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!
Comments
7 responses to “mm-cc 07.03.11”
asahi 50mm indeed… good eye ;-)
thanks again for all your work on this
awesome vid and music, charlie! was wondering if it would be possible to extend this jam session further by say, inviting guests from other countries. then they could add to the music via something like ninjam :)
Thanks guys! Sorry for the late reply. Life has been CRAZY busy lately. Next week scares me a little but anyways…
@Jared, Don’t mention it. It’s been a delight to do these things. My friends enjoy it as well so it’s something we look forward to.
@Pirx, That’s an AWESOME idea. I am totally down to try that out. We would have to coordinate sometime before to make sure that the setup can work. It would be awesome to hear things coming out the speakers that we never made but we know someone out there did. The only thing I have to figure out set-up wise is a way to give you all the instruments while not monitoring them live because of the feedback issues with the mics. But I think it’s doable!
yeah, i’ve hinted doing ninjam stuff to you and jared before. the software is really nice. on the receiving side, you can redirect the audio via rewire/soundflower/jack(osx) to whatever daw you want to use. each audio stream gets its own pair(s) of ports. same for the “send” side; it should be pretty easy to put everything on a master stereo pair and push that out over the network.
as far as latency goes, ninjam compensates for lag/delay/latency by treating it as “rests.” you setup the bpm/tempo in ninjam, and then any network dropouts are treated as part of the steady rhythm, as rests, with the music returning right on the next beat. i never really hear even 1-bar rests, despite playing with folks all over the world simultaneously. hit up jam.monome.org to see about setup instructions — you may have to hop onto #monome on irc.freenode.net to get the server address and password, or just email rud. try it out sometime; get in on a jam session.
Awesome video! Love this new technique.
Some kind of cubism of the time.(my english gets worse day by day,jajaja…)
awesome!! i’ve yet to try ninjam + ableton but i’m sure it won’t be too difficult. will give you feedback once i’ve set things up!
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