A little drawing from life.  A work glove in the backyard.

After June was off to bed I came back out to the living room and these guys were sitting next to me.  So that is what I drew.

Another busy day.  Got home, put my little one to bed and drew this tree as quickly as possible.  Then I was off to bed to for an early wake up call.

Unfortunately, I had to power through my drawing time tonight because I am too busy with work stuff.  I wasn’t in the best of spirits this evening either so I decided to keep the faces sour.

Kind of random.  I didn’t know what to draw so I just sort of scribbled out some shapes.  Eventually the mantis head came into view and then I scribbled out the rest.

Today I spent most of my time working in the backyard and then afterwards flew a kite with June and some friends.  I got a pretty good sunburn and was pretty tired come night-time.  I drew this picture from a photo reference in a Time/Life book on canyons and mesas.  I didn’t really get too far on it.  I drew it while watching TV with Jenny and I was nodding off for part of it.

Tonight was the friday night Artwalk in my hometown of Fullerton.  First friday of every month they hold it and this evenings exhibit at the Magoski Art Colony was one of the best ones I’ve seen.  It was about marriage equality and also the overall subject of gay rights.  It was a great show with a lot of beautiful work.  I saw my friends Jeff, Wendy and Nicole there.  Jeff and Wendy are my neighbors up the street.  We all decided to go over to they’re house and have a beer.  I brought my sketchbook along since I had to draw something and Wendy and Nicole are both artists.  We all decided to draw.  It was Nicole’s idea that we draw each other.  I drew my buddy Jeff and Jeff drew me, while Wendy and Nicole drew each other.  It was a pretty hilarious experience.

Surprisingly, my picture of Jeff didn’t turn out that bad!  His nose is a little epic and his face shape is a little over-longated but generally, it kind of looks like him.  Jeff, at the time of course, was drawing me so for a while he put his hand up on his forehead like you see in the picture.  It was lucky timing because once the hand found that position, the drawing became something else.  Thats when I realized that this Jeff was in his Lake Tahoe cabin, probably sipping wine, by his roasty fire and kitty-cat.

Anyways, this drawing is a crack-up to me.

I need more practice drawing cars.  I thought it was pretty tough to get the proportions to look good on this car.  I also need more practice drawing the details with more finesse.  There is this artist that I really like and respect that I would love to have one 8th of his skill.  His name is Pat Perry and I recommend you check out his art, especially his sketchbook stuff.  Such amazing rendering skills.

This evening when it was time to do my drawing I perused the internet a bit.  Through Boing Boing, I learned about a new documentary coming out about a town under the scourge of oxycontin addiction called “Oxyana”.  It looks pretty good.  They linked back to his earlier short documentary called “American Juggalo”.  I remembered watching that a while back.

This drawing is pulled from one of the shots in “American Juggalo”.

Today I finally got my rough cut done and out to my client.  I’m so relieved to have it done and I think it turned out pretty A-OK in the end.  It’s almost completely motion graphics which is a slower process than editing.  Anyways, I relayed the cut out to the client at around 8pm and I was home by 10pm.  After Jenny was off to bed I watched some episodes of Samurai Jack on Netflix and I drew this picture.  It felt good to draw this knowing that I will get some sleep tonight.  Although I DO have a meeting at 10 in the morning.   Ah well.

This is yesterdays drawing, Monday.

I had nearly worked all night on Sunday and today was no different.  I was unrealistic to think that I could get my edit done by Monday morning and in fact it was looking more like I wasn’t going to get this piece done until possibly Tuesday.  I don’t like having to call my client but I asked for more time.  I worked until late into the evening and then I brought my work home with me on my laptop so that I could see my family for a bit.

Jenny and I watched our episode of Mad Men and this is what I sketched while watching.  I was off to bed and set my alarm for 5 am again.

This is for Sunday.  I’m posting these late because I was working long hours over the past few days and working hard getting an edit ready for the client.  I had to work this sunday.  First, I had a shoot early in the morning.  It was a peaceful morning because I was shooting b-roll of a 56 piece orchestra for a film called “Saving Mr Banks”.  After that I was off to work to put in an all-nighter for the sizzle piece I was cutting.  It’s for an upcoming film called “Big Hero 6″.  I was hoping to get the piece done by morning.

When I was younger I had more energy for working all night.  This evening I ran out of steam around 3am.  This picture above is as far as I got for a drawing.  I kept my sketch book by the computer but I had enough to work on that I didn’t focus too much on my sketch.  Oh well, I laid down around 3am and set my alarm for 5 in the morning.

Not much time for drawing today.  I have to work fairly early in the morning tomorrow and Jenny and I were out kinda late on a little date night.  So, once we got home I basically just drew some guy.  He seemed kind of bored to me so I drew him in a cubicle.  Blah.

Looked through my “Movies of the 70′s” book for a photo reference and I decided to draw this wacky picture of Travolta.  Started with pencil and then switched over to ink.  His face is kind of wonky and his eyes are weird.

Tonight I drew four random faces.  How bout that?

This evening I wanted to jump off from where I left off yesterday.  I have this drawing book that talks about the triangle shape that is the mouth to eye relationship.  I decided to draw multiple renditions of Jesus Quintana with different mouth to eye proportions.

Jenny has choir practice on Tuesdays so I had to leave work a little early.  The neighbors were watching our Junie-bug so I had about an hour to myself at home before I had to go pick her up.  This is what I drew.  I plan on doing a caricature of just his face in the future and I want to play with exaggerating his features in different ways.

I’ve been pretty busy lately but I did take a little break tonight to draw.  I didn’t want to think too much about what to draw so I kept my style loose and fast.  I tried to make each face have a different proportions.

While Jenny and I watched Mad Men this evening I decided to draw a picture of the lovely Christina Hendricks.  The reference photo was found on the internet.  I think it looks all right.

Today was a memorial poker tournament for an old pal who passed away about six months ago.  I miss him dearly and all I can say to describe the feeling is surreal.  Without having to go into too much detail, it’s just strange to remember that he is no longer here with us.  I believe he would’ve been proud of me, though, because I ended up winning the tournament.  I had quite a few afternoon beers that by the time Jenny and I were lying on the sofa catching up on some Parks and Rec episodes we were both heavy-eyed and sleepy.  After she was off to bed I put on some Portlandia and attempted to draw something.  That guy with the glasses is inspired by Fred Armisen.  I say inspired because it looks nothing like him.

When I got home tonight I went straight to adding more details to this drawing.  I feel good about it.  I realize drawing is all about patience and its a good idea to more often work on one drawing for multiple days.

Jenny and I searched through some American landscape Time/Life books that we have on our bookshelf and we found this reference photo.  It’s a lumberjack standing amongst giant chestnut trees around the turn of the 20th century.  I’d like to continue adding details to this.

Today I went to go pick up lunch at a cuban place in Burbank called Mambos.  It’s on the corner of Victory and Western.  Normally, I would call in the order and wait 20 minutes to pick it up.  Today, I decided to call in the order and directly go out and use the extra time for sketching.  I hung out on the corner across from the restaurant and drew the view while the food was being cooked.  I was only able to finish a quick sketch of the contour lines of the scene.  I brought the sketch back to the office with me and continually added to it throughout the day, either while importing music or rendering effects.

This is from a picture of Junie on an easter egg hunt in the grandparents backyard.  It doesn’t really look like her exactly.  She kind of looks older.  It was a bit of a tough angle.

I drew a bit during my renders today at work.  This drawing of Junie directly above and my co-worker gage is what I drew during the daytime.  The Dirty Harry image I drew this evening and it’s from my “Movies of the 70′s” book.

I’ve been meaning to practice drawing fur.  So tonight, while Jenny and I watched a bit of television, I took a picture of my cat, 99 (as in Agent 99) and drew it in my sketchbook.  I would’ve liked to spend more time filling it in but I have to wake up pretty darn early tomorrow and I this is where I called it a day.

We went out tonight and had dinner at a friends house.  Once we got home we were all very tired.  I actually fell asleep and woke up around 12 midnight.  That’s when I drew this.  I decided to doodle on some shapes and then I came across his head shape.  After that I just fleshed it out and decided to ink it with a micron pen.

Tonight was a nice surprise.  I’ve been wanting to get things done with my drawing and I try to make plans during the day but by the time night rolls around and it’s time to draw I change my mind.  Well, tonight was no different.  I had planned on retrying my picture of Tony and Dan but when it came time I just couldn’t muster the interest.

So, to speed things along I decided to draw with an 8B pencil and planned not to use the eraser very much.  I drew a Rastafarian fellow named Zoom-Lee whom I met on a London underground train.  I followed and interviewed him back in the day for my creative thing-a-day project.  I started by drawing his profile and I wasn’t too into it at first but I kept drawing and I think it turned into something maybe a bit more interesting what I’d planned on.

My plan today was to try drawing yesterdays picture again and I was going to use a grid to help my proportions but by the time I was able to begin drawing I was too tired to put my energy into it.  Plus, I’m getting a bit under the weather lately.  So tonight, I decided to just doodle Dan’s face in a more open and sketchy method.  He’s not exactly doing the same face as in the picture but I think it’s kind of funny either way.

Dang!  I STRUGGLED with this one.  It’s from a picture of my old friends and roomates Dan and Tony.  I think my main mistake was that I started detailing the they’re arms and hands before I ever got to they’re face and eyes.  Usually I start with the eyes and this time, by the time I got to the face, I had a lot of trouble getting the proportions right.  I should draw this one over again from the beginning.

Oh well.  I also probably spent too much time tonight making this little animated gif.

I got a bit of an early start on my drawing this evening.  I had to leave work about an hour early in order to get home in time for Jenny to make it to her choir practice.  When I got home June was already asleep on the sofa and I let her stay there for a while.  So, I pretty much started on it as soon as I got home.

It’s nice to start these things early because if the time gets too late my ambition dwindles and I just want to get it done.  This drawing is my second time is based on a photo from my friend Jared’s blog, uprlip.  If you don’t know already he is doing a daily photo-series for the year.  Here is the post that my drawing is based on.

A mixture of things, including my daughter Junie refusing to fall asleep led me to do my drawing pretty late in the evening.  By the time I was ready to draw I didn’t want to spend too much time doing it, especially since I had an early morning.  So, I decided to draw the cat laying beside me.  My cat “99″.  I found it particularly hard to render her fur in a realistic way.

Jenny and I watched the preimere of Mad Men tonight and I drew this while we watched it.  I google image searched the show on my iphone and choose an image to draw.  I couldn’t zoom into the picture and it was so small so I sort of drew my impression of it.  I’m kind of into it.

Not sure who I drew tonight but he definitely looks like some kind of weirdo.  This evening we had a backyard movie night.  After it was all over and everything was cleaned up I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to drawing.  I didn’t want to waste any time looking for a reference photo so I decided to just draw whatever.

Back in the day when I was a kid who drew in my sketchbook a lot I would always start by drawing the eye. Tonight I did the same thing except I went with a more realistic almond shaped eye rather then the cartoony ones I usually do.  That’s pretty much how this guy developed.  After I drew the two eyes and the nose I decided this guy was definitely not smiling and then I just went from there.

This is from a picture of Jenny when she had a girls trip to san francisco.  I think I plan on continuing work on this.  This is the preliminary drawing and I think I would like to do a pen and ink of it with more crosshatch detail.

While Jenny and I watched a bit of television I drew this picture from a reference photo I took many years ago.  I was attempting to do some loose sketch-style shading with a blue ballpoint pen.  At a certain point my patience level dropped and my drawing got a bit sloppy.  Other then that I had a good time drawing this.

This evening I decided to look back on some of my previous drawings and when I saw this one I thought it seemed like a good candidate to practice my watercolor on.  This time I used masking fluid over top of the snails to protect it from the background watercolor wash.  While I think this one didn’t come out terrible I really felt like the whole time it was falling apart.  I totally overpainted the background wash.  I also made the wash too similar to the color of the snails.  The only part that I felt went kind of OK was the shells.

Pretty random tonight.  I didn’t get much sleep last night so I’m pretty tired tonight.  I decided to not think about anything in particular while drawing.  Pretty much just doodled and fleshed stuff out.

Spent the night at the office last night and I worked on this during my render times.  It’s a redux based on yesterdays drawing.  I like this composition much better than yesterdays version.  The only gripe I think I have with this one is that I think the hunter should be in a more dramatic pose, like he should be visibly tugging hard on the rope around the Velociraptors neck.

This weekend was Wondercon at the Anaheim Convention center.  Wondercon is an annual comic book, fantasy and science fiction convention.  My friends Wendy and Nicole were there all weekend selling their artwork.  I got to see some of their pictures that they posted on Facebook.  I saw that Wendy had sold a painting of a velociraptor and it got me thinking…about velociraptors.  So, I was inspired to make my own velociraptor painting.  After pondering it for a while I decided to fashion my design after some kind of turn-of-the-century hunting photograph.  Also, kind of like something out of the farside comic.

I decided to plan it out.  I drew it out roughly first, just to help me figure out the composition and anatomy.  And then I transitioned over to my nicer paper and attempted to draw the real thing.  I think I realized halfway through that I’m composing the image incorrectly and that the velociraptor belongs in the center of the image rather than off to the left side.  So tomorrow I may try drawing this all over again and then hopefully I will have enough time to give it an inking and a clean-up in order to prep for watercolor.

Today, the day before easter, we hung out with family because my sister was down from Oakland with her family.  I kept my sketch book with me and attempted to quickly sketch out little moments happening before me.  Like June and her cousin, Tess, playing together.  It was a challenge to capture the body language when the reference wouldn’t exist for long.

I pretty much let myself go on this one.  It started as a pencil doodle while Jenny and I watched TV.  It began as a pair of wide set eyes which then quickly formed into a weird distorted face.  I was interested in exaggerating some of the grotesque details.  I couldn’t seem to get myself to add any hair to his head so I decided he looked like some kind of yogi or something so I put him into a very zen position.

Then it got a little out of hand.  I kept adding lines, trying to add dimensionality.  I kept thinking I was going too far with all the lines and then I decided I couldn’t fix it unless I added more.  That’s when I added the circles around his head which transformed into a sort of tunnel.

It’s a kind of a weird and creepy drawing but that’s cool.  I should probably finish it off by filling in the bottom half with more pen lines.

I wanted to continue practicing watercolor so I drew this guy this evening with the intent to paint it.  Unfortunately, it got a bit too late and I will probably end up painting it tomorrow evening instead.  The only thing I’m bummed about is that I wish I never filled in the diagonal pattern on the back of the chair with black.  I realized my mistake only after I’d already filled in a couple boxes with black and there was no turning back.  I will have to figure out some interesting way to incorporate black into the background when I actually paint this guy.

Recently, a friend of mine posted a link up on facebook to a bunch of scary easter bunny photos and they were totally cracking me up.  I actually think all easter bunnies are kind of scary.  They have their own special brand of scary.  Anyways, I loosely based my drawing on a reference photo but I pretty much just copied the chair.  The little girl and bunny are both from my imagination.

I like the fact that the little girl is smiling real big and that she has absolutely no clue just how evil and demented the easter bunny is behind her.

I feel like I finally had some semblance of control over the watercolor tonight.  I realized on the last watercolor I did that I have a real problem with over-painting.  I just waste a lot of paint without diluting enough and my strokes end up splotchy.  Tonight, I tried to remember the words “More water, less color” and it turned out to be pretty good advice.  When I mixed the colors together I did it in tiny conservative puddles rather than large ones, which helped me to keep a level of restraint in prepping the brush with paint.

It felt good.  I still made a bunch of mistakes through the process and, admittedly, it’s really not that great of a painting by most standards but it felt good to see a bit of that light at the end of the tunnel.  I think I may need to continue practicing this stuff.

I’m working late this evening.  I drew this guy in about an hour between jobs.  With this picture I’m playing a bit with the super fine tipped pens for inking.  I love the fine tipped pens.

Tonight I tried to move pretty quick because I have a pretty busy couple of days ahead of me.  I’m going to be working some long hours tomorrow and I need to get off to sleep soon.  I chose a reference photo fairly quickly from a nearby book entitled “Movies Of The 70′s”.  The picture is of Jack Nicholson from the film “Chinatown”.

Anyways, I tried something a little different with my drawing tonight.  Usually, I will initially draw my picture out with a pencil until I feel like it’s looking good and ready for inking.  This evening I decided to draw everything from start to finish with a ballpoint pen so I couldn’t have the luxury of erasing.  If I drew a line off or ill-proportioned then I was forced to work with it.  It made for a more interesting image I think.

Medium: Ballpoint Pen

Time: 1 hour

Reference: Photo

I spent a few hours adding all the crosshatching to this.  I made a bit of a mistake on the background by making a series of straight horizontal lines.  I was hoping that the straight lines would help complement the addition of squiggly lines representing the distortion of the water behind them.  It didn’t work out.  So I decided to bring out the india ink and brushes and fill in the background completely with black.

I worked on this last night and was too tired to post it.  I actually fell asleep while drawing it.  But I think I’m going to continue it for tonight.  I think would like to crosshatch the shiznet out of it possibly.

So maybe that will be posted later tonight.

I kind of like and hate this painting, all at the same time.  I tend to usually hate all the paintings I do.  I just don’t think I’m that good at it.  Possibly, it’s because I always do watercolor and I find it very hard to use.  I just haven’t got nearly the same level of confidence in my painting skills as I have in my drawing.  I believe I may be a little too impatient for watercolor.  I don’t like to wait for it to dry.  Plus with this picture, I probably should’ve painted down some liquid frisket over my two kids and wall-mounted animals in order to allow me the ability to apply a smoother wash to the background color.

Ah well, on the plus side, I like how this image came about.  It was pretty random.  I had no idea what I was looking to draw when I began.  I just kind of scribbled it out lightly and then told myself I’d follow through with it.

Medium: Watercolor and Pen

Time: 3 Hours

Reference: None

I almost didn’t get my drawing in tonight because I was very tired.  I spent the night at work last night and got very little sleep so tonight my eyes were heavy.  I mustered enough energy before bed to sketch out something.

Finally, I cross-hatched the living bejeezus out of it.  It was a little out of control and didn’t turn out so well but no problem.  It’s all for fun.

Medium: Pen

Time: 45 minutes

Reference: None

I started drawing this in the morning.  I arrived early to work and I doodled a bit while I edited.  Once I had the face the hardest part was figuring out what his body was doing.  After a bit of trial and error, I finally found this pose and it seemed to fit.  Finally, I inked him up with some micron pens and practice more cross-hatching.

He’s a pretty cheesy, and slightly evil looking dude.

Medium: Pencil and Pen

Time: 1 hour

Reference: None

After last nights drawing, I realized that I need quite a bit of practice in the technique of cross hatching.  So, today I watched a couple youtube videos on the subject and decided to ink this pencil drawing that I drew earlier this month.

It was tough to decide which direction the hatch marks should go depending on contour of the shape.  You can see in his right hand, as a standout, of how the cross hatching is not really complementing the contour so well.

Also, I wasn’t sure how dark to go with the initial tonality.  I decided to keep things measured and kept a lot of white area left over.

Medium: Pen

Time: 1 hour

Reference: Photo

Jenny said I should draw an old timey deep sea helmet so that is where this guy came from.  Had a bit of crosshatch trouble.  It takes quite a bit of concentration and patience.  And it also seems pretty easy to screw up.

Medium: Pen

Time: 1 1/2 Hours

Reference: None

This evening I lightly scribbled out some shapes until I saw the shape of this guys head.  After that I added his body and inked him up with some micron pens.

Medium: Pen

Time: 20 minutes

Reference: None

I was pretty tired when I drew this.  I didn’t get my drawing started until very late at night.    It’s a bit messier than I’d like it.

Medium: pen

Time: 1 hour

Reference: photo

I had to take a break from the charcoal for a minute.  It has been good but I needed a break.  Tonight, I decided to do a little graphite, 2H to be exact.  This is a picture of the two most important ladies in my life from about 2 years ago while at Disneyland.  I believe we are standing in line for “Small World”.  The proportions are not perfect but it was good to be drawing nice sharp lines with graphite and I was keeping it a bit loose.

On a side note, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my artistic direction for this year-long project.  I have been doing a lot of charcoal lately and that’s not because I particularly like charcoal that much as a medium.  I mean, I do like charcoal but I’m practicing it more to get a handle on the technique for my own good.  I actually think that I’m more interested in pen and ink illustrations than I am in charcoal.  And actually, I’m really interested in mixing mediums.  In the future, I want to draw more things from my imagination rather than from a photo.  Or I want to meld my photo reference into something maybe more abstract or surreal.

I don’t know why I’m really even writing all this stuff because I really don’t know where I’m going with it but I guess I am  feeling kind of excited about what may be on the horizon for me artistically.  I’m looking forward to finding my voice as an artist.  I may have to begin spending multiple days on a single picture in order to give the drawing the time it deserves to come together.

Medium: Graphite

Time: 2 Hours

Reference: Photo

Another screenshot from Danger 5 as my reference tonight.  This one is from an episode called “Fresh Meat For Hitler’s Sex Kitchen”

I think it’s funny that tonight I decided to take on such a complex image.  The reason being is I went to the art store today and bought paper made specifically for charcoal.  I was so sure that it would be easier to work with than my heavy sketch book paper that I decided to be ambitious with my reference selection.  It turned out that the charcoal paper was just as textured as my sketchbook paper and that it was virtually the same experience to draw on it.

I have learned a bit though, over the past days doing charcoal, in regards to technique.  I think I have a system that seems to be working.  I think my frustrations and troubles in creating sharp lines and smooth gradations can be remedied by just spending more time with my drawing.  I usually only spend about an hour and a half to two hours drawing, which is really not that much time.  Charcoal is pretty forgiving but you have to spend a long time pushing and pulling to finally get to a happy place.

Although, I should try to be more delicate with the charcoal and take more time working in light layers of tone.  As I work my way to the harder charcoal, I tend to press harder, making more permanent marks on the paper that won’t easily be erased.  If I work lightly and take my time then I will have a better chance at finding the right tonality.  Then, I can go in with the hard pencils and create sharper lines.

Medium: Charcoal

Time: 2 1/2 hours

Reference: Photo

Tonight, I decided to draw a still life since none of my photo references were sparking much inspiration.  I want to improve my charcoal technique so I figured I ought to practice drawing an object and attempt to render it as realistically as possible.  While I ultimately like my drawing I still think I have a lot of trouble rendering the finer details.  I think I better test out a thinner paper.  This paper is 138lbs so it is really thick and textured.  I think that texture is making it hard for me to create a smooth and sharp rendering.

Medium: Charcoal

Time: 2 hours

Reference: Still Life

Aw, this one didn’t turn out so well.  I was attempting to draw David Brent (Ricky Gervais) from the british version of “The Office”.  Here’s the photo I was using as reference.  For some reason I could not get the face to look right.  I erased it a bunch of times and kept adjusting but it still came out looking incorrect.  Oh well.  Perhaps eventually I’ll get it looking right.

Medium: Graphite

Time: 2 hours

Reference: Photo

Tonights reference photo comes from another one of my favorite television programs called “Look Around You”.  It’s a short BBC show based on old british educational films.

The drawing I am not completely happy with.  I struggled quite a bit trying to make it look good but ultimately couldn’t get the finer details looking sharp.  Eventually, I had burnished the paper so much that the charcoal had become impossible to erase.  Im not sure if it’s the tooth of my paper but I find it quite a challenge to create a sharp line with the charcoal.

The Sunday of my birthday weekend.  I am feeling the gotta-go-back-to-work-tomorrow- blues.  Last night we watched Macgruber in the backyard with friends and it was a blast.

For my reference image tonight, another screenshot from the TV Series “Danger 5”.  I’m such a fan of that show.  For my technique, I tried to replicate the method I used for my last drawing of “Old Blue”.  I felt good about the way that one turned out so I wanted to see if I could repeat it.  I think it’s working for me at the moment although I feel like I’m having trouble turning out the finer details.

Medium: Charcoal

Time: 1 and 1/2 hour

Reference: Photo

I hate to admit it but unfortunately, I missed a day and then, sadly, I missed another day.  This weekend was my birthday weekend and various events stopped me from accomplishing the goal of drawing on those days.

It was a bummer to have been unable to accomplish my goal with the consistency that I’d hoped for but truthfully, this little bump in the road is not going to stop me from continuing the process of drawing every day and documenting it.  It has already been hugely helpful in improving my skills as an artist, I ain’t going to stop now.

I felt like I had a bit more control of the charcoal tonight.  I started with a wash of charcoal until the whole paper was toned medium gray.  Then I began drawing out the outline and structure of his face with extra-soft vine charcoal.  Then, I moved from the extra-soft to the soft and darkened up the shadow areas.  I blended it until I had a rough shaded structure and then I began using the rubber eraser to draw in the highlights.  This evening I felt myself having a teensy bit more command of the charcoal.

Medium: Charcoal

Time: 2 hours

Reference: Photo

Today I picked up some new vine charcoal and I have to say it made a world of difference.  I was able to make much smoother washes with it and it also erased much easier.  Even though this image isn’t as sharp as last nights charcoal I got a lot more done in a shorter amount of time.   I think the charcoal just reacted a bit more as expected this evening.  This week and possibly next week I plan on focusing on short and fast charcoal practice.  I want to improve my ability to quickly rough out the shapes of an image rather than to focus too hard on illustrating the details.

Medium: Graphite and Charcoal

Time: 2 Hours

Reference: Photo

This was a real struggle.  I don’t know if it is the age of my vine charcoal or the type of paper in my current sketchbook but I had a lot of trouble getting a smooth shaded effect on this.  The truth is the vine charcoal I’m using could be as old as 16 years, if it’s the same charcoal that I used back in college, which I think it might be.  Now, I suddenly feel old.  But it’s funny that it just occurred to me.

Plus, I think the paper plays a small role in it as well.  I’ve recently transitioned into a new sketchbook with thinner paper.  I feel like the charcoal had a smoother wash to it in my previous sketchbook, which my beautiful wife actually made for me.  Yep, she bound the book and everything…but that’s another subject, which I will devote a later post to.

But anyways, this was quite a struggle!  His proportions look a bit wonky but I’m OK with how it ultimately came out.  I know it could have been better, of course.

Medium: Charcoal

Time: 2 hours

Reference: Photo

Tonight Jenny and I got caught up on our episodes of “Parks and Rec”.  While we watched I decided that I would draw Ron Swanson for my drawing this evening.  As I drew I realized that I really wanted to get my charcoal out but unfortunately I have to get up pretty early tomorrow.  So I decided to leave this drawing as an outline for now.  I will add charcoal at a later date.

Medium: Graphite

Time: 20 minutes

Reference: Photo

Sunday.  Today was a wonderful day off.  It’s been so long since I’ve been able to hang out with my family and today it was all about that.  I also picked up an upright piano that my wife purchased from a garage sale yesterday.  I’m excited to finally have a piano in the house.  We’ve been wanting one for so long but it’s never been feasible.  Luckily, Jenny spotted this one at a great price.

For my drawing tonight, I decided to retry drawing an image that I attempted but screwed up back on Drawing 050.  It’s from the classic scene from The Hudsucker Proxy.  I think I was able to capture the face all right but I would have liked to have seen some darker charcoal added to this.  Oh well.  Maybe later.

Medium: Graphite 6B

Time: 1 Hour

Reference: photo

Saturday.  I had to go to work.  I went in around noon and left around 8 in the evening.  When it was time to draw, I decided to sift through this book called “Films of the 70’s”  While looking through it I came across this famous image from the film “Network”.

I’m pretty into this drawing even though the proportions are a bit off.  I plan to continue working on this on a later day.

Medium: Graphite

Time: 1 1/2 hours

Reference: Photo

Today I spent the early part of the day continuing the tour of the aircraft carrier until it ported in San Diego.  I walked off the ship at about 1pm.  During the evening time Jenny and I went to the Art Walk but tired out and went home.  I was pretty uninspired and tired so I just doodled some random faces.  This evening I had planned on posting the drawings from my days on the ship but was too tired to write.

Medium: Graphite

Time: 30 minutes

Reference: None

Today was an amazing day!  Firstly, even though we celebrated my daughters birthday last weekend today was my daughters actual 4th birthday and I was unable to share it with her. I sent her a little birthday video via the iphone that morning before leaving the hotel room.  Afterwards I met with the group who would be departing for the aircraft carrier that morning.  We headed to the North Island Naval Air Station and received an orientation in what we could expect for the day.  We flew out on a C-2 Greyhound and experienced an arresting wire landing on the carrier.  It was a bit scary anticipating that experience.  Like most roller coaster rides, the anticipation is more nerve-wracking than the actual event.  The best part, though, of landing on the carrier was the actual opening of the hatch to reveal the flight deck.  It was like looking through a surreal window onto an alien landscape, the flight deck with its slowly bobbing horizon line and helmeted flight crew peering curiously back at you. Then, actually stepping out on the flight deck, you quickly feel the uneasy tilting of the entire structure.  It was all completely awesome.

The carrier we landed on was the USS Carl Vinson.  After entering the hull, the sound girl and I got our gear together and proceeded to cover the tour.  Some of the most exciting stuff happened right away when we got to see an F-18 Hornet catapult off and then do a flyby.  We were truly treated like distinguished visitors and were given amazing access to the inner workings of the carrier.  I got to see some seriously awe-inducing spectacles.  I also got lots of exercise.  I must have gone up and down over 50-60 stories of extremely steep stairs over the course of the day, all the while carrying a 50 pound camera.  My arms and back were really feeling the effects.  I joked that the Navy’s mascot should be a set of stairs.

At the end of the night we were escorted down to the fantail of the ship where you could stand at the edge of a railing and watch the wake of the aircraft carrier disappear into the moonlight.  After all the exercise I got that day it was an extremely serene feeling to stand there.

It was on the way to the fantail that I saw the image that I decided was going to be my drawing for the night.  The image above is a view from inside the hangar bay.  The hangar bay is a very large space within the hull of the ship that normally stores the jets after they’ve landed.  They get brought down on an elevator and then parked.  Except this evening the hanger bay was completely empty.  Scheduled to port the next morning in the San Diego bay, they had sent all of the planes off in preparation for landing.  As you walk through the hangar bay you can see to the sides these giant pill-shaped windows to the outside world.  The cool blue moonlight shimmering on the ocean outside was surprisingly beautiful against the yellow sodium lights of the interior of the ship.   It made me stop a little to soak it in.  I snapped a picture of it and rendered this picture while laying in my bunk before falling asleep.

Medium: Graphite and Charcoal

Time: 1 hour

Reference: Photo

This day was ridiculously busy for me, hence the drawing.  I had to be in a hotel room in San Diego before the end of the day because early the next morning I would be heading out to an aircraft carrier for a full day of shooting.  But before I could drive down to the hotel I had a ton of things to get finished.  Without having to bore you with all the details,  after all the running around, I finally arrived at the hotel room about midnight.  And after all that I still had to unpack my gear and repack it into hard cases for the transport to the aircraft carrier.  By the time I was ready to draw, this was all I could think of, someone who is exhausted.

Medium: Graphite

Time: 30 Minutes

Reference: None

Intrigued by yesterday’s drawing I thought a lot about drawing textures today.  I should have given myself more time for this drawing.  After a certain point I began speeding up because I have to get to bed on time tonight.  The photo reference had lots of very subtle details that I in no way captured.  I really just roughed the thing out, that’s all.

Many things are happening at work right now, including the fact that this coming Thursday I will be spending the night on a real life aircraft carrier out on the Pacific Ocean!  I will be experiencing the tail-hook landing as well as the catapulting take-off via a C2 Greyhound.  I will get to tour the majority of the carrier and watch night flight operations.  I am a lucky guy.

The reason is I am going as a cameraman.  I am hired to shoot the director and producer of the upcoming Disney Toon film “Planes” receive they’re tour of the aircraft carrier.  I am the lucky camera guy who gets to experience things that my good friend Dietrich, who is a pilot, would give his left nut for.  He is completely jealous of me right now.

So anyways, I won’t be able to post my drawings on Thursday and possibly tomorrow because there is no internet or even phone service out on the carrier. Look forward to seeing my next three drawings post all on Friday night most likely.

Medium: Graphite 6B

Time: 1 Hour

Reference: Photo

Tonight I finally decided to draw a photo reference from my friend Jared’s blog.  He is currently doing a photo-series a day.  I’ve thought about using his photos for awhile but many of them are architectural or textural or have lots of straight lines, which I tend to shy away from.  It was good practice though.  It’s always good to practice free-hand drawing straight lines whenever you can.  I decided to stick with the same pencil for the whole sketch, A graphite 2B.

From now on, I’m going to start posting stats for each drawing that I do, which I think will help me judge my improvement as the year goes on.

Medium: Graphite

Time: 1 hour

Reference: Photo

Calling it in tonight.  We drove home from San Francisco today.  This evening I need to go into the office to attempt to finish some notes on a rough cut by morning time tomorrow.  The notes are substantial enough that I believe I will get very little sleep tonight.  So, I decided to draw something quickly so that I may hit the sack soon and wake up in a few hours and arrive to work butt-crack early.  So, I did a very random, free association-style google image search and I decided to draw this goofy looking turtle from a photo reference.

The idea of drawing a house has been on my mind for a little while now and since tonight I had a little extra time to sit and draw I decided to give it a go.  It’s a little wonky in proportions here and there and I could’ve tried a little harder to keep my pencil sharp and my line steady but nevertheless, I think it came out all right.

Today we drove up to Oakland for our daughter Junie’s 4th birthday.  My sister lives up here and Junie loves her little cousins so we thought we’d bring them together for her birthday festivities.  Once night fell I was allowed to head out to San Francisco to meet up with old friends.  Even though we had exchanged a few texts earlier in the day, I hadn’t heard back from them regarding where or when to meet.  So, in the meantime, on a serendipitous whim, I decided to Facebook a friend who lives out here in Oakland and whom I’ve never actually met face to face.

His name is Jared and at around the time that I took on my creative thing-a-day challenge back in 2010 he was also starting his own.  Through that common goal and a few other common interests we became good friends via the internet.  I would pretty regularly check out his progress on his blog and comment on his posts and he would do the same for my posts.  It ain’t an easy task doing one creative thing a day and to document it so I believe through that process we grew a pretty great friendship.  Even after the year was over we collaborated on other projects.  So anyways, since I hadn’t heard word from my friends in the City I made contact with Jared and we met up for coffee in Oakland.  It was great to finally sit down and have a conversation with him.  It’s funny how quickly and comfortably we began to talk about things.  It was all very natural.  Though we’d never actually met we were certainly no strangers.

So anyways, 11pm rolls around and Jared and I part ways.  I still hadn’t heard back from my friends in S.F.  So, I decided to cross the Bay Bridge and find a spot in the Embarcadero with a good view of the Bay Bridge.  I decided to begin drawing the view with Vine Charcoal.  I darkened the paper in a wash of charcoal.  Then I began drawing the bridge and Treasure island  and everything was looking pretty good.  I spent a lot of time outlining the contours and adding details.  By the time I started drawing in the details of the little tugboat in the lower left I lifted my hand to discover that I had inadvertently erased my whole drawing.  When you’re working with Charcoal it’s best to keep your hand from touching the paper.  Oh well.  I almost gave up at that point since it was freezing cold and I had to pee I decided to wrap up my things and drive back.

I finally received that text from my friend in the city and he had fallen asleep.  Nice one Dave!

Anyways, I finished this drawing in the warmth of my sisters kitchen.  I decided not to use the photo reference I had taken from the spot since I’d already started drawing the scene from eye and proportionally they didn’t match at all.  I wish I could have stayed out there on the spot but the elements were a bit too harsh for me at the time.  Next time.

I had trouble tonight figuring out what I wanted to draw.  I went through a bunch of google searches to find some kind of reference image and I couldn’t get inspired by any of them.  So, I made this drawing without any reference photo and simply started by roughing out a generic body shape.  Then halfway through the process I decided he was going to be a sea captain.  I think it’s good practice to draw things without a reference photo sometimes.

Barely any time today for my drawing.  I’m heading up north this weekend for Junes 4th birthday and so I have to take care of some stuff to be prepared to leave on friday.  So, I am actually posting this at 2am from my office.  I started this drawing at about 1am I would bet and I drew fro about a half hour.

The inspiration came from a random google image search I did today.  Today I learned what Olan Mills is.  If you google image search it you will find some great, very awkward portraits.  I decided to sketch out one of the more nerdy portraits.  Too bad I had so little.  A lot of these portraits are worth giving some real time to the drawing.  Maybe next time.

This drawing was the result of a disastrous mistake that happened while I was drawing it.  I never meant to draw this picture.  In the end, I kind of like the frenetic look of it.

I started out drawing a character from the film “The Hudsucker Proxy”.  If you remember the film, it was the little curmudgeonly guy that gives Norville Barnes the “Blue Letter” in mail room. (“It’s a BLUE LETTER!”)  Anyways, it all started out good.  I drew the contours of his face lightly with graphite.  Then, I had this bright idea that I would try to spread a kind of charcoal wash over the entire background before outlining the details.  I thought, since I was using vine charcoal, that I would be able to wipe the charcoal across my paper and sort of still see my graphite contour lines underneath.  Boy, was I wrong.  I spread the charcoal over the paper and my drawing completely disappeared.

I tried to salvage the image but realized that I wouldn’t be able to recreate the drawing that existed underneath.  So, I decided to throw caution to the wind and I began adding charcoal in mass quantities.  It got pretty messy and I wasn’t sure if I was actually going to get it to a place that I felt good about.  Eventually, a face began emerging and I followed the momentum.  I like the way it looks now.  It kind of reminds me of a frame from a William Kentridge animation, which is really too heavy of a complement.  William Kentridge is eons beyond me at this point.  I recommend watching some of his films if you have the chance.  They are amazing.

Drawing-wise I think i should have just kept it as graphite.  It looked a little better before the charcoal came out.  But I’m also pretty tired and I think I was rushing through it a bit.  Charcoal can get messy kinda quick.

Jenny and I stumbled across this evil cat a long time ago while looking for apartments in Pasadena.  I was so amused by his evil little face because it was totally out of his control.  I mean, he was a friendly little cat.  He just looked that way.

And here he is.

I’m surprised I decided to draw this picture today because it’s a sunday and I’m at work.  I didn’t want to take on anything too challenging since I’m working here late.  Nevertheless, I needed a break from the cutting.  I went into this one thinking I was just going to draw a realistic eye.  So I looked through some of my reference photos on my computer and I came across this picture.  A close up photograph of Junie when she was probably just a year old.  Those big beautiful eyes were staring at me and I thought “What the heck. I’ll just draw those eyes.”

I have, up to this point, been shying away from pictures Junie because her skin is so light and so smooth.  It’s a challenge to get the proportions correct when there’s so much space between the features.  Once I began drawing I was soon pleasantly surprised that my proportions were looking pretty good.  Junie’s eyes came together so surprisingly fast that I decided to draw the rest of her face.  I also attempted to stay away from the charcoal pencils unless I was looking to really darken an area up.  In all, I spent about an hour drawing this.

I have to say that after drawing this I have realized that this drawing-a-day thing is really actually helping a lot.

I got a pretty late start on this one tonight and I had to call it before I really wanted to.  I got caught up watching Christopher Waltz on SNL with friends.  It was a really good one.  Anyways, tonight I continued to practice with the old-timey portraits.  This time I tried to exaggerate some of the facial features a bit more.  Trying to caricature the reference photo a bit.  I’m also experimenting with the shading.

I’m digging this guys eyes though.

Today, on a break, I made a quick trip to the art supply store and I picked up some charcoal pencils.  Tonight I wanted to give them a try.  I haven’t used charcoal for quite a while.  I did take a figure drawing class back in college which taught me how to use charcoal but I remember it took quite a while to get used to.  This evening was like reliving that first day using it.  I’m still not even sure how best to use it.  I found myself using the shading stump in more creative ways in order to get the rendered look that I was aiming for.  I think in the future I could see myself drawing mostly with graphite and then accenting with charcoal perhaps.  I’m not sure yet.  I still have a lot of technique to learn when it comes to shading.

So I was still thinking about that soft shading style that I found so cool from the Steve Pilcher pencil drawings from a couple days ago but this afternoon I came across another artists who I think is perhaps even more amazing at rendering in black and white.  And not to mention, his style is so unique.  His motif is the Victorian/Edwardian portrait style except just a little more exaggerated and distorted and creepy and weird.  His name is Travis Louie and you need to check out his stuff.

As for my drawing I’m pretty happy with it but I still have a lot to learn about shading and rendering realistic textures and shadows.

I probably spent a bit too much time on this drawing because I had planned on doing a bit of work late this evening.  I have a pretty tight schedule for this rough cut that I am cutting at work.  I will most likely be working at the office very late tomorrow evening because I have to finish my cut by Friday morning.

Anyways, as I was driving home from work, I decided to listen to a bit of this audiobook I have on the subject of world history.  The topic of The Huns came up and it was quite interesting.  There was a particular quote that kind of stuck with me.  It was from a Roman author named Jordanes who described the huns as having “…a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes.”  And so this drawing up above is kind of what I pictured in my head at the time.

I spent a lot of extra time attempting to render more realistic textures by using the shading stump.  Still inspired by the Steve Pilcher pencil drawings I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to at least attempt something kind of similar.  Even though this guy is nowhere near the quality of Steve Pilcher’s expert drawings.  Still, I’m pretty happy with my drawing.  I think he looks pretty foreboding and creepy.

Today marked the end of what was a very busy stint of shooting over the past couple of weeks.  And now begins the editing process…

Today I was privileged enough to get to fly up to Pixar in Emeryville for a shoot.  It was a pretty hectic day.  Like every trip to Pixar, I was once again inspired by all the artwork up on the walls.  This time around all of the artwork was from the film “Brave”.  There were some really amazing pieces but I was particularly blown away by the pencil drawings of Steve Pilcher.  I’ve learned that Steve Pilcher was in fact the head production designer on the film and there was a lot of artwork by him on the walls. But it was his pencil drawings in particular that really stood out to me.  His drawings have such soft subtle pencil strokes and shading. He seems to have a way of rendering light which actually makes the picture appear to glow.  Here’s a good link to see what I mean.  Scroll down and look for the soft black and white nature drawings.  These drawings in particular make me think of the artist Tyrus Wong and his backgrounds for Bambi.

Anywho, you’d think that I was inspired to draw some kind of masterpiece tonight.  Well, the truth is, I was exhausted once I got home. So, I decided to do something a little quicker.  I google image searched the term “Karate Poses” and found a nice image with a compilation of different karate poses.  I decided to roughly draw a few of them for myself.  It’s always good to get a little body posing practice.

Just as Jenny was off to bed we talked about what I should draw.  For some reason I had the urge to draw some 1940′s factory worker.  I figured I could find a good body position like a guy putting all his weight into turning a gasket with a wrench or something.  I google image searched “factory worker” and then I tried “Steel Worker” and that’s when I came across this image.  This image is taken from a 1943 cover of Life Magazine with an article on women steel workers.

What I liked about the image was the hard shadows.  As I was drawing, it occurred to me that I would not do this image any justice unless I went ahead and tried inking it.  So, that’s what I did.  I tried to plan out the location of the shadows as much as possible before bringing out the ink.

So I totally over-painted this one.  I’m kind of bummed about it too because the actual drawing came together pretty well.  Earlier in the day, I mentioned that I wasn’t sure what I should draw and then June suddenly said, “I know what you should draw.”  ”What’s that?” I asked.  ”A Ballerina.”  She said it so sweetly that I just had to say yes.

Even though I knew that a minimum amount of paint would’ve gone a long way with this particular design I just couldn’t stop adding paint to it.  It was like I felt like I could fix it if I just kept working at it.  Eventually, things got very muddy.  Especially, when I decided to outline the Ballerina with black ink.  Oh well.  Next time.

I am quite tired this evening.  I got 2 hours of sleep last night and when I put June to bed tonight it was all too easy to fall asleep.  I had a great shoot today though.  I got to work with Terry Crews who was ridiculously awesome.  I found out that he is actually a pretty talented artist.  He showed me some of his paintings on his phone and they were amazing.  In fact, after he retired from the NFL he actually turned his portfolio over to Disney in order to get a job as an artist there.  Also, he’s got years of experience playing the flute.  He was just plain awesome.

So tonight, I began by perusing a comic book style anatomy book that I have and I decided to sketch out some of the action poses from inside of it.  Just a bit of simple practice tonight really.

Tonight, I barely had any time to get a drawing done.  I have a shoot tomorrow early in the morning and a lot of pieces have to come together for everything to go well.  And I’m still working on all those pieces.  In fact after I finish posting this I will move directly onto working on the animatics for the shoot.  I hope to get a couple hours sleep tonight since I have to leave by 5am in the morning.

So, to insure that I at least get a little rest, I decided to draw very quickly and think very little about what I’m actually doing.  Each of these guys was pretty random.

Tonight, I was thinking about how some of the coolest looking characters in comic books are the really bulky and muscular ones.  So, I decided to draw one of those types of characters myself.  And look, he’s struggling to open a jar.  Hilarious.  Anyways, once I had gotten the pencil drawing looking kinda good, I decided to try my hand at inking.  I did the inking with black speedball acrylic ink and a small brush.

It was interesting to use a brush.  In some cases, I had the capability to do the finest line but a lot of the time I was struggling with it.  I did enjoy doing it though.  I screwed up his left eye accidentally by dropping too much ink there so I decided to match it by darkening the other eye as well.  I struggled a lot trying to figure out where to put all the shadows.  I guess I could have planned it better while still in pencil phase.  In the end, I like the way he looks and I like the idea of inking more characters.

I’m a little low on sleep tonight and need to wake up early tomorrow.  So, I decided to do a bit more practice in foreshortening.  I found the high angle a much tougher challenge than the low angle.

I got a busy couple of weeks ahead of me.  Tonight, I am working on something for a job at the office so I had to take a break from that to do this drawing. I decided to keep it simple tonight, since I didn’t have very much time, and practiced drawing hands.  The hand on the right is based on a drawing in my figure drawing book and the hand on the left is actually my hand, drawn from just looking at it.

Even though this drawing doesn’t look like much I spent quite a long time working on it.  Lot’s of erasing and redrawing.  I wanted to do a body position that had a lot of foreshortening happening.  I used this great iPhone app called “Pose Tool” in order to create the position and angle.  It’s a pretty great tool for any artist out there wanting to practice they’re figure drawing.

I’m pretty surprised by my drawing this evening.  I never expected this would be the drawing for tonight.  I invited some friends over to watch “Samsara” in my backyard again.  My friends Jeff and Wendy couldn’t make it over the last time I showed the film in the backyard  so tonight I decided to screen it again.  It’s a movie that I can imagine is less effective when watched on a regular sized television set.  The size amplifies the impact of the film in my opinion.

If you’ve never heard of the film, it’s a 70mm extravaganza in human culture.  The film makes interesting connections between various world cultures, like cutting from an African tribe (that you just can’t believe is actually real) to Los Angeles, where a tatted-up gang member rocks his baby in a loving gesture, reminding you of the fact that we are just as weird to them as they are to us.

It seems that especially Western Culture is the most divided when it comes to the subject of TYPE.  Culture has truly become SUB-culture in western society.  The epitome example of this in the film, in my opinion, is a shot where you see three asian gentleman sporting pompadours that would make Elvis Presley himself cry himself to sleep.

These guys are a part of a culture so SPECIFIC that very few could possibly understand the style.  So for tonights drawing, I google-image-searched the words “Asian Elvis” and sifted through the images that came up.  I decided to draw a composite image based on the photos I was seeing.

Tonight was the art walk in Fullerton so I was out pretty late before starting my drawing.  As I walked home, I suddenly thought about the Tardigrade.  They’re microscopic creatures known for their indestructibility.  Also known as “Water Bears” I am to believe that they’re so impervious to damage that after the planet explodes and everyone is gone these little guys will be floating around in space doing just fine.

The photo reference for the drawing comes from a picture of a Tardigrade that a friend posted on Facebook.  I was so confused by the picture when I first saw it because the Tardigrade looked kinda fake to me.  I have trouble even to this day believing that the Tardigrade in this photo is actually real.  These things are supposed to be microscopic and the creature in this photo looks more like a muppet.  It looks like a caterpillar made out of a vacuum bag or something.  Check it out here.  Am I supposed to believe this photo?

Danger 5 is one of my favorite shows ever.  I’m surprised it took me this long to decide to draw a frame from it.  This is Colonel Chestbridge.  He’s about to get straight to the biscuits.

If you haven’t ever seen it before I thoroughly recommend you check it out.

I was on a shoot all day today and there was quite a bit of downtime.  During part of that, I decided to try and work out that carpet pattern that gave me so much trouble a few days ago.  I figured it out by drawing a grid and planning out how the pattern should fit within that grid.  It’s definitely not perfect but I think it’s looking pretty OK.  It’s closer.

So, this evening I didn’t get home from the work until pretty late.  I got home just in time to catch Jenny and June, whose very sick at the moment, cuddling up under the covers about to fall asleep.  I laid down next to them for a little bit and before I got up I asked June what she thought I should draw tonight.  She said to draw a lion and a tiger.  So, that is what I did.

They are both drawn from photo references I found via google image search but I tried to play a little with the interpretation.  I tried to caricature them a little.  I maybe went a little overboard with the shading of the lion but tonight was a free for all.  No rules.  Just messing around.

Today wasn’t the best day.  Anyways, this evening I didn’t feel much like challenging myself so I decided to take it easy and just draw couple of cartoon dudes.  I tried to make them a little ugly, a little distorted.  One guy looks like an overweight, evil mastermind and the other guy looks like an old curmudgeonly neighbor whose always complaining about something.

Being that I’ve had the topic of perspective on the brain lately I decided to do another perspective drawing tonight.  It’s an image from the film “The Shining”.  All seemed to be going pretty well until I decided to start on the carpet design.  If you’ve seen “The Shining” you know the carpet.

At first I was excited by the prospect of drawing that carpet pattern but once I got there I changed my mind.  I knew there must be some kind of cool trick or technique to drafting the pattern but I figured I’d probably have to cut the paper out of my sketchbook and tape it to a table to really set up a system to accurately draw the pattern.  Unfortunately, I can’t be up that late tonight.

I have to study more drafting techniques.

Tonight’s drawing is pretty random.  At first, I thought I would just add details to my 3-point perspective drawing from last night but then I got bored pretty quick.  So, I decided to turn to the Random Animal Generator I’d used before on Day 14.  The purpose of this particular random animal generator is to generate two animals at once.  The goal is to then draw a composite creature or cross-breed based on the two selections.  You click on the “Image Search” button and it will bring up two windows with reference images in them.  Rattlesnake and Heron were the first two animals that came up for me and I went for it.

I decided to keep up with the perspective practice and drew a 3-point perspective city landscape.  I could see how it was fairly quick and easy to get the basic structure started initially but then the urge to create variation in the building heights, widths and depths made the job exponentially more complex.  I didn’t even get to adding doors, windows and other details but I could see how this could take a long time depending upon how far you decide take it.

Last night I was kind of surprised how hard it was to draw the perspective of the room in my drawing that I decided to practice perspective tonight.  I never had much interest in it as a kid.  I would often skim past those chapters in my art books.

I could’ve drawn a cityscape but I decided to try to translate the cubes of 1 and 2 point perspective tutorials into more organic shapes.  I decided to see how experimenting with perspective could help me create a natural landscape.  I think it was pretty helpful and I’ve never really used it that much before.

This is one of my favorite pictures of my daughter Junie.  It was taken when she was about 2 years old and she was visiting my dad’s office.  I just love her expression and the way she’s concentrating so hard on the pencils in the pencil case.

I have this crazy idea that I’d like to do a watercolor of this image but first I have to know how to draw it.  I don’t want to draw it too realistically.  I’d rather caricature it a bit more.  Anyways, I realized that I need to practice a bit more before I can truly do this the right way.  I think I may practice some perspective tutorials soon.

Tonight I continued with what I worked on last night by attempting to draw multiple trees with different types of leaves.  I’m trying to experiment with different pencil techniques for defining the light and dark of the leaves.  Not as easy as it looks.

I got a late start on my drawing this evening.  I decided to attempt a quick tree drawing.  I always shy away from adding leaves to a tree because I don’t quite have the techniques down.  Tonight, I attempted to go there.  In the future, I really need to spend more time drawing many trees in a row in one sitting.

Last night we watched the film “Samsara” in my backyard and all day today the thought of it stuck with me.  This guy in the drawing above is the “Tollund Man”.  He is one of the most well-preserved corpses of prehistoric man that we are able to see today.  You get to see all of his many details up-close and personal near the beginning of the film.  Watching his face is very eerie.  He is so well-preserved that it feels like he might suddenly open his eyes.  At the same time, you can also see the centuries of dirt on his face.  The film spends a lot of time presenting t0 the audience the vast array of cultures that we humans have developed into and this guy serves as one of the first examples.  It’s a really amazing film and I recommend watching it.

Regarding the drawing, I think I may have gone a bit overboard with the shading but whatevs.  It was a good exercise.

I drew this one pretty fast.  I didn’t have much time.  This evening I had friends over for a backyard movie night.  We watched Samsara, which was ridiculous in every sense of the word.  By the time everyone left it was getting close to 1am and I still needed to draw something.  I would’ve liked to have drawn something from the film because it was absolutely  beautiful. Ultimately, I realized it would be tough to do any sort of justice to any frame from that film. So I decided to grab a small potted cactus from my shelf  and I drew that.  I drew it pretty fast.  Now I’m off to bed.

This evening I drew a toy elephant that we got a long time ago for our daughter June.  He’s become more of a decoration than anything she actually plays with.  It was a good challenge trying to draw something physically in front of me rather than something from a photo reference.  The angles are a bit muddy and the proportions came out a little squashed and compressed.  I think it might be a good drawing practice to do more still lifes, that or I should practice drawing more animals.

Anyways, have a good weekend!

Doing a bit of hand practice.  I was looking through a book called “Drawing From Life” and decided to draw some of the hands that were in that book.  The artist who drew all the figures in this book, George Bridgeman, is insanely good.

After the positive results from yesterdays drawing, tonight I wanted to keep it simple.  I decided to practice using ink and watercolor to outline and color in a rough drawing.  I need to pick up some new brushes.  most of mine are pretty beat up.  Also I need to practice this process more often.  I’m not too good at using paint.

Ok, in 15 days I have improved like I never expected I would!  This drawing may be the best one I’ve done ever.  Like ever.  I was even feeling kind of uninspired and  having trouble figuring out exactly what I wanted to draw.  I searched through my folder of photo references and didn’t find anything that really interested me.  I decided to turn to my video clips, and since I did Lebowski a couple days ago, this time I decided to go with The Hudsucker Proxy instead.  Anyways, I’m really surprised how it came out.

The character is Waring Hudsucker, the president and chairman of Hudsucker Industries, winding his watch just before sending himself through the plate glass window of his board room to fall 44 floors, not counting the mezzanine, to the sidewalk below.

Hey, when is the sidewalk fully dressed?  When it’s Waring Hudsucker!

Tonight I wasn’t feeling the figure drawing bug so much so I decided to go back to my old sketchbook days and do some cartoon characters.  I felt like doing some animals.  I tried to challenge myself, though, by not drawing animals that I’m used to drawing. I used a random animal generator that I found on the web to help decide what kind of animals I would draw.  The first animal to come up was a Beaver, then a Parasaurolophus and last a Kingfisher.

The Kingfisher was the biggest challenge and the Parasaurolophus turned out to be my favorite.  I like drawing characters that look annoyed or generally dissatisfied.

I drew this one kind of quick and rough because I had other things to take care of tonight and I’m traveling tomorrow but I think it came out all right.  It’s funny.  When I post these pictures I think the drawings are generally OK-looking but then when I see them as thumbnails they always look so much better.  This one looks kind of awesome as a thumbnail but then again it IS the Dude.

This one was a struggle but I think in the end I’m pretty happy with it.  The darkening of the background actually improved it quite a bit.  Initially, I had a lot of trouble with her proportions.  I erased and adjusted multiple times until I sort of found a balance.  The shadows were so subtle in the reference photo that I decided to darken up the backdrop which made it a bit easier to give her figure some dimension.

Another figure drawing.  I felt like I was a bit more in charge of the shading tonight.  The face came out a bit wonky but the shading is looking a little better than yesterdays drawing.

I think I’m going to focus on figure drawing for a while, at least until I need a break from it.  I found a few good Tumblr blogs out there which have a plethora of reference photos to choose from.  I downloaded a bunch and this is the first of many that I will attempt.

On a positive note, I was able to make the rough shape of this drawing pretty quickly.  I didn’t have to struggle for too long to get the proportions to look right.  On the other side I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to shade her.  I don’t know the muscles in the back so well and her back didn’t have many hard or obvious angles to help me find the shape.  I think I realized tonight why it’s important for artists to learn all of those obscure muscles and where they’re located.  I think the subtle shapes in her back would’ve been easier to shade if I knew what was actually supposed to be there.

I didn’t get started until it was a bit late tonight and it took me quite a while to even get to this point.  As my wife Jenny was going off to bed she did a couple of kung fu kick poses for me and I roughly drew it out.  Ultimately, I had a lot of trouble getting the proportions to look correct so I decided to erase it and I start from scratch with a simpler position.

I started with the torso and worked my way out from there.  I wanted to have the hips pushing in the opposite direction of the ribcage which, as I look at it now, isn’t really happening exactly.  It’s almost as if her upper torso is in a 3/4 position while her hips are straight on.  I could see that her hips were not wide enough but after I drew her hands in with more detail I didn’t want to have to erase and re-draw them.  I re-drew the legs quite a bit, trying one leg in front of the other.  Eventually, I felt this leg position seemed to complement the angle of the hips the best.

I have very little experience drawing women, even just the female face.  Usually, as a kid, when I’d attempt to draw a female face, she’d end up looking like one of my male characters except with long eyelashes and big lips.  I did finally come to be able to draw a certain style of female face with some success but I left it at that and never took it anywhere.

This evening I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but I knew I didn’t want to do anything too complex.  As I was putting my daughter to bed I thought of a friend of mine, Jonathan St. Amant.  He is a teacher and an artist and he is really quite skilled.  His creativity is boundless.  I’m super envious of his cartooning abilities.  Most of his artwork takes place in a fictitious world of his own creation.  He has a series of pieces which take place in a world called Nowhereland.  It’s a place inhabited by ninjas, uber-masculine robots called Bro-bots, giant sloth creatures and sexy faun women.  His latest imaginary world is called “Shelby and the Blooms”.  Shelby is a slug who when she recedes into her shell enters into a fantastical world.

Anyways, because he is a teacher, he has a bunch of youtube videos that he does to help inspire his kids.  One of them is this watercolor experiment that I did this evening.  The rules are, first, you make a grouping of random blobs on a page with watercolor paint.  Once the paint is dried you label each of the blobs some kind of category or object.  Then, you take a pen and try to draw each of those objects attempting to stay within the random blob of watercolor paint.

To make it extra challenging, I had my wife Jenny come up with all the labels without looking.  She came up with some pretty unique things.  The Aeonium was a lucky break.  That one just happened to fit the blob it ended up on.  The toughest one was the Dune Buggy.  I also forgot that I was left-handed and accidentally smudged up my banana slug.  Oh well.

Check out Jonathan’s video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I doodled a bunch of stick figures today at work.  I was practicing various body positions and I was aiming for extreme camera angles.  I wanted to draw something where I was either hovering overhead looking down on a character or down on the ground looking drastically up at a character.  That’s when I realized I wanted to draw a giant robot.  I’m pretty happy with it.

Knowing what I wanted to draw before coming home was helpful because I was able to spend more time working on the details and the shading.  I still need more practice with that and maybe I should attempt some shading-specific exercises soon.  The vision I had in my head was a bit more dramatic with really dark blacks, where the robot would almost disappear into the night sky but I was too afraid to go there this evening.  I didn’t want to ruin what was already looking pretty good.  I think that’s more of an inking thing anyways and I don’t think I’m skilled enough at shading with pencil yet.

Tonight I practiced more body shapes based on the technique I learned from the Marvel-Way book.  I had a lot of trouble with the legs and the foreshortening that’s happening there.  No matter how much I erased and adjusted my lumberjack still looked a little off-kilter and squat.  Also, I need to practice shading fabric.  I’m never quite sure where to put the shadows.  Ah well, he’s still way more detailed than I usually do with my drawings.  So that’s good.  In fact, I can already tell that this drawing a day thing is going to really beneficial for me.  It’s only been a short time and I can already feel the improvements.

I bought a book today, “How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way”.  I was turned onto it after watching some segments from the video version of this same book on youtube.  I’m so glad I got it.  It’s a great drawing book!  It reminded me of the drawing books I used to have as a kid and it really simply breaks down the process for drawing comic book style.  I realize that I need quite a bit of practice in body shapes and positions and I think the method laid out in this book is going to really help me expand my repertoire of poses.

I’ve never drawn this way.  As a kid, I drew lots of faces.  Most of the time I would omit the body altogether.  When I did draw a body it was usually slouched, lanky and with hands hidden away in pockets.  That way I never had to even think about drawing hands.  The method in this book starts with a stick figure which makes it easier to create a variety of positions and camera angles.

I can certainly see plenty of proportional flaws in these drawings but I’m happy with the positions I’ve decided to put them in.

Tree drawing without a photo reference.  A good test in branch arrangement.

For some reason I thought this image would be easier then yesterdays.  I spent a fair amount of time this evening erasing and adjusting the proportions.  I think the human form is so familiar to us that it’s easier to spot flaws in the proportions.  I don’t think I ever got there but hey, on the bright side, in the past two days I have spent more time on a single drawing than I have in years.  Feels good.

The reference image is pulled from the trailer to Django Unchained.  Best film I’ve seen in a long, long time.

1st drawing of the year.  As I was drawing this I thought to myself maybe I chose a reference image that was a little too ambitious.  There was a lot of detail in the picture that just didn’t make it into the drawing.  The reference image is one of many Bonsai Tree pictures I got from the internet.  I’m pretty happy with the results.

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.

February 7th, 2011

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 successfully this evening.  I continued the process today (saturday) so that I could post more than just one.

What I think I’m missing is the sort of easing in and out of the freeze frames that gives it realism.  The movement still stops rather abruptly when it reaches it’s stopping point.  The most realistic one is the Pulp Fiction one at the bottom.  I have only just now realized how I can do this using greater delay times on certain frames.

I still had the stuff from the presentation in my car today so at lunch I assembled the Harmonograph table for my co-workers to try out.  Although, I decided to focus on a very specific goal.  I wanted to create the most harmonious harmonograph images yet.

The way you create harmonious drawings is by matching the swing frequency between all of the pendulums.  The way you tune them is by either adding more or less weight or by lowering or raising the weights.  The lower the weight, the longer and slower the swing.  The higher the weight, the shorter and faster the swing.  That’s easy enough.  You can see them swinging in tune with each other but what about the rotation of the drawing surface?  How do you tune the rate of rotation of the drawing surface to the swing of a pendulum?

I basically attempted to eyeball it.  I got the pendulums working together and then, before dropping the pen, I turned on the rotation.  I tried to get it to spin at a rate so that every time the pen swung forward it was going towards a corner of the drawing surface.  It was pretty tough to juggle all of the elements at once.  I did, however, create some of the most harmonic, spiraling-harmonograph drawings yet.  None of them were perfect but some of them were very close.

Check out the examples above.  The first picture is an example of what you can create with matched swing-frequency but without rotation (pretty harmonious, eh?).  The rest of the examples are my attempts at tuning the rotation to the swing frequency.  The one at the bottom, in my opinion, is the closest one to a tuned swing and rotation.

This evening I presented my blog to a group of people at Crashspace in L.A.  It was a pretty nerve-racking day leading up to the presentation.  I asked if I could show up an hour early to get set-up.  I was bringing my harmonograph table and having never transported it I had no idea how long it would take to set-up.

At the last minute, I realized that I didn’t have any good pens.   I rushed to Aaron Brothers and picked up a few micron pens.  The freeways were abhorrent and so I decided to cut through the city.  I imagine I made up some time sticking to the streets but by the time I arrived I only had fifteen minutes left.  I don’t think I began until about 8:30.

There wasn’t a bunch of people there.  5 total actually, and I remember all of their names.  Jason, Rachel, Kevin, Marco and Eddie.  They were all very kind as I flubbed around trying to get set-up.

One aspect of the show that I thought was pretty cool was that I used my wireless salad bowl speakers for sound.  It was funny because I just handed them out and we placed them in random spots in the room.

Eventually, I had it all set-up and I was ready to go.  “Ahem!  Hi there…”.  By the time I got to day 30 Kevin raised his hand and asked, “Uh, are you going to go through every single day?”

Whoops.  Forgot to mention that.  No.  I had planned on prefacing the presentation with the comment that I had wanted to include every single day in the first month because the first month was a testing ground for me.  It was the time for me to experience this and decide whether or not I thought I could continue doing this for an entire year.

It was an interesting experience to go through the whole blog like that.  You could very easily tell what types of creative things were my fallbacks.  My fallbacks are modular patches, music box tunes, Cinema 4D experiments and sometimes origami.  If I’m unsure and I don’t know what to do, I tend to lean towards one of these projects.

By the time I reached day 100 or so things were moving along pretty well and I felt like I was perhaps saying an interesting thing here or there.

At the end I was happy to hear many questions from everybody.  We set-up the Harmonograph table and made a bunch of drawings with it.  I also brought along my music box tunes for people to crank through and my DIY viewmaster disc as well.

I realized that I probably should have let everyone play with these things before or during the presentation because you could see the atmosphere change once people were allowed to touch and play with the stuff I brought

Anyways, I had a great time and felt very special to be invited (thanks Kevin!).  It was a pleasure to meet everyone there and I hope to see them all again soon.

Thanks!

So this evening I spent most of the night creating my slideshow presentation in Keynote for tomorrow.  Tomorrow I speak at a hackerspace in L.A. called Crashspace.

It was pretty tough designing the slideshow.  This is the first time anyone has asked me to speak about the blog and I didn’t know how to present it.  I tried at first to select highlights from it but instead I found myself just adding everything.  At times I condensed multiple days into a single slide but I felt it was better to have everything available in case there might be something interesting to say about it.

275 days is a lot of days to go through and I didn’t finish creating the slideshow this evening.

I felt like creating the slideshow wasn’t the most exciting creative thing to present for this evening.  I don’t know why.  Everyone I tell that too is like “why?  Creating a slideshow is creative.”

So, I decided just before bed to create this random abstract shape in Cinema 4D.  I threw some lights into the scene, found an interesting angle, added a semi-transparent material to it and rendered it with all the bells and whistles.  It rendered overnight but never actually finished.  The picture you see above is maybe 1/4th of the whole thing.

He started a thread proposing the idea of remixing christmas songs for a monome christmas compilation.  A bunch of people have jumped on board and begun claiming songs.   On the 15th of this month everyone will reveal their final tracks.

Tonight I decided to work on my song a bit.  I claimed “The Christmas Song” by Nat King Cole.  The song has no beat and also has a very open rhythm to it.  My main idea for the remix was to vocode the voice of Nat King Cole and support it with some synth pads.  I plan on using my gameboy mixed with some larger, more lush analog modular lines.  I don’t even know if it will ultimately have any beat to it.

Of course tonight I didn’t add any of that.  This evening I basically just turned Nat into a robot.  It took quite awhile to dial in the vocoder sound.  I used Ableton Lives vocoder and I’m not entirely impressed with it.  I think I might have to ultimately record myself saying the lyrics instead of Nat himself because he’s mixed with the music and that’s ruining the vocoder.

After I finished Robo-tizing Nat I added the rest of the song in.  I created two tracks with heavy EQ’ing/Reverb/Delay to fill in all the silence.  Next, I added another track of the song with all the highs and mids cut leaving only the bass tones.  Then I added a bunch of sample rate reduction to make it all sound kind of digital and aliased.  The track below is the results of my experiments.

This song is certainly nowhere near what the final track will sound like. It’s actually quite hard to get through the whole thing.  It’s vocoder christmas music. It doesn’t get better the closer you are to the end.
 

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-275-robo-king-cole/feed/ 5 http://theb-roll.com/day-274-finger-painting/ http://theb-roll.com/day-274-finger-painting/#comments Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:55:41 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=3884

This sunday was crazy busy for me.  It was my one day off.

Christmas is getting close and Jenny and I have a short list of things we’d like to get done around the house before that time arrives.  We also have Jenny’s sister, her husband and his parents flying in from France for the holidays which is very exciting.  So, we want to make the house pretty.

Getting things done when the grandparents aren’t around to take June is a challenge.  Today Jenny simply wanted to paint a wall.  It was my job to occupy June.

I decided to work June into my creative thing today because I haven’t been posting everyday lately and I’ve gotten backed up again.  It’s a horrible habit that I really must stop.  I decided to do my creative thing during the daytime today so that I could use the nighttime for posting all my previous days.  I will try harder to get back to posting my projects by the next day after doing them.

The finger-painting was a good time.  I took June to Michael’s and I bought her some washable paints and a smock.  We took all the supplies into the backyard, laid down a piece of wood for the paper and went to town.  June was pretty cute getting all dirty in her smock.  I couldn’t take any pictures of the process because it got really messy quick.  June had some trouble concentrating on the art process but had no problems getting covered in paint herself.  I’m glad we did it.

I should also mention, I will be appearing and talking about my blog this wednesday at a hackerspace in LA called Crash Space.  I’m honored to be asked to talk.  A fellow monome user who also happens to be a member at Crash Space invited me.  I’m still unsure of exactly what I’m going to talk about.  I will try to describe what I’ve learned in doing this process.  I’ll also be bringing some of the stuff I’ve created, including the Harmonograph table.  Hopefully, I can fulfill the expectations.  You can learn more about it here.

This saturday I worked on set as well.  It was at the same location as yesterday.  It’s a pretty amazing place.  It’s called Greystone Mansion and it was built by an oil tycoon.  I found the story behind the place very interesting.  I wish I could share details from my experiences on set but I could easily get myself in trouble if I say too much.  The location is not such a big deal too mention because tons of films have been shot there including Ghostbusters, The Big Lebowski and There Will Be Blood.  It has been so far the most beautiful set of the film.

I got home and had no idea what I was going to do, as usual.  Lately, I’ve been having trouble getting inspired.  This particular evening was a struggle.  I actually started two separate projects before this one and dropped them in the middle because they were not turning out well.

The first idea was to do a little flip-book animation with a post-it note stack but eventually it became too much to concentrate on.  Then I decided to do a cinema 4D tutorial on modeling a mountaintop but the tutorial was old.  Many of the suggestions were dated and worked differently in my version of the software, so it was not going anywhere.  At around midnight, I decided to do this book compartment idea.

I’d remembered this tutorial on the MAKE blog which describes the process using a dremel Multi-max.  I so want one of these tools.  Anyways, I gathered up my regular dremel, found a book I didn’t mind destroying and headed over to my parents garage.  I was lucky because they were away visiting my sister up north so I didn’t have to worry about going into the garage and making a bunch of noise.

I pretty much followed the same instructions as in the tutorial except I used a regular cutting blade with my dremel.  I deepened the cuts with a utility knife and spread Elmer’s glue along the edge with my finger.

I think it looks kind of cool.  It’s a silly way to transport your art supplies but kind of stylish nonetheless.

This friday was another pretty mellow day on the set.

Afterwards, at home I was feeling a little un-creative.  Once Jenny was off to bed I didn’t have much of a spark to be adventurous.  Even a patch on the modular felt a little too complex for me.

Fortunately, I devised a plan that would simplify my goal in front of the modular.  I decided I’d just go in there with the idea of creating a simple beat.  That’s all.  Patch in a kick drum, patch in a snare, patch in some hi-hats and there you go.

Well, I’m glad I decided to simplify because through the process of creation the avenues of complexity were less of a bother.  Opportunities arise as you patch and by the end you’ve created something better than you expected.  That’s how this evening went.

I set the rotating clock divider as the heart of the rhythm.  As I recorded my beat I tried to switch up small variations such as muting a single drum or adjusting the decay of the snare.  When I felt I recorded all of the variations I would switch patch cables on either the rotating clock divider or the envelope generators creating new beats.

I enjoyed the way the beat was transforming.  I brought it into Ableton and cut it down to the best of the best.  You can play the results below.

Enjoy!

Today was a pretty mellow day.  I was finally able to make it to the hardware store to pick-up the tools I needed for this evenings creative project.

By the looks from the pictures above it may not appear like I did very much but in reality it was actually quite a struggle.  Removing the body of the telescope from the brackets that connect it to the housing was the hardest part.

There were two phillips head screws holding it onto the brackets and you couldn’t get to the screws with a normal screwdriver.  I would have needed a 90 degree phillips head but I didn’t have one.  I improvised by using a phillips head connector for use with a multi-head screwdriver and combined that with a pair of needle-nose pliers.  With this method, I was just barely able to get in there to unscrew it.

The goal of taking apart this telescope is to convert it into a pan and tilt controller for my camera.  The telescope motors can move at such slow and constant speeds that it makes for a handy setup for either time-lapse or slit-scan.  The slit-scan is something I’m very interested in testing.

Unfortunately, I ended this creative thing with more questions than I went into it with.  People have done this kind of conversion before but I have not seen it done with my particular telescope.  At the moment I’m not too sure how I’m going to proceed.  The cost of my telescope is the main issue.  I could probably sell it on ebay and purchase a cheaper one better designed for this conversion.   Or if only I could have the best of both worlds and design a mount that works with my camera but is also removable in case I want to use my telescope as just that, a telescope.

Hmmmm, have to think.

I wasn’t so sure about what creative thing I was planning to do.  I had been mulling some ideas on the drive home but none of them were sticking.  It wasn’t until Jenny was off to bed when this idea hit me.

June has these books called “Scanimation”.  When you open the front cover you see the sillouhette of a horse begin to run.  I had looked up the technology behind the effect a while back and I had always contemplated doing something like this for the blog.  The actual technology is quite old, it’s called a Picket-Fence illusion.  The way it works is a grid of equally spaced bars is printed onto acetate.  Then, six frames of animation is combined onto a single piece of paper, except each frame is cropped out in a way so that when you place the grid over it you only see one frame at any given time.  This little video explains how to do it.

Last night, when I was tucking Jenny into bed the idea popped into my brain, what if I tried doing a circular version of it?  Would it work the same?  It should, but there was still a question in my mind of whether it would work as well.  What I learned was that because a circle is made up of many elongated triangle-shaped slits that ultimately the animation is harder to see towards the center, where the triangle shape tapers.  If you were to place the animation away from the center it would be much easier to see.

First I created the circular grid shape in after effects.  I created the first triangle at the top of the circle then duplicated it and added 7 degrees of rotation, which left 1 degree of space between the two triangles.  I repeated this until I went all the way around.  I imported the grid into photoshop and then began importing the frames of animation.

The process here was rather simple.  I just placed the frames of animation in the position I liked best behind the grid layer and then Command-Selected the grid layer to create a mask of that shape.   Then I selected the first frame of animation and pressed delete.  This deleted the parts of the frame that were not being seen through the slits.  First frame down, I rotated the grid layer 1 degree and repeated the steps again with the rest of the frames.

The results actually look kind of cool just by themselves without the grid layer at all.  You can see all of them posted above.  When you place the grid layer over and slowly rotate it you can see the animation begin.  I wanted to print everything out on paper and do a video of me physically creating the animation but time was running out.  So, instead I decided to import it all into after effects and do a virtual version.

In the video below you will see each of the examples posted above in the same order.  Some are harder to see than others.  The examples are, a short clip from my dry-erase animation days,  then a clip of my friend Caryn play-slapping her husband/my pal Dietrich, then a clip of a tape dispenser from my Office Instruments at Work video, then a clip of my Harmonograph table in action and finally a clip from Road House of Patrick Swayze kicking a bad guy in the nuts.  That last one is from my Swayze Beat day.

I think it would be cool to create little animations which could be put on the face of a wooden top.  That way when you spin the top the animation is seen from above.

 
I hope you enjoy!

I recently downloaded this super-popular app for the iphone called Hipstamatic.  It’s a truly amazing app in that it gives you the ability to take pictures with your iphone that get processed into cool looking vintage-style prints.  It’s based on a real camera by the same name and you can learn more about it here.  The app also offers you the chance to buy different virtual lenses and flashes which process the resultant images in different ways.

I started seeing photo’s from this app showing up on my friends facebook pages.  I actually commented on one of them saying “This is an amazing photo, what kind of camera did you use?”  He replied, “You don’t want to know.”

I took some snapshots of my co-workers at the office and we were all kind of “oooh-ing” and “ahhh-ing” at the pictures but it also brought up the concern that this all seemed a little too easy.  Getting these really cool pictures without a lick of knowledge is a little upsetting to me.  The pictures are so good that I think it would be hard to tell the difference from the real thing, at least when viewing it on the internet.  I think this app might come off a little insulting to a person who truly loves the original Hipstamatic camera.

Since I was feeling this way I decided I wouldn’t post Hipstamatic pictures as my creative thing.  Instead, I decided to research what exactly is going on inside the app to create these cool results then I’d perform the function myself.  That way I could perhaps put my own personal touch on it.  I found this quick video tutorial which showed how to, basically, do it in Photoshop Elements.

At it’s core, what the Hipstamatic app is doing to your pictures is adjusting the levels on each separate color channel (Red, Green and Blue) to a certain place. Then, it adds vignetting and a bit blur here and there, finally it slaps on a photo border and boom, instant vintage print.

I used what I learned from the tutorial as a basis for experimentation.  I played around as much as I could.  I went more blue with some pictures and more red with others.  It was actually a very good experience as I felt I was learning a lot.  I might use this process on photo’s in future posts.

For the photo borders, I also made those from scratch using the brush tool and following this tutorial here.

In the end, I’m still not sure which pictures came out cooler, mine or the Hipstamatic’s but I feel much better about my pictures since they were created every step of the way by myself.

Funny thing about this creative thing was that I spent most of the night putting together the video for Day 266 / Runners & Chasers but I didn’t want to post it as my creative thing.  So, I opened up Arturia’s Moog Modular V and made a quickie patch.

Moog Modular V is a software emulator of the classic Moog Modular synthesizer.  Before I had any kind of physical or tangible analog synth in front of me, I had this.  It’s a pretty great alternative for those interested in learning the methods of patch-making.  It sounds sweet too.  It’s a very realistic emulator of that analog warmth that everyone hopes for.

I basically created a quick patch using three oscillators going through a multi-mode filter with the pitch being controlled by the sequencer on top.  I recorded the sequence multiple times on multiple tracks in Ableton.  I over-dubbed the sequence at higher pitches and different rates and recorded that to another track.  Then I just messed around with a bunch of stuff, changed the sequence, adjusted the envelopes, added delay, added a some bode frequency shifting.

Ultimately I recorded myself playing all of these loops in sequence and then cut it down to a more listenable running time.  Lastly, I sequenced a simple beat using drum samples I’d created a long time ago using my real modular.

I hope you enjoy.  You can play the results below.  Just a simple synth tune.

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-268-a-quickie-patch/feed/ 4 http://theb-roll.com/day-267-the-final-eyes/ http://theb-roll.com/day-267-the-final-eyes/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:12:00 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=3825

This Sunday I worked on set.  I got out around 6pm and had to go to the office to quickly deliver a shot to a client.  Luckily, I was home in time to see June before she was off to bed.

I didn’t want to consider editing this video as my creative thing for the day.  I only had the ending to finish up and I thought I’d get home and quickly finish it and then move on to something else.  The plan was a patch on the modular.  What ended up happening is that worked on the montage until my 2am bedtime.

It was a pretty tough one to edit.  I still am quite critical of the final product.  I guess that’s just the way it goes though.  Something could always be better.  The music was more of a challenge to cut to than usual because it doesn’t have a steady beat.  Also the footage is a little shaky so it was hard to smooth the edits.

I can certainly say though, that I now know the very minute intricacies of many of my friends eyeballs.  I do think the variety is extremely beautiful.  Such amazing objects.  The texture of the iris varies between looking like fur to torn fabric to fine sand.  No one has a single eye color as well.  There are a wide array of colors deep in there.  It’s surprising how many yellows and oranges there were.  You don’t think of yellow or orange as an eye color.  And the movement of dilation is amazing.  The way the ridge between the pupil and iris contracts like elastic.

It’s interesting to me that each of these eyes belongs to a close friend of mine and yet when you see them this close up you don’t recognize the person anymore.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy.  The music in the piece is from an album called A Funneled Stone by an artist named Stretta.  You can download it here.

I’d never done it before but it was popular with our group of friends many years ago.  The way it worked was that everyone would meet at location A, in this case it was the Muckenthaler Center in Fullerton, and be categorized as either a runner or a chaser.  The runners ran on foot and the chasers chased by car.  The directive was that runners had to make it to location B, Jeff’s house, without getting caught by any chasers.  At the starting bell the runners are given a 5 minute head start before any of the chasers can get into their cars.  The distance between location A and location B was approximately 2 miles.

I was completely winded 2 minutes into the 5 minute head start so I was a little worried that I might get caught very early in the race.  Luckily I got myself to a nearby church to hide before the 5 minutes were up.  I partnered up with my buddy Reuban and we had a blast sneaking through the streets and alleys of Fullerton acting ultra-paranoid at the sight of even a single car.

It was an extremely visceral experience.  We joked that we felt like we were black ops or something, briskly walking on our toes, our steps on the wet pavement as the only sound, snapping behind trash barrels as suspicious vehicles passed by.  It was all good fun.

We got the text message that Dean had won the race about four or five blocks from the destination.  At that point it could be assumed that no one was out looking for us anymore but Reuban and I still cautiously continued to Jeff’s house.  Once we got there we found that we were the last to arrive!  Other than first and second place we were the only other group not to get caught by a chaser.  Everyone at the party gave us a hard time though saying that it didn’t even count because no one was looking for us.  Well, I certainly didn’t listen to that nonsense.  I was proud of our effort and Reuban and I had a great time doing it.

Afterwards we all played a rousing game of movie charades.  It was all good.

The video below is just a quick and dirty select of footage in chronological order of how the night went.

Enjoy!

I am working on Sunday so my next to posts will hopefully go up Sunday night or Monday morning.

The day after Thanksgiving was mellow for the most part.  Mostly watching after June.  I took her to the park and had a blast.  I was regularly wishing that I would’ve remembered bringing my camera with me.  It was a great night as well.  I took Jenny and the baby out to dinner at one or our favorite restaurants, Felix’s in Orange.  We filled up on the greatest cuban food you can get in Orange County.

After we got home I started work on editing the video of my friend’s eyeballs.  It was pretty tough to get through it all because I got a lot of people on film and I had to sift through about an hours worth of footage.  I found it tough to choose the right shots.

The video is still unfinished at the moment but getting close so in the next day or so you will see it here.

Jenny and I at a large Thanksgiving dinner with family and then afterwards attended my friend Colleen’s Annual Post-Thanksgiving Trauma Center.  It was great fun.  We all played a rousing game of movie charades.

At some point in the night I set my camera up in the bedroom and informed everyone that if they were willing I was interested in filming their eyeballs.  I have been wanting to do this project for awhile and I’d been hoping for a day where many of my friends would all be together in the same place.  This get together proved to be the perfect night.

I was happy by the amount of friends who were willing to go through the torture of getting their eyes on film.  It was a very uncomfortable process.

First off I’m pressing my tripod up against them and a friend is pointing a bright flashlight directly into their eyeball.  It was really tough to capture the shots.  The light needed to be bright and the both of us had to be as still as possible.  The eye has a tendency to move rather erratically and it was a real challenge to capture steady, smooth shots.

In the end I got some good stuff.  It was a trip to see what an eyeball really looks like that close.  One interesting thing I noticed was that the people with brown eyes came out more intriguing than the bright colorful ones because the brown tone really accentuated the topography of the iris.

 
The final video is still being edited and will show up on the next post.

I have had this old 3/4 deck in my garage for a long time.  It used to be at my office until a co-worker informed me that it was heading to the trash.  I decided to save it.

I wanted to make space and I knew I didn’t want to keep this big old deck hanging around for much longer so I pillaged it for parts.  It took me awhile to get through the whole thing but eventually I made my way completely through it.

One piece in particular I already had some plans for.  The big metal drum in the upper left corner of the four pictures above is strong and heavy and has a nice long spin to it.  So, I figured it might make a good mechanism as the basis for a foot-cranked potter’s wheel.

The rest of the stuff is really just fodder for tinkering.  I pulled out multiple DC Motors and solenoids.  I also pulled out numerous gears and other interesting moving parts.

In other happy news, I am officially off for the Thanksgiving holiday!  Yay!

So, todays creative thing came to me at the last minute.  I tucked Jenny into bed and fell asleep, as I have unfortunately been getting into the habit of doing.  She woke me around midnight and I wandered into the living room.  I perused the internet for awhile and suddenly remembered an image I’d seen a long time ago.  It was of money from around the world folded in such a way that the historical figure on the front of the bill looked like he was wearing a funny hat.

I googled for it and found the image in this post on the MAKE blog.  In the comments fields was a bit of history.  The 1000 note yen with the portrait of Hideyo Noguchi was one of the first and most popular origami hats to spread on these here interwebs.  The Noguchi Turban is the most popular hat but there are many variations, including the ninja Noguchi and the Noguchi sombrero.

I watched this quick how-to video on the Noguchi Turban and then pulled out whatever money I had in my wallet.  I followed the basic method I saw in the video and tried to create my own variation using the money I had.

I think they turned out pretty funny.  I tried to do more with George Washington’s hat but decided to stay with the dunce cap look.

Today I spent the whole day on set.   It was a pretty mellow day.  I spent a fair portion of the day trying to post this weekends creative things using my iphone because I didn’t have any internet access.  I typed out the posts in piecemeal throughout the day.  Posting from the iphone is a very slow process.
 
I feel bad not updating the blog daily on the weekends.  I wish I could do my creative projects earlier in the day more often so I could spend my night-time hours posting them.   But the truth is, I need to spend as much time with my wife Jenny and my daughter June as I can because I don’t get to see them very much with the hours that occupy me at work.
 
Jenny likes that I’m taking on this 365 day challenge but then again she wishes I could be around more often.  When work gets busy the creative projects become a bit of a burden.   She understands that I’ve taken it this far that I can’t just call it quits.  I can’t miss a day.  If I give up a day I’ve already lost.  At least that’s how I feel.  It’s like my smoking.   I can’t have a single smoke or I’ll break the record and probably just start smoking again.  Happily, I can say that I have not had a cigarette for nearly 150 days, I reckon.
 
Anyways, lately I have been feeling the weight of the blog.  I’m looking forward to the end.   It has been a real learning experience and I imagine if I make it past this current valley I may experience another great high.  But man, I can’t wait to turn my brain off for a bit when it’s over.   I think it’s possible that most challenges feel the hardest when you’re three-quarters of the way through it.
 
Well, tonight I decided to continue the tutorial that I fell asleep doing yesterday and boy am I glad I did.  I think the end result looks pretty realistic.   Plus I learned quite a bit about some of the more fundamental controls in Cinema 4D.

I got home rather tired and Jenny and I relaxed on the couch for awhile.  I had very little energy to do much of anything so I decided to try out a Cinema4D tutorial on the web.  Not a very exciting project to present but at least it’s something.  
 
Well, when Jenny was off to bed I tucked her in and while doing so quickly fell asleep.  She woke me up around 130 to tell me to lock up the house and I attempted to continue working on this but just couldn’t.  I decided a half done tutorial is better than nothing.  Oh well.  In defense of my creative choice, I did learn quite a bit from this tutorial.

In that section of the magazine there were a few pictures from some art installations that dealt with that concept.  One of them was a sculpture of a guy playing piano except when you looked at it from 90 degrees over it looked like a guy playing the violin.  There was also an image from an art installation (which this particular creative project is emulating) where in the center of the room there was what looked like a pile of garbage, but once you shined a spotlight at it from a particular angle the shadow on the wall revealed the form of two people sitting back to back smoking cigarettes.

I love the concept and the process of doing it with a pile of garbage physically in front of you seems pretty interesting to me.  It’s great that 3D software allows me the chance to recreate this idea virtually in the computer and in a fraction of the time, I imagine.  
 
It’s sort of a surreal experience to compare the shadow projected on the wall to the actual structure creating the shadow.

Initially, I was going to do something completely different.  I was going to edit a video together that was filmed quite a long time ago but unfortunately one of my drives completely failed.  I have most of it backed up to another drive so I’m not losing too much information but half of the footage for this particular video is now completely gone.  I spent most of the evening trying to get my drive back online for enough time to get some of the files transferred over.  Unfortunately, it never happened.

So late last night I had to change gears.  I decided to work on some more designs for screen-printing over at my buddy Dean’s house.

Last Sunday, when I got to do my first screen-print I suddenly saw the benefit in designing something simple.  With hardly any experience under my belt I realized I should just focus on doing something with two or three layers of color.

Between Days 179 and 181 I set out on the very ambitious goal of designing a very complex modular synth within Inkscape.  Day by day I created little component after little component.  Eventually, I realized I had designed myself into a corner and that there was no simple way to combine all these components into one.  This evening I decided to simplify, simplify, simplify.

I think it turned out pretty cool.  The synth I based it on was an EMU System.

Last night I was researching Photo-memes on the internet.  The idea to create some sort of photo-meme came to me a long time ago when I found this site, which basically is a compilation of badly-photoshopped images of Tom Selleck with a sandwich by a waterfall.  That’s basically the criteria for the site.  Selleck, sandwich and waterfall.  Check.

So last night I thought I’d do something similar.  I started collecting images from the internet.  First, I thought I’d take Ed Lauter, a popular character actor who seems to always play the tough coach character, and place him next to a timber-wolf or a pack of timber-wolves and finally, a plate of cous cous.  Hmmm, now that’s meme-worthy, right?

Ulitmately, I got sidetracked.  I visited Knowyourmeme.com and got lost looking through all the memes there.

Eventually, my eye was caught by some hipster meme and suddenly a Chinchilla popped into my head.  I thought, well, it’s getting pretty late.  I better just do this chinchilla idea.  So, there you have it.  Hipster Chinchillas.

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-255-hipster-chinchillas/feed/ 1 http://theb-roll.com/day-254-king-grahams-walk-cycle/ http://theb-roll.com/day-254-king-grahams-walk-cycle/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:37:49 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=3698 Like so often, I didn’t get started on this project until late at night.  I could’ve started earlier but for some reason I couldn’t get myself to do it.

I perused the internet for inspiration.  I am still drawn towards working in Cinema4D.  I decided to ultimately go back to a thought that I had on Day 247.  On that day, I recreated the main character of the game King’s Quest in 3D.  I decided tonight to create multiple positions to create a walk cycle.

The way I did it was I used screen capture software to record myself playing the online emulation of the game (which you can find here) and then I pulled the frames of a single walk cycle.  I’m pretty sure I’m missing a frame or two because the program seems to run faster than the actual frame rate of the screen capture.  I was too lazy to recapture at that point, though.

I organized the frames into a PDF document so I could flip the pages quickly and compare one frame to the next.  Then I duplicated the character’s position that I had created in Cinema4D and repositioned the cubes that needed moving to create the new position.  Ultimately the animation you see above is made up of 5 positions running at 8 fps.

My creative project this evening was easy because I knew I had a screen-printing meeting to go to.  My buddy Dean has been acquiring the tools one needs to do screen-printing for a while and the workshop is now close to being set-up.  Dean and I and a group of his friends are starting a small artists collective.  The truth is, Dean and his mates are really professional graphic artists and I am just sort of feeling my way through it all.  But it’s all good.  Once I’m up to speed I feel like I’ll be contributing more worthwhile pieces.

Now that I have one screen-print under my belt I am super excited to do my next one.  I didn’t know what picture to use for my print so I decided to select a drawing from a previous project.  I chose my drawing from Day 179.  The colors are not exactly what I was hoping for but that was my own mistake.  I decided to paint the background purple before I even knew what kind of screen-printing inks we had.

It turned out that we had mostly primary colors.  I opted for the red at first because I thought yellow and purple might look too cadbury egg-like.  The red wasn’t popping so I did another pass with the yellow.  After the yellow was added I started to like the image a little better.

I’m not such a fan of the the final product but the experience was invaluable.  I now know what to expect and I’m excited to try out different combinations of things.  It’s time for me to collect up a more muted palette of inks and get to work designing some interesting images.

It’s going to be a busy weekend.  I’m working on the publicity for a film that starts shooting this week and I have to be on set both days this weekend.  Plus, our friends are throwing a friends-giving dinner this saturday night, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you see my posts for this weekend go up sunday night or monday morning.

Today was a crazy day.  There are multiple projects happening at the office that I am looking after as well as editing and there’s the prep for the shoots happening this weekend.  So I have been running around quite a bit.  My car was finally fixed today and I am happy to have it back.  It cost me an arm and a leg so it better last me another 100,000 miles.

I needed to go to bed as early as possible tonight because there is a pretty early call time for me tomorrow morning, so I decided to do a project that was tangible.  I didn’t know what exactly I was planning on doing but I got out my art supply box and pulled out some pencils.

I drew a random squiggly line on a sheet of paper and looked at it a while.

I decided to cut out all the negative space from my squiggly with an X-acto knife.  Once I was done cutting out the shapes I pulled out my watercolors.  I did a couple quick flat-washes of color on the previous page in my pad.  Finally, once the watercolor was dry I flipped my squiggly-line cutout over so it lied flat on top of my washes.  The result was the streaks of color from my watercolors filling the negative space of my squiggly line.

I thought it came out pretty cool.  I really enjoyed the process on this project.

I basically created a sphere and applied a Mo’Graph object called PolyFx to it.  PolyFX then takes control of every polygon that makes up the sphere.  I can control the uniform scale, position and rotation of every polygon that make up the sphere.  The kind of geometry that I was seeing from just messing around with the parameters within PolyFx was already super amazing.

I dug deeper into an object called the Time Effector which allows me to animate the parameters of the PolyFX without having to set very many keyframes.  I rendered the resulting animation without too many bells and whistles, in regards to render settings, because I wanted to make sure it would finish by morning.

Enjoy the video!  The music I put under it is from a monome artist called Watson.  It is his track from the second Monome Community Remix Project called “Venutian Chant“

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-250-bending-geometry/feed/ 0 http://theb-roll.com/day-249-pixel-people/ http://theb-roll.com/day-249-pixel-people/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:54:47 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=3637 My luck has been going down the drain lately.  I got a phone call from the dealership taking care of my car.  It turns out that the engine pretty much needs a major overhaul.  The cost is considerably depressing.  The frustrating thing is there is nothing I can do about it.  I just have to accept it and fork over the dough.

Last night Jenny and I watched television until about 10 or 11 at night and I was left to figure out my creative thing for the day.  While I rode the train home I thought I wanted to work on the music video as my creative thing but once 11pm rolls around alternatives start coming to mind.  My creative thing from Day 247 where I recreated the main character from King’s Quest in 3D has really been sticking with me.

So, at the last minute I decided to make myself some 8-bit characters.  I created a document in photoshop at 100X50 pixels.  I zoomed into it and used the pencil tool to fill in the pixels.

It went by surprisingly fast and because of that I decided to challenge myself a bit more and make an 8-bit versions of Paul Bunyan and Ash from Army of Darkness.

I think they’re pretty cool.

It’s pretty interesting to see Los Angeles by train.  You get to peek behind the scenes, so to speak.  You pass by veritable fields of electrical power boxes and transformers, massive distribution centers with pallets stacked to the sky.  Plus the people on the train are interesting as well.  I can understand how a writer might benefit from riding the train.  Everyone is a character.  I enjoyed over-hearing the cell-phone conversations that many of the passengers were having around me.  It was all very evocative for me.

Anyways, my creative thing came to me at the Burbank station while I waited for my train to arrive.  I looked at the ground and saw that the concrete I was standing on had all these pockmarks in it.  I tried to mentally connect some of the dots together and found a few good combinations, so I decided to snap some pictures.  I brought the images into Inkscape and connected the dots together to make the pictures you see above.

But on the bright side, I had to go to a shoot this afternoon and there I met one of my favorite performers ever, Bret Mckenzie of Flight of the Conchords fame!  I was able to tell him how much of a fan I was.  I also asked if he was truly a synth-nerd and he confirmed.  It was pretty awesome.  I may have the opportunity to actually film him this thursday for work!

Once I got back to the office I spent part of the evening with my co-worker Gage.  I didn’t know what to do for my creative thing but I knew I didn’t want to do another slitscan.  We started talking collages and joked about making a monster in photoshop out of horse photos.  I seriously considered it because I thought it would be funny.  I perused the net.  Google image searched unicorns.

I remembered the fact that a long time ago I was really into pixel art.  I googled it and found The Superbrothers.  They’re work is really awesome and amazing.  They are inspired by the video games of the really early years.  Atari 2600 days.

I tried to think back to some of my earliest memories of playing video games.  It didn’t take me long to end up at King’s Quest.  I used to have an Amiga computer back in the day and I played all of the old Sierra games but the King’s Quest series were always my favorite.  I looked up the game and found a picture of the main character.  It suddenly occurred to me that it wouldn’t be too hard to recreate him in 3D.  He is completely made up of giant pixels so all I had to do was create a bunch of cubes and stack them up using the right colors.

I have to say I’m pretty happy with the outcome and I had fun lighting him.  I think it would be awesome to see him actually move.  Perhaps, a future creative thing.  It only took me about an hour to create this position and I can’t imagine a walk cycle being all that complex.

It started with the usual, swinging her around with my arms and dropping her softly on the bed.  Then some playful tickling and in a moment of sigh I could tell that she was relaxed.  I said “Let’s talk June”.  She smiled and seemed to know exactly what I was asking.  The rest of it I can’t remember exactly but I asked her to say a bunch of words which turned into trying to sing and ended with me sucking her boogers out without a peep of crying.  Pretty rad.

After that I took her to the Discovery Center, Science Museum in Santa Ana and we played our way through all the exhibits.  It was a great day.  That evening Jenny and I went out to dinner with friends and enjoyed a late night board game.

I didn’t get started on my project until after midnight.  I decided as I drove home that I needed to do something that didn’t entail me needing to use my computer later.  So, I drew a dinosaur.  I’ve been wanting to draw a T-Rex with laser battle armor for a awhile now for perhaps a T-Shirt idea.  I felt a little unsure of how I would draw the armor so I just stuck to the dinosaur.

]]> http://theb-roll.com/day-245-i-drew-a-dinosaur/feed/ 2 http://theb-roll.com/day-244-slitscan-experimentation/ http://theb-roll.com/day-244-slitscan-experimentation/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 07:04:57 +0000 The B-Roll http://theb-roll.com/?p=3569 What a weekend.  I got a little backed up on posting.  It’s sunday night as I write this.  I’m back-posting my creative things for friday and saturday as well as dealing with this evenings creative thing.  Oh yeah, and I’m at work.  Because I have no car I decided to spend the night here and finish up a cut for the morning.  My car should be done tomorrow, I hope.  The weekends are always the hardest to post for me because it’s my time with the family.

Just in case you have been missing them I have more slitscans coming your way.  I’m still in conceptual/experimental mode for an upcoming music video.  Once I have a grasp on my favorite ideas for this effect you will probably see less of it on the blog.  
 
I tried story-boarding the music video as my creative thing but realized that it was impossible.  I, more importantly, have to make a list of what types of things I would I like to see slit-scanned.  I already know I plan on using it as a concept for things being tangled with each other.  Either two lovers twisting forever in an embrace or a person being swarmed by videotape, the experiments from Day 112 make for a complementary set-up.

I’ve come to the conclusion, in regards to experimenting with Slitscan, that I should be playing at lower resolutions.  I have been doing all of these experiments at either 1080 or 720.  The render times are so dang slow that its absurd to think that I can really get an impression of how to manipulate this effect.  This evening I wised up and made some standard definition compositions, which can render about 5 to 6 minutes worth of video a night.

When I realized that story-boarding was out of the question I perused vimeo for slitscan videos and came across this one.  Basically, I decided to copy it.  In the video, the person experiments with his fingers and as I watched it I began seeing a lot of potential for interesting effects.  I thought how beautiful it might be if I could find someone with great control over the fluidity of they’re movement.

I’ve sort of put a hold on research and development of the tools and turned towards asking myself what can I do with the tools I’ve already developed. For my video I decided to do the same hand-thing that the fellow in the video linked above did, just because I wanted to try it.  I also, decided to play with this super-cool vintage rocket toy that I bought from the flea market a while ago.

Enjoy the video!

I wanted to write up at least one Processing sketch that you could be able to play with (like on Days 162, 166, or 170) but most of my time was spent reviewing in the book.  When you take any time away from learning a programming language the syntax goes right out the window and you need to re-read a ton.

I had a lot of trouble getting through it all.  I wanted to introduce myself to working with images in Processing because I’m feeling a little impatient to get ahead.  When I last left my studies in this software I was heading into the chapter on Arrays.  Unfortunately, Arrays were particularly foreign and complex to me.  
 
Eventually, it got pretty late and I decided to skip ahead in the book to the chapter on working with image files.  In the picture above I am using a simple code which connects the mouses X and Y positions to the amount of red and blue in the image.

A rough morning.  My car broke down just before the freeway exit at work and I had to get it towed to the dealership.  They informed me later that my head gasket might have been damaged and the cost will be a substantial dent.  Top that with the fact that my license is expired and my renewed card hasn’t arrived yet.  I had been planning on working a bit late this evening but  because of the situation I decided to save a days worth of rental car and simply spend the night.

The thing that spawned this evenings creative experiment was this Anamorphic Kit that they carry at Grand Illusions.  Tim Rowett, the delightful toy tester, demonstrated it for me when I visited them on Day 017. The Grand Illusions catalog has always been a great place for me to look for interesting ideas.

The word anamorphic has, for most of my life, only meant one thing to me.  In movie terminology, it means 16X9 or widescreen.  An anamorphic lens will distort an image so that when brought into your editing platform and conformed back into it’s undistorted form it will become the rectangular shape we all know and love as widescreen.  But I have come to learn that the definition of the word is much broader than that. Basically it means “To change form or distort”

This particular kind of distortion that I did this evening and which the Grand Illusions product also displays is now generally called Anamorphosis.  Meaning, to distort something so that the true form can only be seen at a special vantage point or in a special manner.

It was actually easier to create than I expected, which is always a nice surprise.  The way I did it was I set my camera up in its position, decided where my virtual cube was going to be and started placing little points of tape where I thought they belonged.  I was able to fine tune it a bit by viewing it through the camera and adjusting those points until they looked lined up.  Then I just connected the points together to form part of the shape.  I repeated this process until the final cube was complete.

I love this concept.  This version is a pretty simple example.  I’m interested in taking it further if I can find the time some day.   The ultimate example of Anamorphic art, in my opinion, is the chalk-drawings done by a UK artist named Julien Beever.  Check out his stuff.  It is absolutely awesome!

I knew that I didn’t really have the time to focus on note selection and song structure.  So, I decided to find something to use as my guide.  I was initially thinking of printing out some EEG brainwave charts or some seismic charts so that I could transcribe the waves into notes on my sheet music strips.  Then, as I was checking the results of the California election, it hit me.  I could just use this election data as my source to translate into music.

I had to figure out the rules.  How was I going to use this information to convert into pitches over time?  I had twenty notes on the staff of my sheet music strip.  Twenty divided perfectly into multiples of five to make 100, so I was able to use the percentage of votes each candidate received as my guide for pitch.

I decided to do the Gubernatorial race.  Not all of the polling information was complete at the time so the music you hear may not match exactly but it should be pretty darn close to the final results.

To represent time I decided to use the names of each of our 50 states.  I wrote each name in alphabetical order on the bottom row of my sheet music.  On the first letter of each state I marked the pitches of both the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.  I looked at their current percentage of votes and then rounded it to the nearest multiple of five and I marked them on the staff.  That way as each state passed through the music box you could hear the chord that they’re percentages created.  If there were Independents or Others who received a percentage then they were added to the chord as well.  Maine had four candidates that received substantial percentages so Maine got a four note chord.

I also decided to attach a simple rhythmic form to each party.  Republican notes consisted of three quarter notes in a row and Democratic notes were two half notes.  Finally, since the time between states lasted as long as there are letters in the name I decided to add a simple metronomic clock note.  It was a high A that rings at the beginning of every bar.  That way, rhythmically, each state lands at a certain place in time with that clock note.

Anyways, it was cool to hear how the results translated into music.  It was interesting that in very close races you tended to have notes that were very close to each other resulting in somewhat discordant sound. Sometimes the race was so close that each candidate occupied the same note.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the video!

Processing is probably the best other option.  It’s a software that I have started to learn a while back.  Unfortunately, June got a hold of my “Learning Processing” book and she destroyed the binding.  Soon the book turned into many tiny mini-booklets held together by whatever glue was left from the binding.  Eventually, I lost track of some pages and reviewing was impossible.  So, the other night I repurchased “Learning Processing”

Also, a few days ago I came across this website.  It catalogues most of the experiments that have ever been done in slit-scan.  It is a great source for research and inspiration.  That is where I found a few code examples for slit-scan within Processing.  Unfortunately, it is a little beyond my comprehension of the software so I think it’s time for me to go back to the chapter I left off on on Day 170.

On a slightly separate note, I was pretty excited to see how my experiments from yesterday turned out in video form.  I was really jazzed by the way the still images were looking.  Well, very soon after that I came to realize that the video was not going to be all that different from the stills.  The reason being (now this may be a little hard to follow) is that the line of resolution that I selected to be copied in time across the frame was not moving at all.  In other words the resulting video was similar to a printer printing out my image from the right side of the screen to the left.

Now if I could move that selected line or slit in time as it’s going then I can create some movement and interest.  So I went into After Effects and linked all the masks creating the slits in the thousand or so layers to the mask in the very top layer.  Then, I animated the top layers mask from left to right over a period of 20 seconds.  Since all the masks in the layers below are linked they move in unison with it.

Sorry, it’s all very hard to describe in simple terms.  Below you can see the results in my video.  First you will see the two shots from yesterday.  You can see what I mean by the printer analogy.  Then the third shot is the same traffic shot from the first experiment only with added movement to the selected slit.  Finally, I rendered an old shot of the ocean that I had with the same effect as the third shot.

I’m disappointed with my situation at the moment but I am digging my way to the bottom of it.  If I can get up to speed in Processing, then when I want to experiment with a different approach on a shot all I’ll have to do is adjust a couple numbers in the code and re-process it.  It’s the best situation at the moment.  I just need to keep reading and working my way there.

Anyways check out the video.

Lastly, a surprise treat for you and a possible ray of sunshine for me.  Last night in my research I came across the most amazing slit-scan video that I have ever seen.  It had been uploaded to vimeo a mere 20 hours earlier.  The fellow who made the video, Carl Rosendahl, wrote the software himself in C++ using openframeworks so that he could import the native full HD files directly from his 7D.  He says on his blog that 100 frames at 720p are rendered in a single minute!  That is a major improvement from my After Effects 2 1/2 minutes per frame!  Don’t worry, I have already sent him a message through vimeo.  I am hoping to hear back from him.

But for your enjoyment, check out his amazing achievement below.