it was perhaps going to come together.  Then, as I squeezed a bottle fluorescent pink into a little paper cup, it suddenly exploded in my hand and blew pink all over my clothing.  I, stupidly, hadn’t changed into painters clothes so I had to jump into emergency clean-up mode.

I was able to get the stains out of my clothing but the sad pile of paint outside looked pretty ugly.  I tried adding more paint but again I would get the consistency wrong and it would flow all wrong.  Eventually, I got frustrated and impatient and just threw caution to the wind.  I stopped diluting altogether and just started wasting the paint.  I was still left with a very sad looking pile of paint.  Oh well.

I figured the only way I could make up for this creative project was to attempt to capture some nice close-up pictures of it as it certainly didn’t look very good from a wide angle.  So, I grabbed my camera and snapped away.  In the end I felt like I got some nice pictures of it but that was pretty much it.

Later, my friend Christie told me that the paint they were using in the video could have been house paint.  The reason being that it’s the cheapest paint you can buy and you know that the consistency will be the same across the board.  If I ever try this again I will definitely use house paint.

This morning I had breakfast with the family and then I had to drive 60 miles out to Simi Valley to pick up a toner cartridge.  It was the only black toner cartridge in Southern California that I could pick up on a Saturday.

When I got home I spent time with June and played with her until it was almost dinner time.  Afterwards, I met up with my mom at my dad’s office and she gave me the rundown on the plotter and how it works.  My dad has this sweet large format printer which I’m going to use for the larger scale prints.

This printer works great and the images come out looking nice and sharp.  Because I’m printing larger sizes I have more downtime while it prints.  While I waited I decided to try out this origami trick I’d seen in a youtube video some time back.  What it’s supposed to create is this cool Nelson-Riddle-looking paper ball.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the thing to fold up like it was supposed to.

I think my mistake was in the speed with which I folded everything.  I didn’t crease it as tightly as I should have.  Also, I used a pretty heavy weight paper so that made it harder to push it into shape.

Oh well, I still kind of like the texture that was left on the paper.

February 25th, 2011

I spent the night at my office printing pictures until about 3am.  I woke up this morning and kept printing.  It was a day off from normal work duties.  My goal was to get my print as much as I could by the days end.

Jenny called in the middle of the day and asked if I could stop by ikea to pick up a children’s table and chair set that they were selling for 20 dollars.  While I was there I spotted this mirror.  It was a classic wall mounted mirror which had arms that allowed it to expand and retract.  The moment I saw it I thought of my Pinto-graph machine.

The arms were scissor-style.  Exactly the kind of design used for the arms of the pinto-graph.  I thought if I were to mount these arms onto my motor attachments I would get much larger drawings from it.  Plus they were made of metal and much higher quality then the arms I made from basswood.  The clincher was that the mirror was only five dollars.

I was pretty exhausted from the long printing session and when I got home the only thing I wanted to do was tear apart this mirror.  I brought it into my studio and found a drill bit that matched the size of the rivets holding it together.  Then I proceeded to drill each of the rivets out.

It was actually very easy to do.  I thought about getting out my sawhorses and making new disc attachments but I didn’t have the energy for it.  I am looking forward to building this guy though.  I think it will be a pretty simple procedure to construct and I can’t wait to see how big the drawings turn out.

Over the course of the day today, I realized just how expensive this print order was going to be.  I didn’t want to spend that much.  I have some images that will be poster sized, some that will be 11X17 and most of them which will be 8X10.  The poster and medium sized ones I plan on printing at my dads office because he’s got a high quality plotter that can print large sizes.  But the 8X10’s alone were going to cost me upwards of 600 dollars.  That’s too much money.

We have a color laser at my office and I decided to test it out with some heavy weight paper.  I thought the images came out all right.  I decided to call my boss and get her permission to use the printer for my show.  Because the toner cartridges alone cost 75 dollars each, and there’s four of them in there, it could get pretty expensive as well.  My boss, so kindly, offered to take on the cost of the cartridges, which was a huge relief.

So once 6pm rolled around I started the long process of printing every single picture.  I printed until 2am.  I had gotten about 150 images printed which only consisted of about 75 days from the blog.  It’s definitely a slow process but at least I have some images in my hands now.  I fell asleep on the sofa at that point.

I think it’s funny that ultimately I’m going to have to print this day as well.

My boss also let me borrow a large flat screen television which was in one of our avid bays.  It was mounted on an arm on the wall and we didn’t have a stand for it.  I decided to try out a couple of C-stands as alternatives and it worked like a charm.

Also, while I printed crap all night, I decided to mess around a bit with my Pinto-graph.  I fashioned a different size attachment out of some cardboard and I got some pretty cool variation in the drawing.

February 23rd, 2011
 
When I got home from work today I felt the weight of this epic print order on my shoulders.  So I knew I needed to finish it tonight no matter what.  So, that’s exactly what I did.  I have been working on this process in peice-meal over the course of this week, sharing time with whatever my creative thing is for that night.  And I’d gotten pretty far over the week but being that next week is the show I don’t have any time to waste.

The problem with doing a show based on 365 things is that even if you’re making a label, you have to make at least 365.  With the pictures I am going beyond that because I feel that people need to see some pictures of the process involved.  So, there are something like 400 to 500 pictures that I am going to have to get printed.  Oy!

I was happy to finish the sifting and resizing by midnight.  I decided to start the process of creating the labels that will accompany many of the days.

The monome layouts that you see above will be next to all the days that have videos associated to them.  Each video will be a button on my 128, which will be on a podium in front of a flat-screen television.  Perhaps, I’ll provide little pencils and sheets of paper for people to write down the coordinates of days that they find interesting and can go to the monome and play them.

Lastly, I started creating the actual names for each day which will be printed separately.

February 22nd, 2011
 
What a nice end to my day today.  I was back at the office after a lovely three day weekend and when I got home I got to spend some time with Jenny and June.  I knew that I was going to finish my Pinto-graph project because all I needed was more binding posts for the arms.  I also picked up a second hobby train power supply today.
 
I went to my parents house around 10 at night and began my finishing process on the Pinto-graph.  I decided to cut a couple of new thicker pieces of wood for the ends of the arms because I needed my pen to fit snugly at the connection point.  It all came together fairly quickly.  Most of the critical thinking that I did tonight was figuring out how to attach the pen.  I decided on using the little rubber bands that we use for June’s hair.  Although, it’s a pain to switch out the pens it’s a pretty good hold.
 
It was cool to finally see it all in motion.  It worked pretty well for the most part.  I think I need to get more washers in order to tighten up the connection points on the arm.  I want to figure out a more convenient method for mounting the pen as well.
 
The drawings that come out of it all have a similar look to them.  I changed the motor speeds and got some interesting variations but if I let the drawing fill in it would end up as a version of the same tubular shape.  I think once I make a couple of different disc attachments and mix and match them together I will get more variety.  I will make a couple disc attachments that are larger and smaller and I will make a couple which pivot on the side rather than the center.
 
Another cool idea that occurred to me while I watched it work was, what if I made a stop animation with this device.  Because the train power supply’s have numbers around the knob I could easily recreate any shape I want.  I could make five drawings or so at a particular knob setting and loop that in my editing software.  Then I could stop frame, drawing by drawing, up the notches on the knob.  It might look pretty awesome.
 
Anyways, I’m pretty happy with this device.  I’d like to one day free them from the power supply and make it run off of a couple of 9 volt batteries.
 
The video below is something I threw together once I got home so that you could see it in action.  The music in the video is from an artist named Dolza.  It was a made for the latest Monome Community Remix project.  The track is called “Musical Construction Requires Pseudograph”  Download it here.
 
Enjoy!
 

February 21st, 2011
 
Another bulk posting.  Sorry again.  I’m getting close to the end of this experience and my ambition to post these everyday has all but completely waned.  “Aw, I’ll post them at the end of the weekend.”  I think it was the same last weekend too.
 
Today’s creative project was to test out the giant bubble making device that I put together on Day 343.  I was hoping to create giant bubbles with it but instead I found it almost impossible to even create a sheet of bubble with it.  Jenny snapped some pictures while I tried using it and amazingly she captured one of the very few times a bubble actually formed.  The picture above is probably the best of the day, I’m sorry to say.
 
While we were there I suspected the problem was with my bubble mix.  But after I got home I tested the mix out with my first bubble-wand and it performed beautifully.  So, I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem was with the rope that I’m using and perhaps the way that I had it tied to the fishing poles.  The rope that isn’t working so well is a thick and heavy cotton rope.  I thought initially that the thicker the better since it might absorb more and extend the life of the bubble.  I turns out that the thinner rope seems to work better.
 
I found some rope in the garage more like the kind I have on my other bubble-wand.  I tied it onto  the fishing pole with regular knots this time so that the rope would create a V-shape at the connection point.  I tested it out quickly in my backyard and sure enough I was able to create multiple bubble sheets.  There was no wind to coerce the bubble out but I felt better to have improved the design a bit.
 
Hopefully, before this blog ends, I will succeed in creating whale-sized bubbles.

February 20th, 2011
 
The weather was beautiful today.  I spent the first part of the day preparing my images for the art show.  Still not done!  In the afternoon, I stopped by the Ace Hardware store here in Fullerton.  This hardware store kicks ass.  Funnily enough I feel like I find more selection here than in the monster Home Depot down the street.  The staff there is old school and they know they’re stuff.
 
I went in there looking for parts for my Pintograph project.  In the hardware aisle you can commonly see this friendly older gentleman who works there who will find you whatever screw, bolt, fastener or whatever you need for your project, and if they don’t have it he will find you an alternative.
 
I described to him what I was building and how it should work and he took me around the aisle showing me all kinds of options.  It was great because if he wasn’t there I would have assembled the thing completely different.
 
I decided to work in my parents garage because its roomier and my parents were up in Northern Cali for the weekend.  I made a few mistakes in the construction process though.  I started by building my drawing surface and gluing legs to the bottom of it.  I clamped it down and began working on constructing the arms that will hold the pen.
 
I drilled the holes for mounting my DC motors and soon after realized that I placed them too high on the drawing surface.  I decided to build a second drawing surface out of some scrap wood I found laying around.  I mounted the motors to it and began assembling the arms together with little metal binding posts.  As I was assembling it I realized that I didn’t buy enough binding posts to actually finish so my work had to end unfinished.
 
I should have this guy up and running in the next day or two.  I’m looking forward to experimenting with it.

February 19th, 2011
 
Three day weekend!  Hooray!  Today, I got to spend some quality time with June.  I took her to the Children’s Museum after breakfast and we stayed there until lunch-time.   After lunch I spent a while organizing and resizing my images for the art show on March 4th.  There’s still a lot of work to be done on this.  In the evening Jenny and I got together with friends for dinner and we all ended up at our place to play board games.
 
We played a game called “Apples to Apples” which if you’ve never played it, it’s quite fun.  It’s perfect for large groups because the pacing is quick and it doesn’t wear you down the way that some board games do.
 
Anyways, to my creative thing.  At the end of the game my friends asked me what my creative thing was going to be tonight and I said, “I have no idea”  They asked if I ever do much writing  and I said “no”.  As it turns out, in the whole of this blog I have only one creative writing exercise.  I’m not exactly sure why that is.  I must admit that writing can take me a while to accomplish.  I just have trouble feeling good about what I’m writing.  I re-read and edit too much as I write.
 
Short stories are what I feel most comfortable writing.  On the other side of that spectrum is poetry.  While I love poetry, especially when I can hear it read aloud, I am completely uncomfortable with writing my own.  Perhaps, I am too insecure or cynical.  I am definitely not the most romantic fellow.
 
Well, my friends challenged me to do a little Haiku poetry post, which made it even more intimidating for me because Haiku is one of those forms of poetry that I have always had trouble understanding.   The rules they made up for me were they would pull four cards from the Apples to Apples deck and the words on each card would end up being the titles for each Haiku.  The words they pulled were, Arrogant, Chewy, Sensitive and Charismatic.
 
Everyone felt bad for dropping this one on me so as a consolation they helped me create one of the haikus, “Chewy”.  So, “Chewy” was a group effort.
 
After they left, Jenny wanted to help me.  I had to turn her down because my haiku’s had to come from me.  Instead, she decided to write her own Haiku’s for each word.  She was much faster than I was.  I have to laugh because her “Sensitive” haiku had me in stitches.  “Circular pink tenderness” became the catch phrase for the rest of the night.
 
In the end, I was glad it ended up being my creative thing for the night.  I felt okay with what I had written.  I even tried to write one with a tone of seriousness.
 
Here you go:
 
“Chewy” (group haiku)
A real jaw-workout
Not the wookie friend of Han
But Abba-zabba
 
 
Jenny’s Haiku’s
 
“Arrogant”
We’re never prepared
Water washes away life
Hurricane season
 
“Charismatic”
Beaming with white light
Trinity Broadcast Network
Religion For Sale
 
“Sensitive”
Poking through my shirt
Circular pink tenderness
My far-right nipple
 
That “My far-right nipple” bit was another source of comedy.  We needed another syllable so it was either far-right nipple or left-most nipple.
 
 
My Haiku’s
 
“Arrogant”
Arro-Gantua
Eight-legged monster of pride
Prepare to be crushed
 
“Sensitive”
Lightly hovering
Peach skin in unison flex
Shudder at the touch
 
“Charismatic”  (my favorite)
Yes, Tony Robbins!
Please let me order your tapes
Now I feel better

February 18th, 2011
 
Not a bad day.  I had a shoot around 3pm and I got out by 8pm.  Pretty sweet!  I wish I could tell you more about my shoot because I really felt like I was witnessing a small slice of film history being made this evening.  All I can say is that I was filming b-roll on the set of a miniature shoot.  I was totally blown away by the skills and know-how that these guys have.  There is so much calculation and engineering that goes into a total of 11-seconds of film.  Anyways, I don’t want to tease it too much and I may be a little over-zealous about it.  I just felt lucky to be in the room at the time.
 
When I got home I was delighted to see that my Arduino Starter Kit had arrived in the mail today.
 
The arduino board is a versatile micro-controller board that is designed with user-friendliness in mind.  It’s something that I’ve wanted to get into for a long time, before even starting this blog.
 
It’s a shame that it took me this long to finally get one.  I have been intimidated in the past by the possible math skills and electronics knowledge that I might need to have to really get it to work.
 
On the box for the kit there was a link to some tutorials online.  I decided to run through those tutorials as my creative thing for the day.  As I did the tutorials I found myself getting very excited about this little device.  It was a breeze to get started.  Because I have had some experience with the Processing program language I was very excited to discover that the arduino language (called “Wiring”) is virtually the same.  The syntax is as well as the look and feel of the program is exactly the same.
 
Even though all I did this evening was make a few leds flash at various rates it was refreshing to get to know the process of uploading a program to the board and seeing it work.  I’m sure I will be playing with this stuff well beyond the end of this blog.  I’m not sure what my first project will be for it but I’m excited to see the possibilities as I read more on the language.

I had another shoot today.  It was a pretty hectic location shoot with multiple crews all trying to get they’re own bits.  Ultimately, I had enough time to set-up the shot and we just waited for our moment with the talent.

After my work day, I had plans to meet up with Kent Hutchison who is the lead singer and songwriter for the band Cue The Moon.  My buddy Steve is the drummer and I’ve been planning on doing a music video for one of their songs.  It was a really good meeting.  I walked away pretty excited about preparing for the shoot day.

I went into the meeting knowing a few things.  The music video would be a single shot that would  ultimately go through the slitscan effect.  The video would open with a shot of the ocean.  The camera would dolly back to reveal that the ocean is actually on a TV set on a podium.  The TV set and podium would begin twisting (similar to the effect from this day).  The camera would pan left to reveal a miniature stage with red velvet curtains.  The curtains would open to reveal a couple of mobiles hanging and spinning with the aid of some DC Motors.  The mobiles would be one of the ones I filmed from this day.  The slitscan technique would seamlessly switch from one technique to another.  This is as much as I had figured out.

Kent was really into the idea and together we worked out what the other two angles would be.  The camera would pan left from the mobiles to reveal two slick-haired politicians twisting in an embrace and then finally it would pan left again and dolly along a miniature landscape that ended at a paper-mache mountain that is twisting on a lazy susan.  I had always loved the idea of a mountain twisting like clay.

It’s going to be a very complex shoot but it’s also just one shot.  It will be practiced and practiced and practiced.  There is a remote pan and tilt head you can rent which actually records your camera moves so that you can play it back exactly as you performed it.  This might be the perfect rig to rent for the shoot.  I timed out the song into sections in order to see how much time we would be able to hold on certain things.  I think it will be quite interesting to see how these four angles look transitioning from one another after the slitscan effect is added.

I had a shoot today.  I was actually the cameraman which was a nice change of pace.  It’s been a while since I’ve used the equipment at the office.  We had a burglary some time ago and the lighting kit we have now is all new so it was good to get to some practice with it.

I was shooting in the Santa Monica area so it was a pretty long drive to get home.  I had been thinking that perhaps my creative thing could entail using record covers.  I thought about doing a thing that I’d seen on the net where you take multiple record covers and place them together to create composite images.  For example, I’ve seen Micheal Jackson’s Thriller where he’s lying down on his back combined with another album cover with a pair of female legs in high heels, making it look like Micheal’s actually wearing the high heels.

Although I liked the idea I decided to do a collage instead.  I went into my studio and pulled any record cover that I found funny or unusual and that I felt okay about cutting up.  I found quite a few.  I brought them into the house and began cutting.  I initially thought I’d make the collage this evening but as I cut things out I realized that it took quite a lot of time to do certain details.

I had planned on gluing my pieces to this piece of MDF board from an old ikea coffee table that I had altered but I realized that I should probably go with poster board where I could cut the canvas shape to best fit the collage when it’s done.

I got through about half of the records that I pulled out for slicing and dicing.  I will have to continue this project on another day.

Monday morning and back to work.  It was a pretty mellow day at the office and I got home in time to put June to bed.  I hung out with Jenny until it was time for bed and then I sat there searching for something to do.  As I searched the internet for ideas I remembered something that I could do, which was modify my app.

For my show I plan on having my Monome 128 strapped to a podium in front of a television set.  When you press a button on the monome, you will trigger one of the many videos I’ve made over the year to play on the TV set.  In the main part of the show as you walk along the timeline and come across a day where I made a video you will see a diagram of my 128 beside the picture with a single button highlighted.  If you were to press that same button on the monome that particular video will play.  If nobody touches the monome after a while then a video will automatically play at random.

Tonight I opened my app and stripped it of any functionality I didn’t need, like the pattern recorders and the midi stuff.  I altered my playback engine to match a configuration recommended by Max/MSP afficionado named Vade.  Vade designed a series of optimisation methods for playback in Jitter.

For this, I’m not concerned with how fast it triggers.  I only care that it can play the higher resolution files without stuttering.  Unfortunately, I was too lazy to test it out.  I just performed the basics and plan on testing it with the monome fairly soon.

February 13th, 2011
 
We woke up early and joined our friends Jeff and Wendy for breakfast.  Afterwards, I took June to her very first movie theatre experience!  I took her to see Tangled.  She made it until about act 3 of the film and then she was ready to go home.  It’s all good.  She enjoyed herself.
 
June has come down with a cold over the past few days and today it was in full effect.  She was visibly frustrated by her stuffy nose.
 
Well, anyways, not such an exciting creative thing for today but I needed to use it because the task is an epic undertaking.
 
If you haven’t been checking out the blog lately the big news is that this blog is going to end in an art gallery!  Crazy, eh?  Well, tonight I devoted a fair amount of hours into the task of preparing all my images for printing.  As the title says, it’s going to be an epic print order.  Luckily my dad has a plotter which is perfect for larger poster sized prints but when it comes to the majority of it I may have to go with Kinkos, unfortunately.  We’ll see, my buddy Reuban works for a company that does mass printing so maybe I can work out a deal with him.
 
This art show is incredibly intimidating to me.  Not only am I a little nervous about plastering the walls with a ton of bad and desperate art but I’m also trying to configure the experience so that someone walking along the timeline can understand exactly what they are looking at without too much reading.  365 Days is a lot of stuff.  Each day will be represented by at least one image but most days will have multiple images associated to it.
 
The most important thing to me as that the viewer gets an idea of what they are looking at without having to look to deep.
 
This evening I got up to Day 230 with just selecting images but that’s merely selecting.  I have 114 more days to go through at the moment and then I have to start the long process of resizing and sifting further.  I certainly don’t want this boring stuff to be posted as my creative thing but under the circumstances I needed to make a dent.
 
Once I have this image sifting finished and the printing begins I’ll let out a large sigh of relief.  But then of course there’s all the videos that need to be collected and all the audio and how exactly to present it and finally the act of putting these images on the wall in a cohesive way and labeling it all to boot.  Ay-yi-yi!
 
Well, at least it’s going to be quieter at work now that Muppets is over.  Plus I’m taking the week before the opening off in order to spend as much time as possible moving my stuff in.
 
Still I can’t think of a more perfect way to end this whole experience.  It’s still so surreal to me.

February 12th, 2011
 
It was a pretty full day.  I spent much of the early hours prepping the photos on my blog for printing for the art show.  It’s going to be an epic print order to say the least.
 
At 2 pm it was Junie’s nap-time and I fell asleep next to her.  At 4, I was off to my Dad’s house to help him install Windows 7 on his mac laptop.
 
On the way over I stopped by the hardware store and picked up some cotton rope and some twine.    You see, back on Day 201 / Giant Bubbles I made a large bubble blowing device.  I was inspired by the now very popular video you can watch below of a man creating whale-sized bubbles at Stinson Beach.  The device I made on Day 201 worked pretty well for creating some pretty large bubbles and I learned a ton about mixing a strong bubble mix, but they were nowhere near the size I saw in that video.
 
I decided that I was going to recreate that video myself with an even larger bubble blower.  Now that the blog is getting closer to the end I’m remembering those things I’d wanted to do but never gotten around to it.  This is one I want to fulfill.
 
I started assembling it at my dads house while installing his software but I didn’t finish it until late tonight.  Jenny and I went out for an early valentines date.  We had dinner and then picked up a movie.
 
When I got home I looked up some knots on the net and went with the double fisherman to join the ropes together.  Then I used the twine to tie the ropes to each fishing pole.
 
I wasn’t able to test it out, but if it does work the bubbles should certainly rival those seen in the video from Stinson Beach.
 
Not sure when the video will happen.  Probably next weekend when I can get some friends together to go to the beach.
 

Click here to view the embedded video.

February 11th, 2011
 
Today was the last day on The Muppets.  I had to go to set because they needed me to shoot a short “to camera” intro thing with Kermit.  We got that done fairly quickly and continued to shoot  b-roll for the rest of the day.  Word spread that a special cameo was coming to set at the end of the night so I got approval to go into OT time and get an interview with that cameo.  This was the whole reason I got to be there at the very end.  The last shot.  I’ve actually never witnessed a last shot on any movie before, other than my own.  It was a special thing to be there for.  Whatever bad feelings anyone could have been harboring about each other evaporated in that moment and it was hugs all around.
 
I felt lucky to be a part of it, so it was a pretty reflective drive home.  I had one of those drives where you fantasize about your future.  Fantasies about taking steps-up in my career and doing the things I dreamt about doing when I first decided to go into this business, or more specifically, to become a filmmaker.  Then, I thought about June and I was suddenly grounded back to reality.  My fantasy devolved into the dad so focused on his career that he never sees his kid growing up.  Then as I turned the corner just before home I noticed a small groupings of candles with a picture next to them.
 
A few weeks ago a local high school teacher in Fullerton got into a motorcycle accident on the street corner near my house.  I had heard that he was in critical condition after the accident but tonight there were candles.  It turns out that he had died today.
 
I didn’t know him but some of my old teacher friends had.  Even though I’d never had any personal contact with him his death had some effect on me.  Most likely because I was home when it happened and I saw the police line.  It’s the second accident to happen on that corner in the past couple of months.  It reminded me that time is short and life is fragile.
 
Of course I was feeling very nostalgic and romantic about things but I had one of those dark feelings where you know your whole life is going to change and it won’t always be for the better.
 
I began having these kinds of feelings after my baby was born because when they’re newborns they’re so small and fragile and if anything out of the ordinary is detected you take them straightaway to the emergency room.  Your whole world becomes so much brighter the moment their born.  And it gets better and better the more they grow up.  Then suddenly you think about how much darker it could get if something bad were to happen.  Like I said, it’s a dark thought but it seems the more richness you have in your life the more risk your taking should it all be taken away.
 
But then I sigh and let it out.  Oh well.  There’s nothing I can do about it.  It’s life and it’s a beautiful thing.  As doom and gloom as these kinds of thoughts might seem it’s actually good to have them every once in a while.  It makes you appreciate the things you have now.  The future becomes less important.  Who knows where I’ll be thirty or forty years from now.  It doesn’t really matter all that much.  The most important thing is that I try my best to protect and provide for the loved ones I have around me now.
 
Sorry to get so reflective on you.  It’s just a clear memory from the evening and something I felt needed to be a part of my day on this blog.
 
So anyways, to the creative thing at hand.  I got home and had no clue what to do.  It was nearing 1 am and I was tired now.  I didn’t feel as inspired as I felt when I was first got on the road.  I thought of doing a music box composition except not thinking about the notes whatsoever, just punching out any notes I feel like at random.  That way I could get it over with quick.  Then I thought about the Muppet Show theme because it was in my head for a while today.
 
I decided, “OK, I guess I’ll put some thought into this.”  I googled the sheet music and transcribed the notes in the first 8 bars.  I punched them out of my music strip and tested it out through the music box.  Sure enough, it sounded like The Muppet Show theme.
 
I then went back into random mode and decided to almost mask the theme with all sorts of chords.  I didn’t think very much about it.  I just looked at what note there was before and punched out whatever chord I thought might work next to it.  I didn’t play it through the music box until I was completely finished with it.  I kind of wanted the results to be a surprise.
 
It turned out OK and funnily enough it had a sort of a sweet and nostalgic sound to it.  I guess it’s apropos that it turned out that way.
 
I went straight to bed.  I didn’t have the energy to get my camera all set up so I didn’t actually film the video you see below until Sunday afternoon.
 

February 10th, 2011

Actually, I can’t believe this is what I did for my creative thing.  I couldn’t have waited any later to start my project this evening.

I had the whole day off and I spent much of it working on my art show.  I visited the gallery and measured the space and then for the rest of the day I hung out with June.  We flew a kite.  That was awesome.  We had dinner at my parents and once June was off to bed Jenny and I lied on the sofa watching television.

My thought all day was that I would continue work on the dry-erase I started yesterday.  I had all the stuff ready to go, except that once it was time to start I felt pretty uninspired.  I fell asleep on the sofa and Jenny woke me to tell me she was off to bed.  It was 11 at night.  I tucked her into bed and by midnight I was sitting on the sofa thinking “what am I going to do?”

I had very few ideas that I felt like I had the energy for.  I perused the net for inspiration.  I started thinking about Processing and how it’s been a while since I tried writing a code for it.  Even that was too much for me to handle at the time.  Then I remembered this blog I used to go to quite a bit when I was really into Processing.  It’s the blog of an artist named Flight 404.  He does amazing designs with software.   He has one very popular code that he wrote for processing that is a flock of birds.  It’s really an amazing graphic actually.

Anyways, the thought of that brought to mind tonight’s creative project.  I thought I could just cut out a bunch of bird shapes.  It doesn’t take much thinking and most of the shapes are pretty simple.  So I went ahead and started it.

Once I got going I started I had trouble knowing when to stop.  I didn’t want to be up too late as I had to go to set in the morning.

At around 1:30 am I switched gears and began cutting the tree shape.  By 2 am I was working with the glue.  At about 3 am I went to bed.

Anyways, I surprised this is what came out of what felt like a very uninspiring night.

February 9th, 2011
 
Today was a day back at the office.  It was nice to be back.  I spent most of my time organizing tapes.  I got home at my normal time for once.  I was home before June was off to bed.  It was nice because it seemed like Junie was older all of a sudden.  She was talking up a storm and running around the house like crazy.  After she was off to bed Jenny and I lied on the sofa for awhile ignored some television.
 
After she was off to bed I went into my studio.  I had picked up the correct size bolt to mount my camera to the animation stand so I could finally start that dry-erase project I had in mind the past couple of nights.
 
A long time ago a friend and fellow Monome artist, Kevin (aka Soundcyst on the monome forums)  shared with me some audio files of his.  They were mostly noise based tracks consisting of dissonant guitar sounds.  He had seen a previous dry-erase experiment I’d done before and thought it would be cool if I used the same technique to create visual representations of the sounds in his tracks.  I was completely down for it because dry-erase animation actually moves faster and is sometimes very rewarding when your making it up freeform on the spot.
 
Like I said the guitar sounds are dissonant so I heard a lot of destruction.  I made the animation process progressively harder on me because I decided to animate dirt and earth exploding and crumbling.  The more it crumbled, the more pieces I had to mentally keep track of.
 
It was a great exercise in juggling multiple things in motion.  As a result, I only got about 5 seconds worth of animation done.  Even though it’s a rather raw and messy animation I’m pretty happy with what I made.
 

I got home from set at midnight tonight and again I felt very uninspired.  I hope this isn’t a trend.  Jenny was in bed at the time and I cuddled her for awhile and then fell asleep.  She woke me up at 1:30 am and told me I had to do my creative thing.  I went out to the living room, looked at my computer and then lied down on the sofa.  I woke up again at nearly 3 am.  Oh, yes, creative thing.  Right.  I’ve gone this far without missing a day I’m not about to let it slip.  Jenny came out in the middle of my project and said “Charlie, it’s 3:30 in the morning!”  and I replied “It’s ok sweetie, I just got up.

Because I had so little time and so little energy I thought of doing something inside of the computer.  I remembered seeing this photographic technique on the blog called Applyfilter.  I thought it was a pretty cool effect and actually a pretty simple concept.

The way it’s done is you must take three consecutive pictures from the same vantage point.  Then you bring them into the computer and open each one of them up.  Rename each of them “Red”, “Green” and “Blue Master”.  Go to your Red file and adjust the channel mixer so that only the Red channel is visible.  Then go to your Green picture and do the same except only leaving the green channel visible.  Then go to your Blue Master picture and paste your Red picture into the red channel.  Paste your Green picture into the green channel of your Blue Master picture and there you have it.  You have a final composite where the red, green and blue channel all come from a different time.

The effect works quite well with images that stay static except for some element in the frame.  For example, in my beach shot the sand and sky stay the same but the water has interesting colors throughout.  The images above are all from previous creative projects.

I worked on set and got home around 11pm.  I drove home thinking I was going to do a little dry-erase animation and I felt like I had the energy for it.  When I arrived home I couldn’t find the connector to get my camera mounted on the stand.  I looked around for an alternative but as time went by the chances of getting an animation done were less and less.

I got on the computer and searched for some inspiration.  I couldn’t find any.  I think I was in the wrong frame of mind.  I kept thinking of things I’d done in the past but didn’t want to repeat myself.  I could’ve done something in Cinema 4D or a modular patch but I just didn’t want to.  I felt very uninspired.

I will admit that it can be tough to do this process when you are critical on yourself.  I don’t like to do something I’ve done before unless I’m taking it somewhere different or stretching out a little.  Sometimes, though, I just have to.

As a last minute effort I decided to simply take macro photographs of the things around me.  The things in the pictures, from top to bottom, are my hoody, an orange peel, a banana peel, the end of a banana peel, my shirt, ice cream and finally, the zipper on my hoody.

February 6th, 2011
 
Super bowl sunday and the first time in two weeks that I’ve had a day off!
 
We had our friends Jeff and Wendy over to our place for breakfast.  The afternoon was spent installing a couple of pendant lights over my dining room table.  We picked them up almost a year ago on craigslist so the installation was plenty overdue.
 
They look great though and they provide me with much better light for working on my projects.
 
In the process of installing the lights I found a stash of #11 X-acto blades.  I remembered from Elsa Mora’s tutorial on papercutting that the #11 blade is the sharpest and most exact blade.
 
So tonight I decided to try another papercut.  This one is going to go to my friend Wendy as part of a challenge I accepted on Facebook.  I have to make something handmade for five of my friends.
 
The #11 blade was the bomb.  It was so much better than the one I’d been using.
 
I decided to add a texture to the cactus with a tool I found in Jenny’s sewing room.
 
I’m pretty happy so far with how it’s turned out.  It’s still unfinished as of now.

February 5th, 2011
 
I spent most of Saturday morning preparing my previous creative days for posting to the blog.  I was pretty backed up.  The last five days have been non-stop busy for me and I haven’t had even a moment to spend writing or organizing my posts.
 
Unfortunately, I had to be in Burbank by noon in order to film a short thing on The Muppets set.  After that I went to the office to edit the stuff that I shot.  I got back into Fullerton around 4pm.
 
Jenny was at my parents house with June so I drove there instead.  We stayed for dinner and got home around 8.  I went back to writing and organizing my previous days posts.  I finished writing all of them at 11 or so and it was time to get started on todays creative thing.
 
I was pretty tired and didn’t have much energy.  I decided to do a project that I’d been thinking about for a while.  You see, a long time ago I bought a bandsaw for the very purpose of making small things like the wooden gears you see above, but my garage has been such a mess that the space for the bandsaw is not ready yet.  It’s a big undertaking, my garage.
 
Anyways, for christmas, I got a Dremel Multi-max and I love it.  It’s such a handy tool.  I have been thinking that it might work well for making wooden gears in the meantime while my bandsaw is unavailable.
 
Online there is this tool called the Gear Template Generator.  You can select all the parameters you would like for your gear and even test it out against another gear.  Once you have the gear you want you can print out the template on paper.  I printed these guys a long time ago, around the time I bought the bandsaw.
 
So, tonight I glued them to a piece of wood and brought all my supplies into the studio.  The Multi-Max worked all right but it was still quite a challenge to hold it steady.  The teeth on the printout have a bit of a bevel which I found nearly impossible to cut correctly.  I decided to disregard the bevel altogether and instead cut across them.
 
The final gears came out a bit messy.  I wasn’t able to test them to make sure that they worked but by just turning them in my hands they seemed like they might.

February 4th, 2011
 
I woke up early and went off to set.  It was a crazy day because we are coming to the end of shooting on The Muppets and I still had quite a few interviews to gather.
 
I wrapped my crew around 8pm and was home by 9.  While on set, I got a request from the producer of the movie to film a little thing with Kermit and his son on Saturday.  I figured I would be working on the promo reel anyways so what the hey, I could come by.
 
As Murphy’s law would have it, I was driving home and I got a call from my co-worker Nathan.  He said, “I finished the promo reel, man!  You don’t have to come in on Saturday!”  I told him a defeated, “No.  Unfortunately, I still do.”
 
 
Now for some exciting news that I’ve been holding onto for a while to share…
 
As I’ve been doing this creative thing-a-day blog I have been pondering all the while of how I’m going to end the year.  I had toyed with an idea for my final day of filling up a room with everything I’ve done over the year and calling it “364 Days, 1 Room”.  Well, a while ago I sent the idea to my friend Jesse LaTour who co-owns an art gallery in Fullerton called The Hibbleton.  Unfortunately, He already had an artist scheduled for that time but he loved the idea.  He sent out my email to everyone he thought might find it interesting and my friends Mike and Candace emailed me back.
 
Mike and Candace own the studio space directly next door to The Hibbleton, it’s called The Violethour.  Mike and Candace are extremely creative people.  They are regulars at Burning Man and Mike has been a member of the Black Rock Rangers, a team of moderators who deal with problems that arise at Burning Man, for many years.  They’re space is super cool and as it turns out this March they are going to have me as they’re featured artist!
 
This is going to be an amazing and surreal event in my life.  I don’t consider myself an artist of the caliber of those that might adorn the walls of a bona-fide art gallery, let alone have the complete space but that is exactly what is happening.  I have had plenty of bad days or simply desperate reaches but the show will be more about looking at the whole rather than just the pieces.
 
I envision the show to be more like a hands-on exploritorium rather than a regular art show.  I will have the harmonograph table for people to get they’re own drawings.  I’ll have free sheet music strips and a couple of music boxes for people to compose they’re own songs with.  I’ll have an animation stand with a dry-erase board so people can feel free to add a few frames to the collaborative animation that hopefully will get created over the course of the show.  I’ll have instruments that people can play with, contact mics hanging from the walls and amplifying objects in the room, the modular and hopefully a few monome artists who might be willing to do a live performance.
 
I hope that people who walk through the show that wouldn’t normally consider themselves artists leave inspired by the concept that perhaps they actually are.  I remember the feeling I got the first time one of my posts made it to another blog and they referred to me as an artist.  I was like, Artist?  Uh, Ok.  I’m an artist.
 
It is going to be an epic thing to prepare for and who knows how it will turn out, but I can think of no better way to celebrate the end of this whole experience.
 
 
So anyways, to my creative thing of the day.  Tonight, after leaving set I went by The Violethour to meet with Mike and Candace.  I came to look at the space and imagine how I might use it for my show.  Even though it was quite late I felt pretty inspired at the end of the night.
 
I didn’t get home until almost 1 am but I went directly to my watercolors.  I figured I’d do something similar to what I did on Day 311 where I start with a flat wash of color and finish it with black ink and the dip-pen.
 
Once the wash was done I could see the haze of what might be a landscape in front of me.  I liked the way it looked so I decided to keep the dip-pen to a minimum.  I drew in a couple of lines to suggest the ridges of a hillside and then I added some birds in the upper corner.
 
I practiced drawing the objects in my sketchbook before drawing it on my final piece so that I wouldn’t leave any ugly mistakes in it.
 
In the end, I really like the minimal quality of the final piece.

February 3rd, 2011
 
I woke up at 7am on the sofa at my office.  I got up and went directly back to editing.
 
It was a busy day at the office too and I was pretty delirious.  Nathan and I both worked through the day on the promo reel.  After lunch we got word that the deadline for the piece got extended to Monday.
 
I gave it my all but by 8pm I had to go home and catch up on some rest because it was back to The Muppets for me on Friday morning and it was an early call time tomorrow.
 
I got home and lied on the sofa with Jenny for awhile.  Still clueless as to what I was going to do for my creative thing.  I looked amongst my art supplies for some ideas.  I didn’t have a lot of energy so I didn’t want to do anything complicated.
 
I bought this cool drafting compass set at a yard sale a long time ago.  I’d never used them and I figured tonight was as good a night as any.  I thought maybe I’d be able to create some interesting geometry with it.
 
I searched the internet for any drafting compass art projects and sadly couldn’t find anything.  I decided to just go for it and do something.
 
The results were what you see above.

February 2nd, 2011
 
Okay, I know.  This one isn’t exactly as creative as I usually like to be but it was a matter of circumstance.
 
This morning I woke up with June and while she ate breakfast I checked my email.  I was unfortunately surprised to find an email from my co-worker Todd.  It said that the editing job was back on.  Oh well.  Another all-nighter.
 
I had a doctors appointment so I went to that.  I got home while June and Jenny were having lunch.  I decided to stay a little while longer and I took a short nap with my family.  What did it matter?  I was going to be up all night anyways.
 
I went into the office around 4pm.  My co-worker Nathan and I tag-teamed the cut until around midnight and I stayed on to continue.  At around 2am I thought, “I have to do my creative project!”
 
I made multiple circles around the whole office looking for something.  Unfortunately, I just kept pacing without any real inspiration.  Suddenly, I remembered a joke-creative-idea that Jenny and I came up with a long time ago.  We had been laughing about the idea of wearing a robe backwards and calling it a “DIY Snuggie”.
 
I wear hoody almost every day.  I thought the hood could act as a makeshift snack bowl.
 
Voila!  DIY Snuggie with built-in Snack Sack.
 
Sorry.  It was an easy option to take in a situation of tired desperation.

February 1st, 2011
 
Another late call time and another late wrap.  I left set almost at midnight.  Halfway through the day there was a little scare.
 
My co-worker Todd sent me an email telling me that one of our clients at Disney wanted me to cut a promo for the Walt Disney Company and it had to be done by Friday morning.  This was very bad news to me since last Tuesday, I spent the night at my office editing a different so-called “fire-drill”.
 
It’s a blessing and a curse.  On the one hand it’s nice to know that I’m wanted as an editor but on the other it’s quite frustrating when you don’t get to see your family for a long time.  Later that night, I received an email saying that they canceled the job.  I was so relieved to hear it.
 
As I drove home I tried to figure out what kind of creative project I had the energy for.  I thought about this really inspiring project that Jared of Uprlip did recently where he froze a contact mic in ice and then recorded the melting process.  That got me thinking about the concept of underwater recording.  The contact mics I own have a plastic-dipped coating on them so they are completely waterproof.  Suddenly, I knew what my creative project was going to be.
 
When I got home I collected up the supplies for my experiment, June’s bucket from the backyard, a watering can, a glass full of pea gravel, and a straw.
 
I started by recording the sound of the bucket filling up with water, then I plopped some pea gravel into the bucket, then I poured the entire cup in.  I stirred it with a spoon.  I tried striking some of my DIY glockenspiel bars underwater with the spoon.  It didn’t work so well but I found I was able to get something interesting by striking the glock bar while dropping it into the water.
 
I grabbed the straw and recorded the sound of bubbles.  As I was recording I began to think that the bucket, being plastic, perhaps wasn’t the best resonate body for my experiments.
 
I remembered that wobbly sound you can get by striking a can of coke and shaking it.  I searched my car for an opened can of diet coke, usually not a very hard thing to find.
 
I dipped in the contact mic into the can and struck it with a spoon whilst shaking it back and forth.  These were some of the best sounds.
 
Press play below to hear what it all sounded like.
 
Enjoy!
 

January 31st, 2011
 
On the film, the crew works an offset work week.  So they work through Saturday and Sunday and finally get their weekend on Wednesday, Thursdays.  The reason they do this, I think, is for discounts on equipment rentals because most rental houses charge for only one day over the two day weekend.
 
Another trend this production seems to follow is late call times the closer it gets to Wednesday.  I think this is because after multiple 14 hour days the production wants to give the crew some sleep-in time.  The only catch is that the later the call time the later the wrap.  For today, the call time was 10 am so I didn’t leave the set until 11 pm.
 
As I drove home I decided to head to my buddy Dean’s house.  I had left a shot rendering over night from yesterdays project and I had to retrieve it in order to post the results.  As I was transferring the files Dean asked what my creative project was going to be for tonight.  I said, “I have no idea”
 
He pointed to a bin beside his counter and said “I have a bunch of corks.”  And suddenly, I flashed to a picture in a magazine at my work.  The picture in the magazine was similar to the photos above.  A bunch of wine corks on a table lit from the side with a hard light which created the image of a face in the shadows.  It’s same concept that I did on Day 257 within Cinema 4D.
 
It was convenient that Dean had all the supplies, including the perfect tabletop light for projecting the shadow.  We began organizing the corks until a face appeared.  I made a comment that it looked like Abe Lincoln.  I went for my camera thinking after I captured the shot we’d start fresh and make another face.
 
Dean thought it would be cool if we did a little stop motion and made him recite the Gettysburg address.  I laughed it off but then figured, why not?  Dean found a cool track of Johnny Cash reciting it, so we downloaded it.  I altered the shadow a little bit to get a few variations on an open and closed mouth.
 
Of course I drove home and went straight to bed.  It wasn’t until a few days later that I finally cut it to the Gettysburg address.
 
Anyways, I hope you enjoy this completely random creative thing!
 

 
January 30th, 2011
 
Had quite a long day on set today.  I should’ve called my crew in later because we had to wait until the end of the shoot day to shoot some interviews.  I left set around 11pm at night.
 
My creative thing was already decided upon because I had filmed those turntables yesterday.  I had to go by my buddy Dean’s house and use his PC to send those shots through the mill.  I finished rendering two shots before leaving and sent one more through to finish overnight.
 
It was nice to see the images coming out as it rendered.  They were looking just as I’d hoped they would.  I did a few single frame renders that encompassed every frame in each shot which you can see in the images above.  Everything was looking great.  I was really excited to see them in full motion.
 
Through the magic of late posting to the blog, (haha) you can see final renders below.  I’m super happy with the results.
 
I wish I wasn’t going to be so busy over the next few days because I would love to keep rendering these shots.  Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going to be a crazy week.
 
Anyways, enjoy the video!  The music underneath is a portion of a track called “My Life Is My Own” by an artist named noiseflowr.  The song was created for the latest Monome Community Remix Project.
 

January 29th, 2011
 
Today was the first day of four consecutive days on set.  I have to apologize for posting late again but I’m getting home with just barely enough time to do something creative let alone post them.  Organizing the photos and writing these posts can sometimes take longer than the actual creative project.
 
Anyways, today was a nice busy day on set.  At the end of the day before leaving I had a nice conversation with one of the puppeteers that left me feeling particularly inspired.  I felt like doing something interesting tonight.
 
I thought, I should go out and film something.  Find a location with some really cool movement for future slitscan treatment.  When I got home and unlocked the door I came into a very quiet and dark house.  The silence was a reminder that even though I may have a bright idea it may not always be appropriate.
 
I work so much and with this blog Jenny and I don’t get to spend nearly as much time with each other as we’d like to.  Even though she was already in bed it didn’t seem right for me to leave and go out filming.
 
So I re-thought my plan.  I looked around the house and realized there’s plenty around here that I could film.  On the very first day I did a slitscan experiment way back on Day 100 I put some objects on a lazy susan and tried rotating it by hand.  The problem was I couldn’t rotate it in a constant fashion so the slitscans all turned out extremely wavy.
 
This time I pulled out the little DC motor off of my Harmonograph table and held it against the side of my lazy susan.  It took some trial and error because the attachment on the end of my motor has never quite fit tightly.  I had planned on doing a drill and tap to it for a creative project but I never got around to it.  So, tonight I improvised by stuffing a needle in the shaft to tighten it up.
 
The results were that I captured some pretty slow and smooth rotation.  Perfect for some nice looking slitscans
 
Back on day 100 I used the monome as my subject for rotation.  Tonight, since I finally had smooth movement, I decided to reprise the monome as a subject matter. I also used this cool designer bowl that I bought a long time ago from ikea with some unknown creative project in mind.  Anyways, I’m looking forward to seeing my final shots.
 

I took the day off this friday and recuperated a little.  June spent the day with grandma so Jenny and I both had some free time to relax a little.  I worked most of the morning posting the last three days to the blog since I’d had a bit of catching up to do.  I felt much better today.  The food poisoning from Wednesday night had pretty much subsided.

Today, I thought of all sorts of things I could do but I couldn’t escape the thought that I have a music video to finish.  My friend Steve, of the band Cue The Moon, so graciously offered me the chance to choose any one of their newer tracks to make a music video for.  I’ve been planning on doing it with the slitscan effect.

I have been relishing in the discovery process of experimenting with this effect.  It’s quite hard to predict what you might get from the from a particular piece of footage.  I’m extremely lucky to have been given an optimized bit of code which can render the effect at lighting fast speeds.

I have been lagging on shooting stuff with the purpose of slitscanning in mind.  This has been a prominent frustration.  Anyways, today I thought, hey, I’ve already got a bunch of material that I’ve shot in the past, including stuff over the past year.  Why don’t I try sending some of those shots through the mill?

So, that’s exactly what I did.  I drove over to my buddy Dean’s house with my computer and hard drive.  I set up the stuff and selected a group of shots to try.  I transferred them over to Dean’s PC and started by making a single image representing all the frames at once.  This is a great way to sort of preview what the shot might look like when I finally render multiple frames.  You can see some examples of those images above.

I decided to give a full render to two of the shots.  One of them is a shot of the sun setting in Laguna Beach.  I kept the camera steady for a minute or two and then began panning it around, capturing the surf flowing over the rocks.

The slitscan came out pretty cool.  It’s actually quite inspiring to me.  I like the way that the water flowing over the rocks in the end of the video create this cool abstract imagery.

The music under this test shot is from the most recent Monome Community Remix Project, the track is called “Hints of Logic” and it was created by an artist and monome afficionado Bongo.

January 27th, 2011
 
My iphone woke me up at my office at 5am and I slowly made my way into my edit bay.  I finished my edit as quickly as possible.  By 8am I relayed the cut over to the client and went back to sleep on the sofa.  At 9am, I received some notes on the cut.  I got off the sofa and addressed the notes and relayed the new cut.  The rest of my day was pretty much this repeated.
 
I felt pretty horrible from the food poisoning that I got last night.  I felt nauseous and physically tired.  I found out later, once I got home that I had a fever as well.  I had a meeting over at Disney for the muppets at 3pm so I had to wait around for that.  I made myself throw up just before going to the meeting.  I was in a sad state of affairs to say the least.
 
I was relieved to get home.  I ate some food, finally and lied on the sofa while Jenny watched TV.  I couldn’t imagine doing something creative so I decided it was due time to do another modular patch.  It’s funny because one of the last times I made a patch on the modular on Day 199 I was sick as well.
 
The patch started as a simple bass sound through a WASP filter.  I worked in the rotating clock divider and the regular clock divider and began adding higher pitch melodies.  Both melodies are semi-random created using a couple sample and hold modules each being fed a different LFO.
 
When I recorded the patch, I started by fading in the bass sound, then I added clock divided panning to it, then I faded in the two other oscillators and adjusted the amount of pitch modulation.  The rotating clock divider was controlling the rhythm of the two higher pitches as well as the rhythm with which the pitches would change.  During the recording I played with where the patch cables would connect on this modules, changing up the rhythm here and there.  Finally, I played around with the a highpass filter I had connected to one of the higher pitches.
 
After I finished recording I went to bed.  The next day, I edited it down to a more listenable level.  I recorded for about 15-20 minutes but I cut it down to about 8 and half.
 
Anyways, hope you enjoy.
 

January 26th, 2011
 
On my way into work this morning I recieved a phone call from one of my clients at Disney.  He informed me of a small fire-drill.  A fire-drill is a term they use for a project that has just come up that usually needs to be done by early morning the next day.
 
Unfortunately, the first thing I had to this morning was some organizational stuff for muppets.  Then I had to meet my buddy Tony for a lunch that we’ve been planning on doing for the past two weeks.  At about 2pm I finally got started on my fire-drill.
 
At 9pm I drove off to pick up some dinner.  I got a burger and fries from Del Taco.  About an hour later I felt completely sick.  I had gotten food poisoning from the burger!  I will never again eat Del Taco and for that matter fast food of any kind.
 
As the night went on I was feeling worse and worse.  I had to finish this cut as well as get my creative thing done.  And if I spent too much time looking at the computer screen I got seriously nauseous.
 
After numerous visits to the bathroom I came to the conclusion that I needed to lie down.  I decided I’d finish this fire drill in the morning but before that I needed to do my creative thing.
 
I decided that I would try out this tutorial.  It’s a pretty cool effect where you take a panoramic picture and turn it into a little planet.  (I found it on a blog called Applyfilter where the individual is attempting to do a photography technique-a-day for 100 days).  It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing since I found it and it seemed pretty simple, all I needed to do was shoot a panoramic picture.
 
So, I hopped in my car and drove up the street.  I stopped on the corner of Olive and Verdugo in Burbank and took out my iphone.  I used my iphone instead of my SLR because I don’t have a sufficient wide angle lens for my SLR.
 
There are a bunch of apps for the iphone that do panoramas, and in retrospect, I probably should’ve used one.  Instead, I decided to just snap a series of pictures that I’d stitch together in the computer using a software called Hugin.
 
I guess I didn’t take the pictures with enough overlap because when I got back to the office and loaded the images into Hugin, it could not stitch them together.  Instead, I got a very abstract image.  I kind of liked the way it looked even though it wasn’t a panorama and I was tired so I took a few screengrabs of it using different projection modes within Hugin, which you can see above.
 
After that, I lied down on the sofa and set my iphone to wake me at 5am.

January 25th, 2011
 
(I apologize for the delay in posting again.  I recently had an all-nighter at work combined with a bad case of food poisoning.  It was not good.)
 
But today…
 
I had a lovely day off.  The weather was perfect.  I took June to the Children’s Museum and we had a lot of fun running around and playing.  In the evening, I met up with Jeff and we recorded some stuff in the studio.  It was an overall nice day with family and friends.  A rare occasion as of late.
 
I am still being inspired by the papercut work of Elsa Mora and I want to do more.  Also, I recently accepted a small challenge from my old drama teacher on Facebook.
 
She posted this as her status:  I promise to send something handmade to the first 5 people who leave a comment here. They must, in turn, post this and send something they make to the first 5 people who comment on their status. The rules are that it must be handmade by you and it must be sent to your 5 people sometime in 2011.
 
I left a comment and reposted it as my status.  So, now I have to make something handmade for the five friends who left comments on mine.  One of those people is my friend, Inthia.
 
I know that Inthia likes zombies so I thought I could make her a zombie papercut.
 
Unfortunately, it’s still unfinished.  I want to add other things like background and foreground elements.

January 24th, 2011
 
Today I knew exactly what my creative project was going to be from the beginning.  I planned on it last night.
 
Today, on set, was the first of the muppet interviews.  I’ve been capturing plenty of human interviews but we still have yet to begin the long list of muppets that we need to sit down and talk with.
 
I really wanted it to look like they were sitting in they’re own director’s chair but of course you can’t use a regular director’s chair when there is a puppeteer below.  So, I cobbled together this little baby.
 
I left the house a bit early so I could collect my materials.  First, I raided my garage for all the tools I might need, then I drove into the office and grabbed a chair that my boss would let me to mutilate.  I went by Home Depot and bought a cheap fence plank and had it cut into multiple pieces the size of the seating area.  I also bought some wood screws and a couple of L-brackets.  Then I stopped by a store in Burbank called Filmtools and found a connector which would allow me to attach the faux chair to a C-Stand or light stand.
 
I drove to set with all the pieces ready to go.  By the time I got there, interviews needed to happen fast so I was really rushing to get it built.  I realized that I left the most important drill bit in my car which was too far away at the moment so, I had to use these thick screws which actually broke the wood in a couple of spots.  I attached a plank to the two sides of the chair where the seat exists and another plank to the back.  I found a grip who let me borrow a smaller drill bit and I stabalized it a bit with the two L-brackets.  Finally, I drilled into the back plank and attached my special connector from Filmtools.
 
By the time it was done I was really unsure of whether it would survive the day.  Luckily, it did but I will most certainly need to put some extra work into making it more stable for the rest of the shoot dates.
 
It looked great on camera though and the puppeteers were very happy to be in a comfortable position while they answered questions.  I’m proud of my little creation and I’m glad that it worked out.
 
Oh, and it was hilarious.  The muppet’s improvisational skills are truly amazing.  I keep reminding myself how lucky I am, to be where I am, doing what I’m doing.

January 23rd, 2011
 
Sunday on set was pretty slow.  Almost arduously slow but at least it wasn’t a late night.
 
I went home determined to finish my track.
 
Tonight was better than last night.  It was good to step away and come back to the song.  I didn’t hate it as much this time.  The tempo is very slow and I think this could have been effecting my feelings on the track.  It has a very bolero feel to it.
 
I mostly focused on mixing but I did add a few more samples, including the classic one from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly which I think sounds great.  I also added some of the tape sounds I got from my experiments on Day 320 / Wow & Flutter.  Lastly, I added plugin effects and automated some parameters.
 
In the end, I think the track turned out all right.  I still don’t know if it turned out better than my original version on Day 302 but this time I thought there were some good moments that weren’t there before.
 
Feel free to have a listen below.  And definitely check out everyone else’s tracks and download the full album here.
 
Nevertheless, please enjoy!
 

January 22nd, 2011
 
I had an extremely long day on the set today.  At wrap we got a new schedule for the film and I had to stay back with the unit publicist and reschedule all of our future dates on the film.  Unfortunately, it turned out that the sunday I thought I was going to have off to finish my track was now a work day and I had to quickly schedule a cameraman and sound to cover it.  So, I got home later than I hoped.
 
The goal, though, was still to finish my song.  The only problem was that I was beginning to hate it.
 
The way I started this arrangement was with the recording I made on Day 302 / Grainslide.  I really loved the way that turned out.  Since I felt so good about that recording I decided it would be where I would jump from in creating my final track for MCRP V9.
 
The struggle on this has been in making something better than the original.  The last time I worked on the arrangement I conformed it to a tempo and added a very basic beat to it.  Then I recorded a bunch of other tracks, (basslines, textures, etc)
 
Tonight I thought all I was going to do was automate some volumes, do a bit of editing and add some effects.  In reality, very few of the things I did made me feel any better about the song.
 
I worked very late into the night but much of the time was spent spinning my wheels.  At the very least by the end I had a structure.

Well today I missed the deadline for the Monome Community Remix Project V9.  This evening, just before leaving to go home, I received a phone call that left me with a series of notes on a cut that I worked on.  I had to stay late to get them done because I have to be on set tomorrow at 9am which means waking up quite early.

If I had left on time my plan tonight was to rush to finish my track.  Unfortunately, the notes were too extensive and I ended up staying until about 11pm.  I drove home wondering what to do for my creative thing.  I didn’t have much time and I had to make sure I was in bed at least by 2am.  I decided to make this papercut.

A couple of days ago I stumbled across Elsa Mora’s blog.  She is an artist who creates this absolutely amazing papercut art.  Her stuff is really intricate and beautiful.  I was totally inspired by them.

So, when I got home I went straight to work.  It’s pretty amazing that I got this one done in just under an hour.  I had no idea what my design was going to be.  It all seemed to come together rather quickly.  I just started with a simple bird shape and then adding the vines seemed natural.  I’m not sure why I added the lock in the center.  I just knew I wanted some kind of symbol inside the bird.

After I finished drawing I laid down on the floor and began cutting.  I tried to take my time and work in short strokes and it was quite helpful in getting better shapes and cleaner cuts.  Elsa recommends the #11 blade which I don’t have but I did all right with the ones I had.  I definitely was liberal with replacing the blades.  The moment I sensed any kind of tearing I replaced the blade.  I went through three blades to finish this.

I’m looking forward to more of these but I want to spend more time on designs.  I also want to do one when I have more time so I can add more detail.  Overall, I’m happy though.

In regards to my Monome Community Remix track, I plan on turning it in this Sunday.  I will finish it, no doubt.  I have made enough progress that turning back is not an option. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t make it in on time but I’m not going to let that deter me.  I am listening to everyone else’s tracks right now and they all sound amazing!

Have a listen for yourself and feel free to download them here.

All the best!

January 20th, 2011

Today I was back at the office for the first time in a while.  It was nice to go home at a normal time.

As I drove home, I thought about my song for the latest Monome Community Remix Project.  The  deadline is tomorrow and I need to finish it quick.  At first I thought I would work more on the drums because my song at the moment is sorely lacking in a good beat.  But suddenly another idea popped into my head.

I remembered thinking that I wanted to find a good plugin for emulating wow and flutter.  Wow and flutter is term associated with the sound of fluctuations in tape speed.  I think the wow is the sound of  the tape slowing to a stop or ramping up to speed and the flutter is like the warble that you hear when a tape is playing back with slight speed variations.  I know there are pedals out there that emulate the sound but I thought, why don’t I just record the real thing.

An old friend of mine, Jon Sonnenberg, built something very similar to what I built this evening except he did it many, many years ago.  He’s sort of an electronics wizard and he was also my stepping stone into the world of electronic musical instruments.  He’s a genius actually and has been building electronic instruments since he was a kid.  His childhood bedroom had hardly any room for sleeping with all the broke-open keyboards and wires and other random stuff.  He had a bunk bed where he slept on top and the bottom was piled with electronics.  He lives in Ohio now but still makes music under the name Travelogue.  I definitely recommend checking out his stuff, click here to learn more about him.  (Shoot!  His site is down for construction.  In the meantime, here’s his myspace)

Anyways, he had taken apart a walkman and installed the guts inside of, what I think, used to be an electric can opener.  He then took slices of tape out of an audio cassette and taped it onto a piece of hard card stock.  When you dragged the card through the can opener the tape would make contact with the magnetic tape head and you would hear the sound of the tape.

Well, tonight I made my own version out of an old tabletop tape recorder.  I used a dremel tool to create grooves in the housing of the tape recorder to allow the cardboard to move back and forth freely.  I took most of the springs out of the mechanics I could see up front so that the tape recorder wouldn’t spring back and automatically stop when I dragged my card through.

I connected my computer to the tape recorder and recorded some tracks from my MCRP track down to the audio cassette.  Then, I cut out parts of that recording and attached them to the cardboard strips I cut from the back board of some art paper.

Finally, I brought it all into my studio and I recorded myself dragging my audio samples through the modified tape recorder.  I played my song along with it and tried to match the speed.

It was almost impossible to match the speed and pitch of the song using my hand but I still got some stuff that I thought sounded cool.  It’s a pretty fun device to play with.  Other than getting just general warble from the tape you can pretty easily create some DJ-style record scratch sounds.

Check out the video below to see how it works.  Enjoy!

January 19th, 2011
 
I got home around 8am and, at first, thought I wouldn’t go to sleep.  I hate losing my daytime hours to sleep but eventually I couldn’t keep my eyes open and I had to lay down.  I slept until about 3pm.
 
I was dazed and grumpy for most of the day.  I wondered what my creative project might be.  A lot of ideas went through my head but many of them went out the window as the hours passed.
 
Eventually it was 8pm.  June was off to bed and Jenny was soon after.  I was left with an unsure feeling as to what I felt like I was up for.  I was still pretty tired.
 
I perused the net.  I went to the Make blog because since it has been a while since I’d checked in.  I found this post which I thought was a pretty inventive idea.  This person had taken a book and dog-eared it in away so that the edges of the paper formed the word “read”.  I thought that seems do-able.
 
It started off well but quickly got more complicated.  Once I started to deal with the curves on the letter “B” I felt my energy level begin to wane.  Eventually I had to throw in the towel.  I didn’t have it in me tonight.  I was too tired.  Instead, I’m chalking it up as an experience.
 
I might continue this on another day but I’ll have to wait and see.  As of now, you could put a fork in me.

January 18th, 2011
 
I got home from work around 6am and fell asleep until 2pm.  I spent whatever time I had before I had to go off to set again with Jenny and June.  It was another overnight shoot on a blocked off street in Hollywood.  It was a busy night for me too.  I kept reminding myself, I need to do something creative before the day is over.
 
Before I knew it my cell phone read 5am, almost wrap time.  I wrapped my crew at 5:30 and realized I needed to do something quick.
 
I couldn’t have cut it closer.  I have many times on previous days started a creative project well after midnight and still counted it as my creative thing for the previous day but this time I was minutes away from sunrise without anything accomplished.  I decided that the apropos thing to do in this situation was to actually document the sunrise.
 
Since I was in Hollywood I decided to drive up to the lookout point on Mulholland Dr.  It’s a beautiful spot to look down on the city lights.  I set my camera on the curb and pointed it out towards the skyline.  I don’t have an intervalometer for doing time lapse but I do have a remote control for my shutter so I grabbed it.  I set the camera to do 1 second exposures and set the mode to continuous.  This way I could simply hold down the button on my remote and the camera would continue snapping pictures at one image a second.
 
I sat there for almost an hour holding that button down.  It was kind of a nice way to start a new day.  I rarely get to see the sun rise and looking down over Los Angeles as commuters start their days and I end mine was cathartic.
 
The music in the video below is from an artist called Automatic Thoughts.  The song is called “Ohm Sweet home” and it’s from an EP he did called “Keep Right”.  You can download it for free, here.
 

January 17th, 2011
 
Today was an all-nighter for me on the set of The Muppets.  We’re filming in Hollywood and It’s a pretty awesome production to see to say the least.
 
Anyways, I had to figure out my creative thing while being on set.  It turned out being rather simple and something that I’d been hoping to accomplish for some time now.
 
Part of my job here is to steal the puppeteers away from set every once in a while to capture what I call muppet interactions.  These are little random moments between the muppets on set for use in publicity. 
 
I’ve been trying to get as many of these little moments as possible.  The trouble is that the puppeteers are needed on set quite a bit so scheduling is tough.  Plus, every time we do get them it requires a fair amount of production, including setting up the camera in a unobtrusive spot, lights, multiple monitors, multiple lavaliers and usually a person from the muppets to tend to the way the muppets look on camera.
 
On any other film you can capture these “fun” moments by just walking around the set and asking people questions.  That’s why I put together this little setup I’m calling Muppet-Cam.
 
It’s really quite simple.  It’s basically a couple of earthquake straps and some extra velcro.  The idea is that my cameraman, Phil, can walk right up to a muppet on set and they can quickly and easily see themselves on the monitor hanging around his neck.  Then, If they’re feeling giddy enough they can jump in and say some fun stuff for our camera.
 
The rig is by no means perfect and I have already purchased a weight belt and more velcro in order to angle the monitor straight ahead.  I also need to remember to keep an apple box handy as this is what they prefer to sit on while performing.  That or these little roller cushions which look kind of like barstool cushions with casters.  This allows the muppet to have more mobility.
 
Hopefully, I can use this setup for the rest of the shoot to stock up on more fun muppet moments.

January 16th, 2011
 
I got to stay home today!  It was nice.  I picked up Jenny from the airport in the morning and we had a wonderful day playing and napping together.
 
I decided to invite some friends over for an evening in the studio.  It’s been awhile since the last time.  Tonight my focus was to test out a new monome app called Mash.
 
Mash is an amazingly full featured live looping app.  Seriously, the designer, Stevie Ray Sean did an epic job creating this.  Although the focus of the app is live looping the program can do so much more.  It’s got a built in Ableton-style clip launcher.  It’s got a multi-channel mixer, each with built in lowpass filter and VST effect support.  Every control is accessible through the monome but you really have to have some practice with the software to exploit all of these capabilities.
 
While the features go on and on the basic functionality is so easy to use.  Plugging in an instrument and looping it is really simple.  Once you’ve recorded a loop you can then mash on the buttons and create new rhythms with it.  Pattern recorders also allow you to record your button presses, solidifying the new rhythm as the base pattern for more live loops.  Awesome!
 
With the right preparations this app could be super sweet for live performances.
 
This evening my pals Jeff and Reuban came by to play some instruments for me while I manned the monome and recorded their riffs.
 
We attempted to do a guitar/omnichord track for the video cameras but unfortunately it was already pretty late and our energy level was slowing a bit.  It became clear to me, as we were filming, that it was going to be too much editing work for me to make a good video out of it.
 
What I do have for you to listen to, though, is a little button-mashing I played on the monome with a group of the samples we recorded live into Mash.  We started by looping the bass guitar and then we pulled and switched over to electric.  The beat is a canned loop that we threw in for fun.
 
The best feature of this app is that the first loop that you record, whatever it is, sets the tempo for all of the rest.  It was great because when I dragged that canned beat into Mash it was instantly set to match the rest of the loops.  Mash is now going to be the app of choice for future jam nights.
 
Enjoy!
 

January 15th, 2011
 
Tonight I decided to work on my track for MCRP V9.  The due date for final tracks is the 21st and I don’t want to let my progress fall by the wayside.  I have to admit this evening I was having trouble getting things working.
 
I’m jumping from the place I left off on Day 302 / Grainslide.  That recording had received a warm response from people so I wanted flesh it out more, add a beat, other parts, etc.
 
Getting it quantized to a beat without destroying the natural feel of it was like pulling teeth.  I almost gave up and just decided to go without a beat.  Eventually, I was able to get the piece conformed to a tempo.  Now, when I add more layers with the monome it will be  easier to place them in time.
 
The second thing I did this evening was add some accompaniment with the monome app Grainslide.  I like the way this app treats audio files.  This time around wasn’t as fruitful as Day 302 because the samples I used tonight were only dialogue samples.  Because this MCRP is movie themed I figured I better put those dialogue clips to use.
 
I loaded the dialogue clips into Grainslide and selected tiny snippets of them to find pitches.  Once I found a pitch that I felt matched my piece I recorded a short solo with it.  I repeated this over and over again with multiple dialogue samples.
 
Since it’s getting close to the final submission deadline I don’t want to give away what the final track might sound like, out of respect for the others working on they’re own tracks.  As I continue to work on this song I will try to give you a sample of what I created that day without giving away too much.
 
Tonight, though, I don’t have an audio sample for you.  Most of my time was spent arranging and none of my Grainslide solos are that spectacular on their own.
 
Sorry!

January 14th, 2011
 
It was a pretty hectic day on the set today.  I did three major interviews.  We were shooting in a strip mall in Pacoima and it was windy, noisy and full sun, not the greatest factors for shooting interviews.  We had to move our setup into an old insurance office that the company had rented for holding.  It was an ugly backdrop that we tried our best to decorate with film equipment.  The interviews went off well and that made up for all the craziness of the morning.
 
After work I drove straight to the grandparents house because they’re watching after June while Jenny is vacationing in San Francisco with her girlfriends.  After June was fast asleep I headed home for tonight’s creative project.
 
I knew that I wanted to continue yesterdays concept of recapturing computer animation on paper.  I bought three black printer cartridges because I wanted to get a lot of pages printed.  I was very dissappointed with how the cartridges performed.  I got maybe 20 pages printed at fast draft settings with low ink until the cartridge was completely out!
 
I know that my pages were pretty black heavy but 20 pages is nothing!  I decided to skip ahead in the animation to a section that is mostly white.  I was able to print about 240 pages total.  I realize that the next time I try this experiment I should opt for the laser printer at the office.  Inkjet’s plain old suck when it comes to larger numbers in prints.
 
I’d love to spend an entire day doing this if I can find the time.  I love the way it looks and I’d love to play around with the angles and backgrounds.
 
Anyways, here is the 12 seconds of material that I finally got captured tonight.
 
Enjoy!
 

January 13th, 2011
 
Such a nice day.  We took June to Disneyland again (we have season passes).  She got to meet Woody and Jesse from Toy Story fame.  It was the first time we’ve ever waited in line to meet a character.  It was pretty hilarious to watch June interact with them, especially Jesse.  Jesse’s her favorite character and they shared a good time together.  I got some funny pictures of it all.
 
I had to run into the office to do a quickie thing for the Muppets and then I was back home again.  I had to get out the printer for Jenny because she needed to print out her airline ticket.  She’s going to be off on a little San Francisco weekend getaway with the girls.  I’m working all weekend so June is going to be staying with Grandma the whole time.  We’re both a little worried about how she’ll handle it.
 
Anyways, tonight’s creative project ended unfinished due to a printer cartridge mishap.  I ran out of ink very quickly and Kinko’s was out of my cartridge.  It was too late for any other place to be open.
 
The idea stems from this extremely cool video I saw on vimeo a long time ago.  The moment I saw it I knew I wanted to do something like it.  The basic concept is that you print out the frames of an animation on paper and then recapture those frames using a camera.  What you get is your animation plus all the flicker and shake that stop-motion offers.  On top of that you also get to film it from various angles utilizing the depth of field of your lens.
 
I love the way it looks.  It has been a music video concept I’ve had up my sleeve for a while to film a band, print out the frames of the video and then recapture them on paper.  Simple yet interesting.
 
Unfortunately, this project is to be continued.  I only got a very short amount done but it’s deserving of another days work at least.  The animation I’m using is something I created on Day 252.
 
I hope you enjoy this tiny snippet.
 

I got to sleep in today!  I didn’t have to go to work and Jenny let me have as much time as I wanted to get up. That was nice.  I got up at 10 o’clock and posted my previous days creative thing.  We took it easy for most of the day and got grandma to watch June in the evening.

Jenny and I saw Black Swan this evening.  It was a pretty good film.  To be critical, I did find the device of Natalie Portman’s character seeing her face appear on Mila Kunis’s character multiple times in the film a bit tiring. Nevertheless, the film was still very inspiring, especially the camera work.  There were very few long shots in the film.  The camera was always handheld and moving and right in on Natalie Portman’s face.  It was visceral filmmaking mirroring the visceral objectives and passions of the main character, I think.

I drove home from the film with my creative thing on the brain.  I wasn’t sure if I should do another ink project but suddenly this idea came to mind and I had to follow through.

I started by finding a good reference image on the internet and lightly drawing it onto the paper.

Next, I had to test out some splatter techniques on another sheet of paper to figure out how I was going to go about inking it.  I tested out different techniques using a dropper and various brushes but I ultimately ended up sticking with the dropper.  The reason was that I found a few diferent ways to use the dropper that made it the most versatile tool.

If I dripped ink from very close to the page a small circle would appear.  Dripped from higher produced larger circles.  I could suck up excess ink with the dropper as well.  Finally, the clincher, if I pressed the dropper straight down with firm pressure into a fresh drop of ink and slowly squeezed the bulb a small explosion of ink would occur giving it the splatter I was looking for.  Using this method allowed me to drip ink accurately over the drawing but also add a more controlled splatter by using the little explosion technique I just described. I also used a straw to blow a drop of ink into the shape of the arms.

I’m pretty happy with the final product.  It actually turned out pretty close to how I envisioned it.  I was going to add a spotlight effect by dripping more ink around the corners but decided to quit while I was ahead.

I can’t believe I did this one with the time and energy that I had left.

I had a late call time to set today, about 11:30, which means that my camera crew and I weren’t going to wrap until very late at night.  It was about 11pm when we called it and I wasn’t even home until midnight.

As I was driving home I thought about my experiments with the dip-pen.  I thought I could do another drawing for tonights creative thing but I wasn’t sure what to draw.  Then I thought about my watercolors and how they might work well with the dip-pen.  I pictured myself drawing with the pen first and then filling in the outline with watercolor.  Then, I sort of skirted the whole idea aside because of the time.  I didn’t think I’d be able to do it and get to bed on time.

I got home and perused the internet a bit.  I decided I could possibly have the time to do a landscape if I used broad washes of color.  I found a good reference image to work from from my Day 217 / Desert Sunset video.

I think it turned out pretty good.  I did the watercolor first and then filled in the silhouette with ink.

At the end of the process I had to decide, splatter or no splatter.  I decided to splatter and I think it worked out all right.

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-311-ink-watercolor/feed/ 2 http://theb-roll.com/day-310-another-cube-cluster/ http://theb-roll.com/day-310-another-cube-cluster/#comments Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:22:52 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=4236

January 10th, 2011
 
I woke up this morning feeling kind of grimy from sleeping on a sofa at work.  I was woken up by my co-workers arriving.  I got up and cleaned myself up a little, picked up some coffee and headed off to set.
 
Today was another crazy press day.  The last of the three heavy press days until sometime later this month.  I was able to get out a little earlier and spend some fun time with June before it was her bedtime.  It was nice to see my wonderful family after being away at work for so long.
 
I tucked Jenny into bed, except this time I set my alarm for 11:45pm.  I knew it was inevitable I would fall asleep tucking her in.  The alarm rang and I got up.
 
I knew exactly what I wanted to do because I’d been thinking about it for a while.  On Day 306 I had my first experience with a dip-pen.  I attempted to make a cluster of cubes but didn’t really create the kind of image that I wanted to.  So tonight I gave it another go and this time I got closer to what I had initially envisioned.  I used a still from my video on Day 114 as a reference.
 
While I still think it looks a bit amateur I enjoy using the dip pen quite a bit.  I really want to get the hang of it.

January 9th, 2011
 
Up early again to make it to set on time.  We’re filming at Universal Studios now and it’s funny to see the tours pass by.  People riding the tram snap pictures of me as if I might be somebody of importance.  It was another crazy day of running around on set.
 
At the end of the day I was beat.  I left the set at 8pm but I had to go by my office to meet up with my friends Steve and David.  Steve recently finished a wonderfully inspiring documentary on improvisational musicians and David produced it.  They got the film accepted into a film festival in Montreal and they needed to do an output of it to tape.
 
We had some technical difficulties and the final output didn’t begin until nearly 1am.  I decided I’d better just spend the night at the office rather than drive 40 miles home at 3am just to have to wake up early to get to set.
 
While the film was outputting I worked on my creative thing until it was time to pass out.  I opened up my song for the latest Monome Community Remix project.  On Day 302 I had really great results using this new monome app called Grainslide.  I felt really good about the song I’d produced on that day so I wanted to jump from there as a continuation point.
 
I decided it was time to create some kind of beat that could possibly complement it.  It was not easy and I don’t even think I really accomplished it.  Because of the un-quantized nature of my original track I found it tough to create a beat that sat well with it.  It needs to be almost more textural than straight kick and snare.
 
I’m unsure of which film the sample I used is from but its basically just the sound of someone running around causing a bit of a ruckus.  I pulled little hits here and there and created a drum rack of it in Ableton.
 
Unfortunately, I must now refrain from letting you hear the song as it progresses because I think it is beginning to have an identity and I don’t want to spoil the reveal before the deadline of January 21st.
 
What you can listen to is a snippet of the beat that I created.  It’s not much but it’s where I ended up before passing out on a sofa.
 

Click here to view the embedded video.

I woke up real early this morning to arrive at the location on time.  We filmed all day at the Huntington Library in Pasadena.  It’s a beautiful location to be all day but it was quite cold.  Filming finished up around 5pm and I drove over to Jenny’s parents house.  Stacy and Guillaume are flying back to France tomorrow and tonight was our last night to hang out with them.  They will be missed.

We got home and put June to bed.  I tucked Jenny in because she has not been feeling all that well lately.  I was wearing all of my clothing when I got into bed so it got hot and I snoozed off for a while.  I got up at 11pm and went out into the living room to do my creative thing.

The initial plan that I made while driving home was that I would do some writing as my creative thing.  I don’t write enough and I need to do it more often but after waking up all dazed I really didn’t have the urge to think.

I decided the best thing for me to do was to get that dip-pen out and draw some more.  This time I stuck with the style I’m most comfortable with.  I wanted to experiment with pressure and line thickness.  I felt like I was getting to know the way this pen works, which is good.  
 
I want to do more with this pen because it is quite versatile.  The range of thick to thin is pretty amazing.  With a light touch and a certain angle to the tip you can achieve a spectacularly fine line.

I stayed late at the office again, this time later then the night before.  I was rushing to get everything done because I’m working on set tomorrow and I have to wake up early.  Jenny invited her sister Stacy and her husband Guillaume over for conversation and drinks.  They’ve been in town the last two week having traveled all the way from the south of France.

I knew that I wasn’t going to do anything complex or intensive for my creative thing.  I needed to get my rest so that I could arrive on set on time tomorrow.  I started this one while Stacy and Guillaume were still hanging out with us.

The inspiration for this one initially came from my experiments with displacement within Cinema 4D.  I wanted to draw a three-dimensional clump of cubes.

I also wanted to finally test out this dip-pen that I bought a very long time ago.  As I drew the picture I quickly got the idea that this kind of pen was going to need some getting used to.

I found it very tough to draw the clump of cubes the way I saw it in my head.  I changed direction when I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to realize the image I wanted to create.  Instead, I connected lines together to create cubes from different perspectives.  At the end of the process I played around with flinging ink on the end product.

I’m not that happy with my results but what can you do.  Creative thing done.

January 5th, 2011
 
I had a pretty busy day at the office.  Work kept me a bit late but it wasn’t too bad.  I left for home around 8pm.  As I drove home, I decided to myself that I was going to do a macro-shoot of a bit of bark that I pulled off of a tree a couple days ago.  But once I got home I felt too lazy to set all of that up.  I tried to come up with something that I felt like I had the effort to do.
 
I never thought that stop-motion animation would ever be a viable option when I’m feeling lazy except that I knew it wouldn’t take me that long to get set-up.  Sometimes I think that’s the hardest part with these creative daily tasks, the set-up.  Doing whatever your planning on doing is great fun and can invigorate you out of your stupor but every task has a gathering stage and a set-up stage, then finally the fun part.
 
The leds were something that Jenny put into my stocking on Christmas.  She got them from the thinkgeek catalog.  While it was awfully handy that I had them I was really disappointed with their quality.  Most of the leds didn’t work or their connection to the battery was shotty.  It took quite a bit of searching to find the right ones for painting with.
 
I realized that light-painting stop-animation is pretty darn strenuous.  It was tough to remember how to draw something the same more than once when you can’t actually see what your drawing.  The more I repeated it the closer I got to figuring out my technique.  Then, it was all a matter of stamina.  It turned into weightlifting reps in my mind.  I’d finish an image and say in my brain, “Ok, three more”.
 
Then I started adding steps.  It went from painting the stem, to painting the stem and leaves, to painting the stem, leaves and flower petals, to painting the stem, leaves, flower petals and exploding swirls.  Every time I added a layer it got much more time consuming and I got much more focused and determined.  I couldn’t take any breaks because I felt like there was this momentum building the whole time.  In the end, it took me about two hours of animation-time.  It was a great experience because I learned a lot about how it’s done.
 
While I’m happy with the final results I can see a lot of things I would have done differently.
 
The next day, while at work, I imported the sequence into After Effects and looped some sections in order to draw out the animation a bit more.  I also added an all-voice sound effects pass because I love it when animations are completely scored with mouth noises.
 
I hope you enjoy!
 

I took the day off of work today because I knew that I was going to work the weekend.  It was quite a day.  I decided to treat June to a day on the trains which turned out to be much longer than we expected because I got on the wrong train.  We ended up in West Corona at 5:30 and June was done for the day.  She behaved well considering the delays.

After dinner I drove over to my buddy Dean’s place.  On Day 301 I got a taste of this wonderful slitscan software that was so graciously shared with me.  My way of paying back the individual who shared it with me is by beta testing it and offering any ideas that come to mind for improvements.  Well, last time I only got to spend a very short time with it so tonight I wanted to delve deeper.  If I’m going to offer helpful advice I need to play with it as much as possible to discover any quirks.

This time I tested a different kind of slitscan than on Day 301.  This technique is similar to the kind of slitscan you can see also on Day 112 and Day 150.

Below is just a short video example of what I created.  Enjoy!

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-304-beta-testin/feed/ 2 http://theb-roll.com/day-303-monome-light-typing/ http://theb-roll.com/day-303-monome-light-typing/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:36:19 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=4188 January 3rd, 2011

Today I was back to work.  It was a mellow day to begin the work week.  It turns out I’ll be working all weekend on The Muppets so I have a full week ahead of me.

On the drive home my thoughts landed on an old post that I did back on Day 062.  On that day I decided to use my monome as a tool for light painting photography.  I thought about developing the idea further.  Then I remembered seeing this video on the internet where some people had devised an app for the Ipad that allowed it to be used as a light painting tool.

It’s pretty cool.  Oddly, enough there is a similarity to the concept behind Slitscan photography.  Basically, the image is displayed on the Ipad panning through a slit.  It’s hard to describe but, while the shutter is open on the camera someone would walk across the frame with the Ipad very slowly while the Ipad pans the image through the slit.  The results is the image appears whole in the final picture.

I realized I could emulate this technique using the monome.  There’s an old app for the monome called Nerdscroll which performs the basic function of scrolling text.  Type in the message and it will scroll across the monome.  I used a large book to block out the rest of the leds on the monome except for one column.  Then I basically opened the shutter and slowly moved the monome across the frame.  As a final touch I used the flash a couple of times in two different spots to light up the scene.

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-303-monome-light-typing/feed/ 3 http://theb-roll.com/day-302-grainslide/ http://theb-roll.com/day-302-grainslide/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 02:46:07 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=4181 January 2nd, 2011

My last day before the end of my christmas break.  It was nice to be home but tomorrow it’s back to work and January is looking like it’s going to be a crazy month.

This evening I decided to continue working with the samples from the latest MCRP.  I have been experimenting quite a bit with them lately.  I’m trying to move myself into arrangement mode.  On the last MCRP I experimented a bit too much and moved into arrangement mode much too late.  I was left with too much material to sift through and too little time to get through it all.  I’m going to try to not make that mistake this time around.

Anyways, a friend and fellow monome user Jared just recently released his new monome app called Grainslide.  I tested an early version of the app on Day 213 and he has since made adjustments and released it to the community.  It’s a simple but effective concept.  His layout design is unique to most other monome apps which I think is great.  It’s not a quick sample cutting app although you could play it that way.  It’s a layering tool really.

You have four sample banks each loaded with sounds or noises that complement each other.  You can use the on-screen interface to select portions of the audio files to loop.  Each sound file can be transposed up or down independently but all of them can also be transposed globally.  This is cool when you find a nice combo with the independent settings and then throw in some global shifting and you have the undercurrents to a song.

Finally, in the center of the monome are some sliders that add delay to each of the sounds.  This as an area he hopes to add paging functionality so that you could select between a number of effects.

The controls are one thing but the way it sounds is another.  When it transposes the audio file it also speeds it up or slows it down.  This would normally be something undesirable when your used to working in a program like Ableton where you have the ability to transpose files and still keep the rhythm on beat.   But for this app, it’s what gives the sound its unique character.  If you’ve chosen your samples wisely you will come out with beautiful harmonies.

For my experiment, I took the sample from Close Encounters that I used on Day 298 and the sample from Babel that I played with on Day 295 and messed around with them in Grainslide.  I recorded multiple takes into Ableton.  After that, for blog purposes, I simply separated each take that I recorded and dragged them to a different track so that all would play at the same time.  You’d imagine it would sound awfully muddy (and it does a little) but at times it sounds amazingly beautiful.

Finally, Jared is a kindred spirit because he is around the same age and he’s a monome user and he also has a daughter around the same age but also because he has been doing a creative thing-a-day as well.  He and I have been encouraging each other throughout the year with comments.  He had some troubles along the way, including a major server crash, that had derailed him from the daily schedule for a while, but he has recently renewed himself to do a daily thing.  He’s a much better musician than I am and also an amazing illustrator. So, please check out his blog as well.  It is at http://uprlip.com/and you can also find it on my links page.

Enjoy!

January 1st 2011
 
This post was almost a fail.  Luckily a last minute adjustment saved the day.
 
Today marked the end of my friends own 365 day project.  My friend Dean has refrained from having a single drop of alcohol in the past year and tonight was the night he would have his first beer.
 
I knew the whole day what my creative task was going to be.  You see, last thursday I had been hoping to be able to stop by Dean’s house to try out a piece of slitscan software that I have so fortunately been given to test.  The application is PC only and Dean’s specs are right on target.
 
So, this evening I brought my camera and my computer over to Dean’s place and attempted to run the software amongst various partygoers.  The program runs from the command line which is pretty foreign to me but thanks to my friend Joseph we were able to successfully run the application.  The only problem was that whenever it got to 99% it would crash.
 
We opened the task manager and decided it was most likely a matter of memory.  At the time Dean was transmitting an HD movie from his computer to his PS3 and I figured that was hogging some processing power.  I decided to wait until the movie was done and I would try again.  Unfortunately, people started looking up youtube videos which then turned into a rowdy session of chat roulette.  I figured I had better call it a night and come back in the morning.
 
I did just that.  The next morning I came by and gave it another go except even without the other programs running it still crashed at 99%!  I tried various settings but to no avail.  Just as I was throwing in the towel I decided to run the software again so that I could take some photos for the blog.  This time, though, I decided to use forward-slashes rather than back-slashes for my file paths.  It was the opposite direction from what the command prompt would give back to me but it was the same direction as the example given in the programs ReadMe file.
 
Sure enough, it suddenly worked!
 
What can I say about this software other than, I love it!  It is truly blazingly fast and its extremely versatile as well.  I have only scratched the surface of course.  Once it began to work I wanted to stay and test but unfortunately I had things to take care of.  But in the short time that I spent testing it (about an hour) I created multiple images as well as an 20 second video clip.  That is unheard of with my After Effects setup.  It would take all night to create 20 seconds of video with my setup.
 
The extremely long images you see above are shots from Day 297 when I filmed some hanging mobiles in my friends shop.  In each of those images you are seeing the life of a single scan-line over many minutes worth of video.  If you click on any of them you can explore high-rez versions of them.
 
I think they are beautiful.  Absolutely beautiful.  I am completely inspired and jazzed by the opportunity I have been given with this program.  I can’t wait to create more images and video with it.
 

December 31st, 2010,

Tonight is new years eve and sadly Junie is sick.  We had plans to go out on the town but we felt bad leaving this snuffly sick baby girl with grandma for the night.

As for resolutions, I’m still looking to make it out of the one that you’re reading right now.  But doing this project has opened my eyes to some real flaws in my personal being.  One being the fact that I seem to be extremely diligent with some things but just as extremely forgetful when it comes to other important aspects of my life.  One being the mail.  I hate the mail.  I have let too many bills go delinquent because of mere stupidity and forgetfulness.  My new years resolution is to focus on the things I dislike most and do them first.

Anyways, Happy New Year!!!!

I have to credit Todd Burleson for this idea.  He is a fellow reader of the blog who is involved in his own 365 day project.  He has been taking a creative photograph every day for about a year now.  He’s getting close to the end.  His blog is very inspiring.  Not just the photos but often the words.  The titles coupled with a thoughtful quote under every picture convey ideas and emotions that I can only hope for on this blog.

Todd has also found his own bit of inspiration out of the pages here.  Since he saw some of my previous music-box posts he decided to get one of his own.  He composed a song for his wife on their wedding anniversary and had the ingeniuous idea of creating a mobius strip out of it.

I’d never known what a mobius strip was until Todd showed me his post, but all you have to do is connect the end of your composition strip to the beginning and flip it so that the back-side faces front.

The cool thing that happens is that your composition is inverted once it passes the connection point.  My composition was created kind of haphazardly but I purposely composed something with repeating rises so that when it inverted it would becomes repeating falls.  I actually like it much better inverted.  Funny, but it makes me want to go back and hear some of my previous compositions backwards.

Thanks for the inspiration Todd!

We spent the entire day at Disneyland.  We took June first thing after breakfast and at around 4pm Grandma Rosie came by and picked her up.  After that, Jenny and I rode the big rides and stayed until the fireworks.  Unfortunately, the fireworks were cancelled due high winds.  It was a super awesome day!

When we got home we were exhausted.  Jenny took a hot bath and I perused the internet.  Once Jenny was off to bed I decided to attempt to do something creative.  I opened the remix I’ve been playing with for the latest MCRP but unfortunately was not really feeling it.

The TV kept winning my attention.  That’s how I felt.  Turn off brain.

Eventually, I resorted to an idea that occurred to me a while ago while eating a cheeseburger in my car.  I noticed the grease on my fingers spread across my iphone’s screen creating these rainbow effects.  I thought to myself that might be worth a macro project.  I tried to recreate it but I found it to be too much of a challenge to find the grease through the macro.  My plan B was to forgo the grease altogether and just focus on the pixels within.  What I found was some actual inspiration.

I went from the iphone to my laptop to my television and snapped pictures of them all.  It was the television that was the most interesting.  The TV is always changing with moving images so at macro levels I was seeing what looked like to me, a Saturday Night Fever-esque 70′s light show.  I decided to switch from stills to video and filmed the light show.

Even though I filmed it just to be an example, I brought the footage in and thought it should have some music added to it.  I needed a short track because I don’t want to burn your retina with multiple minutes worth of flashing color.  I found the right track in a previous Monome Community Remix Project.  The track is only a minute long.  It’s called “Gunny Fames” and it’s by an artist and fellow reader of the blog named Bite.

I did very little editing to the video.  Bite’s track actually just happens to complements the material.  Check out more of Bites music at his soundcloud page.

Enjoy the video!

Today was rainy all day.  We stayed in for most of it except at one point June and I put on some rain gear and played in the rain.  We sent leaves down the gutters together.  It was pretty awesome.

I spent the rest of the day hanging with June and rendering shots from yesterday through my After Effects Slitscan composition to collect up for posting.

I decided to continue work on my song for the most recent Monome Community Remix project.  I’ve been experimenting with the samples lately.  On Day 292 I created a sort of fugue with the famous clip from the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where the humans communicate with the aliens at the end.  Tonight, I decided to work more with that same sample.

I separated each on the music notes from the movie clip to separate midi notes on the keyboard using Ableton’s Sampler and then I used the monome application Boiiing on it.  Boiiing is a simple and effective application.  Click here to see a video showing how it works.

I recorded my little jam with Boiiing and cut it down to my favorite bits.  There’s a rhythm in there that I like best and think will be the springboard for my next session with this song.

Enjoy!

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-298-monomen-again/feed/ 1 http://theb-roll.com/day-297-a-great-subject-for-slitscan/ http://theb-roll.com/day-297-a-great-subject-for-slitscan/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:28:24 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=4113 December 28th 2010

I think I’m going to start date-stamping my posts since lately I’ve been posting a day or two after my actual creative event.

Around 11am this morning I made my way to OTTO.  It’s the cool designer toys/books/home decor store that I mentioned earlier on Day 293.  I made an appointment with Pam, the owner, to come by and film their mobiles.

The day before, Jenny and I were visiting with them and I noticed their mobiles hanging from the ceiling.  I’d seen them a million times before but this was the first time I’d ever looked at them as a possible subject for Slitscan.  They have a naturally slow and smooth movement which makes them particularly good for Slitscan.  Not too mention that  OTTO has a bunch of super modern and stylish models to choose from.  I was pretty excited to see how each one would come out.

If your unsure of what Slitscan is exactly, check out my earlier posts for a description.  On Day 100 I give a fairly detailed overview and on Day 239 I talk specifically about the method I’m using on these mobiles.  At this point I have a bunch of Slitscan experiments you can see in my “The Year So Far” page.  Just do a “Find” for the word “Slit” and you will see them.

If you follow the blog you may know already that I’m prepping for a music video that I’m going to use the Slitscan effect on.  These mobiles might find their way in.  I may be purchasing one or two of them to take home and do some controlled experiments with.  I hadn’t thought about it at the time but as cars drove by outside they reflected light onto the wall behind the mobiles, veritably sabotaging my slitscans.  You can see them as the drastic lines going across some of the images above.  Also, I said yes to an offer of turning on some ceiling fans which I probably should have declined.  Some of the mobiles movement turned out more erratic than I expected.

One very cool thing that I’m very excited about is that I have a new software for doing slitscans which should considerably speed up my renders.  On Day 240 I found an amazing slitscan video called Slitscan Carnival made by a fellow Carl Rosendahl.  In his description he talked about developing the software himself and that he designed it specifically for his cameras video codec, which just so happens to be my camera as well.  He also mentioned that his renders went blazingly fast!  In contrast to my set-up, using after effects, which is arduously slow!

I messaged him soon after inquiring whether or not he would be willing to share his application with me.  At first he was a little apprehensive but after a bit of correspondence he accepted and sent it over to me!  I couldn’t be more excited to see how the render speeds compare.  For previous experiments I would have to wait a day and post a single shot.  With this software I may be able to produce multiple shots in a single day!

Alas, it is a PC code and I don’t own a PC.  My buddy Dean, who has the perfect computer is going to be available on Thursday so you might see the results a little after then.  In any case, I’m really looking forward to experimenting with it.

In the end, I think the mobiles came out pretty awesome and I see a bunch of potential in them.  I can’t wait to render them out as video!

Thanks Pam, for allowing me to capture these amazing mobiles!

But me, I grew up playing video games.  I love video games.  From the Apple IIe to the Amiga to the Atari 2600 to the original NES, I have been playing them all my life.  I beat the first mario brothers in a donut shop that still exists down the street from me.  So after watching Scott Pilgrim I was pretty inspired by it.

It was one of those movie experiences that made me wish I could make a movie just like it as my creative thing.  The cartoon Samurai Jack popped into my brain because I feel like in some sequences of Scott Pilgrim they directly borrow from it.  Samurai Jack, in my opinion, is one of the coolest cartoons ever and is still highly underrated.

I went onto the internet and googled Samurai Jack.  I came across a couple blogs by actual background painters from the show.  The backgrounds from Samurai Jack are so good that I cannot put into words how much they inspire me.  Going through these blogs and looking at their artwork made me wish I had on 1/8th of the talent these guys have.  Truly beautiful and amazing!  (Check it out for yourself:  The blog of Artist Bill Wray, Mad About Cartoons and the blog of artist Scott Wills, Candy Cane Land.)

So, for my creative thing I decided to create my own background painting.  I know very little about actually painting in photoshop.  Most of my experience in the software is based in doctoring images with masks and filters.  I’ve never made something from scratch using the brush tool.

I looked up some tutorials but none of them really teach you how to do something like this.  They make suggestions and give you tips but really a lot of it comes down to practice.  I did see one commonality between the tutorials in that most paintings start of with large thick brush strokes that continually get refined down into smaller ones.   Using the Smear tool was the other trick that I found helped me in creating more detail.

I’m pretty happy with the results being that it was my first time.  I certainly could’ve kept refining but I had to go to bed at some point.  I definitely learned a whole heck of a lot about the brush and smear tool.  Yet, I can also see that I have a whole world of things to learn about painting in the computer.

In the evening we had Jenny’s sister and her husband over for dinner and a board game.  We played until about 11:30pm and after they left I decided I might as well put some work into my track for the latest MCRP.  The samples in this one are all from movies and there are some real good clips in there.  One clip in particular is from the film Babel.  It’s a score cue that is almost too good.

Anyways, I went through all the musical samples and experimented with which ones worked well with each other.  Eventually, I created a few loops from various samples and brought them into MLR.

It has been a long time since I’ve pulled my monome out and it was nice to use it again.  I played around with the loops on my monome and recorded the results.  Then I brought the recording into Ableton and cut it down to a listenable length.

The samples I used were from the films Babel, Badlands and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The Babel sample is so good that it is the foundation for the rest of the samples.

I don’t know how this jam session will influence my final track for this MCRP.  I may not use any of this in my final.  I love the Babel sample but I think it could over-shadow whatever identity my track could potentially have.  Either way, it was good to play with the monome again.

Enjoy!

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-295-beautiful-samples/feed/ 0 http://theb-roll.com/day-294-found-faces/ http://theb-roll.com/day-294-found-faces/#comments Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:37:45 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=4076 Christmas Day.  We woke up to a phone call from my parents getting our butts out of bed.  Junie went to bed pretty late on christmas eve so it was kind of tough to get her up.  She was real grumpy.  That all changed when we finally got to grandma’s house and she saw all the family and presents.  June is almost 2 years old now but she still doesn’t quite get the whole christmas thing.  She couldn’t be bothered with the unwrapping bit.  There was plenty else around the house that was more interesting then tearing some wrapping paper.

We have two christmas events.  One early in the morning at my parents house and then one in the afternoon at Jenny’s parents.  By the end of it all I was pretty exhausted.  After we got home from all the festivities I actually spent most my time posting the previous two days on the blog.  It can take me quite awhile to write these things up and get all the photos in order.  By the time I had my previous days posted it was already around 1am.

I decided to do something fairly quick and easy.  On christmas eve, while I was doing my paper robot-monsters, I spotted this picture hanger on the back of a frame (you can see it in the first picture posted above).  I was completely taken by it because it looked to me exactly like a face you might find on a japanese vinyl toy.

I decided tonight to continue the search.  Sure enough I found all sorts of faces around the house.  None of them were quite as obvious as that picture hanger but some of them had real personality.  A few of my favorites were the clock hand, which to me looked like an italian with a mustache, and then the knob in the shower whose shadow created this very funny smile.

Christmas Eve had quite a bit of running around.  In the afternoon I went out and picked up some last minute gifts.  One of the stops along the way was this really cool shop in Fullerton called Otto.  Otto carries all sorts of cool designer toys, books and decorations.  The owners, Pam and Mike, are super friendly and over the years they have become more like friends.
 
Jenny and I both love their style.  They own two shops right next to each other.  The one I mentioned, Otto and then Out of Vogue, an insane vintage furniture store next door.  Pam runs Otto while Mike runs Out of Vogue.  The two shops connect in the back and their super smart and stylish 8 year old son, Van, hangs out between the two.
 
Their situation is one to be appreciated.  Whether they’re at work or at home they get to spend it with family.
 
This is all a lot of extra information but while I was there at Otto I saw these really small simple paper-craft monsters.  The moment I saw them I thought future creative thing.  Basically, they were intricately-cut paper characters that were folded once at the feet to create a paper platform to stand on.
 
So this evening, a little too late for comfort, I decided to design some myself.  Luckily, I had recently purchased some colored construction paper from Michaels.
 
I started the design process with a google search for the term “Robot Monster”.  The results were surprisingly good.  I discovered that there was an old B-movie called “Robot Monster” with a funny creature that consisted of an old-school diving helmet and an ape costume.  I decided to jump from there and started by drawing the space guy you can see on top in brown paper.
 
I drew two more robot-monsters but only had enough time to cut out one more.  So, I decided on the blue guy you can see in the last photo.
 
I think they turned out pretty cool.  Although, if you were to compare them to the ones I saw at Otto mine are at least twice the size.  I may try to challenge myself in the future to create even smaller ones.  It takes quite a bit of concentration to cut small and precise lines with an X-acto blade.

Today was Jenny’s birthday.  It was a beautiful day.  I took the day off from work and the rain had subsided.  We went out for a leisurely breakfast and then dropped off June and caught the film “True Grit”.   What a great film!  And it’s been so long since I’ve been to the theater.    It gave me one of those really great feelings of satisfaction that I so rarely get with films these days.

Todays post came quite late at the end of the night after Jenny was already in bed.  The latest Monome Community Remix Project is underway and I decided I might as well start early since my track record for completing songs on time hasn’t been so great lately.  The theme this time is movies so all of the samples come from movies.

I didn’t pull out the monome at all.  I spent most of the time just getting to know the samples and then experimenting with them a little bit in Ableton.  One of those experiments is today’s post.

The well-known clip from Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the humans communicate with the aliens with an ARP2600 synthesizer was included in the batch.  The most interesting idea that came to mind for this sample was to create a sort of fugue with it.

The analogy I have always used to describe what a fugue is, is the classic “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” one, where one person begins singing the song and then the next person begins singing at the second bar.  The next person a bar later and the next person a bar later until eventually all the parts are being sung at once by some person or another.

I took the close encounters sample and duplicated it eight times and then triggered them each in sequence.  It began to sound quite muddy so I changed it up a little by transposing some of the samples.  Instances 1 and 2 are original pitch, 3 & 4 are transposed up a 5th, 5 & 6 are original pitch and 7 & 8 are transposed up an octave.  I slowed the tempo down quite a bit and played around with the speed with which would I triggered them in sequence.

Once I found a consistency I liked I recorded it all down to a single track.  Then I duplicated that track and triggered the two of them in sequence.

The results were a never ending loop.  Although, the recording below is only about 2 1/2 minutes.

It’s still a little muddy at points but I think it ultimately sounded pretty cool.

Enjoy!

Inspiration struck partly because of the latest Monome Community Remix Project.  We all had to turn in our samples and this time around the theme is movie samples.  I sampled some dialogue from one of my favorite films, The Hudsucker Proxy.  It has always been a favorite of mine but it also is a reminder of the early years between Jenny and I.

Back in the days when I lived in San Francisco and Jenny would come by to visit we didn’t have any furniture in the living room.   Jenny and I would often watch movies tucked in a sleeping bag on the floor.  The Hudsucker Proxy fits into this era of our relationship.

The film is overflowing with great dialogue but the particular line that I selected for the card is one that Jenny and I used to recite to one another.  It’s from a very romantic scene in the film where Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) and Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) stand on a picturesque skyscraper balcony and talk about the past lives they possibly shared together as gazelle and antelope.  It’s a beautiful scene that ends with a kiss and a swelling score that feels like something out of Gone With The Wind.

At first, I thought I’d be able to do a screen-print of the card at my buddy Dean’s house but unfortunately none of his silks were prepared with emulsion.  So, instead I opted to simply go with transparencies attached to some thick card stock.

I found the gazelle and antelope by googling the term “open source clip art”.  I created most of the design in Inkscape and then prepared the files for printing in photoshop.  I printed and cut them to size at Kinkos.  I super-glued the transparencies into position on the cards once I got back home.

It was great to watch her open it the next morning.  She loved the card!

 
 
In case you can’t read the line it says:

“You were a gazelle with long graceful legs gambling through the underbrush.
Perhaps we met once. A chance encounter in a forest glade. I must’ve been an antelope or Ipex.
What times we must have had foraging together for sustenance. Snarfeling water from a mountain stream. Picking the grubs and burrs from one another’s coats.
Or perhaps we simply touched horns briefly and went our separate ways.”

Jenny proposed this creative endeavor.  She told me that she was thinking of making a potato stamp for the “to / from” cards on our christmas gifts.

I was all for it.  A potato stamp is the perfect creative project.  I was foolish to not look up how it’s done.  I never realized how tough it is to actually see the lines your creating in the potato.  I used an Xacto blade and scored my drawing into it.  The only problem was that once I’d finished scoring it I couldn’t see the grooves.  The inside of the potato was wet and whatever crevasses I cut seemed to disappear instantly.

Ultimately, I scored too many lines and the original image kind of fell apart.  It appeared OK when you looked directly at the potato but once you stamped it out on paper it was apparent that the pine cone was a little less than perfect.

I shouldn’t have thrown in the towel on this.  I could have tried again or perhaps drawn something easier but soon after Jenny was off to bed and I fell asleep with her.  I woke up much later and had some other priorities to take care of.

I had to gather up some audio samples for the next Monome Community Remix Project.  This time the theme is movies and I pulled all of my samples from one of my favorites, The Hudsucker Proxy.  One of the best scores ever, in my opinion.

The latest Remix Project, A Christmas themed one, recently ended.  I didn’t finish my own christmas track in time.  I have been feeling less musically inspired lately.  Hopefully that will turn around.  Anyways, have a listen or download A Very Monome Christmas album, if you like.

This evening I focused on finishing my edit for the montage from yesterday. 
 
I hoped to finish the piece last night but what delayed me was the music.  I just couldn’t find the right track.  I actually cut three different beginnings using three different songs but ultimately canned them all.  I needed a song that was quiet and introspective but also had a beat.  But that beat was the hard part.  Long drawn out shots of raindrops aren’t exactly complemented by a phat beat.  I needed a song with a more subtle balance and at least a few changes here and there.

I started off fresh again this evening with a new track by an artist named Modulogeek.  I have mentioned him before.  The song is called “Brothers On A Hotel Bed” and its a remix of a Deathcab For Cutie track.  It’s part of a short EP that Modulogeek released based on some live performances he’s done.

Awesome little bit of trivia as well:  The cover art comes from the blog.  Check it out!

I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the final product.  It’s a little long at the end but I love seeing many of the macro shots play out in full.  I was very pleased with my camera setup.  Lodging the tripod in the passenger seat of my car and filming out the window made for some nice dolly shots.  I still wish I pulled out my macro lens sooner because it would have been nice to film the water droplets in the brightest possible light.  By the time I started it was already darkening out there.

Near the end of the montage I begin playing with the light from a lamp post coming through a droplet of water.  I like how this footage suddenly loses it’s connection to being a drop of water and begins to look like something different, something almost celestial.

Anyways I hope you enjoy!

Jenny and I woke up feeling sick.  I think it was the alcohol we drank last night.  We didn’t drink much of it but we both felt similarly ill.  I woke up early with June and then later Jenny had to take her to a baby shower.  I slept in until nearly 1pm.
 
Overall, I felt a little under the weather.  Looking out the window you could see the tops of the trees rustling hard in the wind.  The wind and the rain were in full effect today.  A trip to pick up coffee got me out of the house and I was inspired by the imagery outdoors.
 
I didn’t have the energy to set-up my garage for working on the telescope project but I did feel the urge to go out and capture some of this beautiful imagery.  I didn’t want to get wet so I set up my tripod and camera in the passenger seat of my car looking out the window.  When I saw an interesting shot I drove right up to it, rolled down my window and began recording.
 
It was pretty cool because it happened to be the perfect set-up for some cool dolly shots.
 
Eventually, I was taken by the raindrops on my windshield.  If you look very closely at them you can see the scene outside projected upside down inside the droplet.  It seemed to me the perfect subject matter for my macro lens.
 
I wish I started earlier with the macro stuff because the light was fading and I ended up boosting the ISO quite a bit.  Still, the imagery in extreme macro was incredibly beautiful.
 
Check back here tomorrow for the video which I am still in the process of editing.

Today was a pretty and cold overcast day.  We stayed in for most of it except for a quick trip to the train station to show Junie the choo-choos, (her term of course, not mine).  That was pretty awesome because we just happened to see two of the longest freight trains ever plus a christmas train as well.  You could tell her life was changed from seeing these things.

The rain sort of kept me indoors and swayed me from working on my telescope to pan & tilt conversion, although I did swing by the hardware store to prepare for it.  I did, however, have the music video on the mind today.  For those of you who don’t know, I am in the planning stages on a music video for a friends band.  Throughout the blog I have been experimenting with slit-scan techniques.  I thought it would be cool to do the music video based on this technique.

It’s the very reason why I’m converting this telescope into a remote controlled pan and tilt device for my camera.  Because the telescope has the ability to move very slowly at a constant rate it makes it perfect for creating clean slit-scan images.

This evening I decided to draw up the plans for how I was planning on mounting the camera to the telescope, but not only that, I decided to imagine other devices that would be interesting for the slit-scan effect.

A larger more simplified version of The Sphere Arm that I built on Day 152 would be very cool.  It would have to be balanced as well as mounted by a strong flange bearing that could give it smooth spinning motion.  This way you could have the camera smoothly fly in a perfect circle around the subject.  The slightest bump in the movement would completely disrupt the effect so a motor for speed control would be a plus.

Then, the same concept of the rotating camera is maybe more interesting to me as a rotating light source.  If it were the only light source spinning around a human being in a high contrast image it might look like that person were being peeled like the skin of an orange.

It was a good brainstorm and I think still a pretty realistic goal as well.

The rain has begun here.  It’s supposed to rain for the next week.  I think it might be the longest stint of rain all year.  I remember there was a couple storms this year but I don’t think any of them lasted for a complete week.  I could be wrong about that.

I stayed in Burbank a little while after work tonight because I didn’t want to go directly into the traffic.  It didn’t matter really because I still got caught in it.  Combine the rain with excess oil on the roads from months without rain and add rushing christmas shoppers and you have a recipe for disaster.  I took it easy and drove nice and slow.

Tonight’s creative thing was inspired by an artist named Stefan G. Bucher.  I came across his website and blog a few months ago.  It’s called The Daily Monster.  He draws a monster a day among other things.

His method is interesting.  The way he starts off every monster is he brushes some black ink in a particular area on the page and then, using a regular drinking straw, blows the ink randomly in all directions.  What ends up happening is the ink forms these thin trails outward which can look cool and chaotic.

After he’s finished blowing the ink across the paper he draws a unique monster around that wild splotch using black pens and brushes.  It’s usually a nice surprise to see the direction he takes each one.

Basically, this evening I used the same method to create my own set of wacky monsters.

It was a fun project and very relaxing to do.

Tonight I finally got back to working on the conversion of my telescope into a remote control pan and tilt mount for my DSLR.

Last time I disassembled just the optical part of the telescope but was reluctant to go much further because of the cost.  I decided that perhaps I should just mount the camera on top of the  telescope tube altogether so that I can use it as both a pan and tilt for my camera as well as a telescope.

The only problem was that for some reason the tilt feature wasn’t working so well anymore.  It appeared to me that the only way the tilt gear was engaging with the brackets for the telescope was by the mere pressure from tightening the knobs on the sides.  I felt like this wasn’t such a good method for the possibly heavy camera rig I’m going to mount on top.

I want a way to physically lock the tilt gear to the brackets so that I can feel confident it will handle the weight of my rig.  I will definitely counterweight the camera so that its balanced and easier to move but I still feel like the gear should be lockable.  If I did lock the gear to the bracket I would no longer have the ability to tilt the telescope by hand.  I would always have to use the motor but I feel like this is not such a major sacrifice.

So, the only way to discover how to accomplish this was to completely dismantle the telescope altogether, from top to bottom.  I’m glad I did it because now I’ve demystified it.  I feel pretty confident that I’ll be able to use this telescope for both purposes.

It certainly was a long and confusing process getting into this sucker.  I felt like I was solving some cryptic egyptian locking mechanism every step of the way.

Step one was removing the screws from the bottom.  This did nothing but loosen a metal plate inside that didn’t need to be loosened in the first place.  Then, under a plastic cover on the bottom, I found the next strange connector.  It was an odd metal washer that could not be turned.

The solution came when I looked at the base from the top.  There is a lever which allows you to lock the panning position into place.  This lever was directly connected to the strange washer below.  I looked closely at the lever and saw that it was holding on by a very small allen wrench connection.  I got the smallest allen wrench I could find and loosened the lever off.  Underneath was the bolt.  I twisted the bolt off and in turn released the odd washer below.  Under the strange washer was another very tight nylon fitting.  I was able to unscrew that off with a pair of channel locks.

Finally, I was getting somewhere.  The rest of the dismantling went smoother.  I got to see up close and personal how everything was connected inside.

I’m happy to say that I was also successful in re-assembling everything back together again.  Now I know how to go in and out of this guy for future modifications.

My plan now is to attach the tilt gear to the bracket using some kind of rubber cement or strong adhesive.  Then designing and creating a mount for my camera that I can then strap onto my telescopes tube.

Hopefully I can get to it soon.  I’m looking forward to recording some footage with this guy.

This evening, I hoped to work more on my telescope to pan & tilt conversion but instead I watched some TV with Jenny and stayed in for the evening.  Last couple of creative projects were tough to fit in and tonight I think I just needed to take it easy.  Rejuvenate a little.  I also figured I started this tutorial, I might as well finish it.

The blog has been a challenge.  Sometimes I have to really muster up the urge to care about doing something creative.  9 times out of 10 I’m happy I made myself do it but at the time of execution it can be tough to get through.

I like the way this render came out.  It’s a pretty good tutorial called “Shatter Text” which you can find here.

I like the fact that this project was taken on out of desperation AND the results look tattered and broken down.  Plus it’s the title of the blog.  How Symbolic!

I got wrapped around 10:30 at night and I was exhausted.  I had to go by the office one last time before I could go home because I had left my camera there.  By the time I got home it was midnight.  I went into the bedroom, said hi to Jenny and told her I had to go do my creative thing.

I was just as tired as I was last night.  So, I decided to go for one of my fallback projects, a Cinema 4D tutorial.  And much like Day 260 / Modeling A Dead Tree, I fell asleep in the middle of it.

I was on set by 9am and spent the entire day there.  Around 7 ‘o’clock in evening I made it back to the office to see how things were going on the cut.  My co-worker had covered the piece with shots and fixed it up but I still was not happy with it.  The problems had nothing to do with his adjustments but were with the way beginning and the end were structured.

I decided to stay at the office and finish it for tomorrows delivery.  It wasn’t long before 1am rolled around and I knew that I was going to be spending the night.  I finally finished my edit around 3am and was flabbergasted now that I had to come up with some creative thing to do before I passed out on the sofa.

I had no real energy to do anything too complex.  I was incredibly lucky to remember the mirrors in the passenger seat of my car.  I stopped by a yard sale this weekend and spotted a large stack of small mirrors being sold for two dollars.  I bought them with another creative project in mind.

But tonight they were a boon in a time of desperation.  I set them up in a couple of configurations and went about taking pictures.

Today couldn’t have been better.  Jenny and I got up and took June out for breakfast.  Afterwards, we picked up a christmas tree and brought it back home.  The whole day was spent playing with my baby and decorating the christmas tree.  It was a beautiful day.

Today’s creative thing came directly from Jenny.  She picked up these clear plastic ornaments a couple of days ago.  She told me that she was interested in making mini-terrariums out of them.  I was super excited because it was the perfect creative thing for me to do and I could share it with her.

The materials we used were clipped out of the backyard.  We had succulents, seashells, moss and some small rocks.  We used bamboo skewers to align everything inside the ornaments.

It was a fun project and for once this year Jenny and I went to bed at the same time.

It was a saturday full of cleaning.  I spent the majority of the day clearing out Jenny’s sewing room, the garage and my studio.  We started renting a storage space a couple weeks ago and with christmas and visitors coming it was time to start filling it.

I didn’t have much time to devote to my creative thing this evening.  We went to a christmas party and we didn’t get home until about 12:30am.  My friend Josh who threw the party is an avid collector of toys and comics.  On his walls are a bunch of prints by an artist named Ragnar.  Ragnar’s style is very 60’s kind of in the vein of Shag except more detail.  I love the style.

With very little time and images of Ragnar in my head I decided to do a bit of drawing before bed.  It worked out well because Jenny was a little spooked by ghost stories from the party that she’d rather I do my creative project in bed.

I drew some random stuff.  Mostly the usual faces with a couple of unsuccessful bunnies.

It’s a tumblr site devoted to posting animated gifs taken from movies.  The movement that he or she selects is usually just a small subtle movement.  It’s an interesting and surreal experience to go through some of the stuff on the site.  There is a certain life to the gifs.  By only taking the most subtlest of movements, it feels as though you are looking into little living windows.

I tried to do the same thing this evening.  I was working late editing at the office so this was the perfect kind of creative thing for me to multi-task on.

I pulled a few moments from some films I like.  I also pulled a small clip of me in the film Prince Caspian.  That’s right.  They asked me to play a telmarine soldier for one of the scenes in the night raid sequence.  The guy next to me is Joe.  He was from the Armory department.

Anyways, I didn’t have as much luck creating life in these little gifs.

I had quite a tough time figuring out what was the best way to go about creating them.  I discovered after quite a bit of failure that Photoshop was the software I should be using.  I only got one gif finished