Thanks to everyone who ran the system spec gauntlet and proudly entered our 3L Beta Giveaway. We’ll draw and announce the winners on Monday when ExiledSurfer and I have finished our respective travel itineraries.

In the meantime, for those who would like to get a head start on the 3L interface, artificialeyes have released the manual for public consumption (Download link: 1.2MB PDF).

When you open that file, you’ll be confronted with the following image.

Sage advice. artificialeyes have made some very interesting interface design choices with this software, and while they’ve packed a huge amount of control and signal flow functionality into a single screen interface, few would accuse it of being intuitive. Even with Michael and Todd showing you through the system it’s still quite confusing, and takes some time for the 3L paradigm to sink in. So for those 5 new beta testers hitting the software on Monday, getting a head start on the manual will have you blasting pixels out smoother and faster.

Good luck! As the commercial release of 3L approaches I’m sure we’ll have more exciting news coming.

Hang tight — we will have that announcement here. It’s Monday in New York for another few hours. -Ed.

Want to learn how to pull off graphics? Make it work with optical and real for real first. Tron may have been a pioneering moment in computer graphics, but a lot of its unique look came from unique optical effects on a scale not seen before or after. The glowing screen was an actual lighting effect, which is why CG artists have taken such a liking to the film’s aesthetic, even if it was ultimately too labor-intensive to apply to the whole movie. There’s even an analog in the music: Wendy Carlos’ adept blend of big orchestral, choral, and organ textures with synths.

Of course, the makers of Tron didn’t leave out computer graphics entirely. And that makes this fan remake — no CG, and no optical effects trickery, either — adorable and inspiring.

Via Kotaku.

You’re also aware of just how much of this sequence is sound and editing. Erm, not that motion isn’t important — if I were to say that, I should say it on, you know, the other blog. Think synthesis of the two.

We’ve seen visual vinyl, via the video stylings of Serato’s VIDEO-SL plug-in. But here’s a more literal approach: stick the camera on the turntable. Via a multi-camera setup, Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow are doing that with their honest-to-goodness, scratching turntablist sets. I especially like the camera up close on the turntable itself — something instrumentalists might try, too. (Well, maybe you want to stop somewhere … no endoscopies during your performance, please, unless you’re an avant-garde performance artist or something.)

More on this sort of thing soon, but there’s something to get the thought process going. Thanks, Jaymis!

It’s still early in development (read: it often crashes), but The Bean Machine applies nodal, patch-based development to Java. The interface is mysteriously close to Quartz Composer, down to capabilities, UI, and even the 3D cube tutorial. Personally, I use Java because it can do things Quartz Composer can’t, but it’s interesting nonetheless — and raises, again, the question of why we don’t see more tools that try to meld the capabilities of code and patches.

The cool bit: nodes are Java Beans, so you really could use this to combine the best of both worlds if it matures. No download yet, but we’ll be watching … perhaps it will inspire other developers, as well.

The project is labeled “experimental”, but could be worth a look. Developer Jerry Huxtable has lots of other goodies for Java-heads on his page, including lots of 2D image processing stuff and a map editor — Processing lovers, might want to pop this into your del.icio.us.

Bean Machine @ JH Labs

JH Labs main page with lots o’ projects

In case you haven’t seen the stunt spreading, meme-like, around the blogosphere, graffiti artist Skullphone hacked ten Los Angeles-area billboards owned by ClearChannel. It’s the coolest thing to happen to LA’s billboards since L.A. Story. And that was a movie, not real.

See it on Skullphone and Curbed L.A. via Textually and Supertouch, and F.A.T. and Anti-Advertising Agency, via Gizmodo and MAKE.

Now, this deserves special mention here because I imagine almost everyone here has dreamed of hijacking giant digital billboards — the way musicians dream of playing the Hollywood Bowl or being on the cover of Rolling Stone or something.

Not that we condone such behavior, of course. No, that’d be illegal.

Too bad you can only get away with stuff like this in LA and not, say, Times Square or Tokyo.

Okay, maybe not “hacked.” If by “hacked” you mean “rented from ClearChannel, the owner of the sign,” then this is a hack. Oops. Speaking of which, I’d better make sure to check my bank balance and make sure I can hack this month’s apartment. So much for sticking it to ClearChannel, evil corporate overlord. (Now, does someone know if you could hack these signs?)

I like Wired’s term, too — “checkbook culture jamming.” And now you know what to get your favorite visualist for his/her birthday, eh? (Thanks for the correction, mememamo!)

Guitar Hero? We want VJ Hero. And the AV Arcade Table, now part of the Boredbrands Digital Funfair, is exactly what you’d want it to be like.

It’s got the hardware — a DIY, cocktail-style arcade table, just the like the one you spent playing Ms. Pac-Man on, slightly drunk.

It’s got the software — a Windows PC running VJAMM.

And it’s got the content — Guitar Hero and Rock Band have rock classics, so this has some classic clips from VJs.

Official description:

The AV Arcade Table is a simple hybrid, a table top arcade cabinet that has been converted to run Vjamm, the best Audio Visual VJ Software by miles! Using the joystick and buttons 2 people can trigger audio visual samples and create beautiful collaborative audio visual collage/ a chaotic mess** (delete as appropriate!).

The Table was originally created for Cybersonica 2007 and was featured as part of “Soundwaves” at Kinetica Museum

Thanks to Eclectic Method, Exceeda, Hexstatic and Vjamm All Stars for supplying content.

AV Arcade Table @ Boredbrands Digital Funfair

Incidentally, reasons to give some props to VJAMM, even in this overcrowded world of VJ apps, and even though everyone went out and bought MacBook Pros last week, it seems:

• Coldcut uses VJAMM. I mean, celebrity matters little to us here, but they do use it well, and that counts.
• The Novation SL line of keyboards supports Automap in VJAMM. (It’s England, so I’m guessing that idea got worked out over a pint — which is certainly the way I like to make deals.)
• They have this cheery slogan on their website: “VJamm3 is the world’s leading audiovisual instrument, the ultimate tool for sound and image mixing, the true 21st century artform, the new hip-hop.”
• This table

Thanks to Gav for the tip — great work, mate! And to all readers of CDM: go for the shameless plugs. There’s no shame in it. We love to see the cool stuff you’re doing.

Beeple - iv.7 (annoyingly small mix) on Vimeo

Beeple’s Audiovisual exploits have been featured twice on Create Digital Motion, and raised a variety of questions. Momo the Monster cornered Mike Winkelmann in a dark alley and forced him to give us the information you crave.

What can you tell us about your method?

Well, usually I write the basis for a song using loop-based software like FL Studio, then i take and export all of those loops and make video that syncs precisely to each note in the loop. If it’s a melody line, then I will try to make it so that you can discern the different notes that are being played. If it is a more rhythmic or atonal sound,I will try to make some piece of video that “looks” like that sound. Then I render the loops of music and video together into one video file. Next, I take those video files into a NLE (I use Vegas 4, mostly) and attempt to write a large piece using my audio/video loops. I layer all of the pieces of audio/video, and because they are all individually synced, bits of my piece, the end product kind of makes itself in terms of video.

It’s been 2 months since artificialeyes announced their new Mac-only visualist tool 3L ("Thrill"). The ae guys have just pushed out a new beta release, updated the 3L manuals, posted a new features page with screenshots, and the word from Michael is that the commercial release will happen as soon as they have the infrastructure in place for selling it.

To further whet your appetite, over 100 free VJ loops created with 3L have been posted to archive.org:

Free VJ LOOPS created with 3L
3L VJ Loops Series 2
Free VJ Loops created with 3L Series 3

… and leading by example, they have also released two content DVDs on VMS. These feature content generated almost entirely in 3L and are designed to be used with the VMS Video Moving Systems.

Hungry? Well, how would you like a main course of "Free 3L Private Beta" to go with that? artificialeyes have provided CDMo with five invitations to give away. The beta group is currently under 50 people, so this isn’t your average web2.0 style "put it out there and call it a beta so we don’t have to make it stable" software release.

Before you go putting up your hand, however, there are some conditions. Most importantly: You’ll need a machine which is capable of running 3L.

2.33GHz Intel based MacBook Pro or Mac Pro running:

• OSX 10.4.1 or later (leopard included)
• Quicktime 7.2 or later
• Minimum screen resolution 1440 x 900 pixels
• 2Gb RAM
• 256Mb VRAM ATI or NVIDIA video card

If you can tick those boxes, then all you need to do is leave a comment on this post (edit: Entries are now closed. Winners will be announced on Monday). Entries will be open for 72 hours, then we will randomly select 5 people to join this exclusive group of visual visionaries beating their graphics chips into submission. Those who have been chosen will receive a beta invitation, and the others will receive an invitation to join the 3L mailing list (opt-in, of course).

If you miss out, don’t fret. The pricing for 3L - €200, €150 for students - is very competitive, and I’m sure that artificialeyes will keep us in the loop on their release progress.

I’ll be doing a two hour workshop in Boston on Processing for a conference on graphic design in education. My goal: get a group of educators and students unfamiliar with the tool up to speed as quickly as possible. I’m assembling a “90-minute” Processing code kit for the purpose, indebted to some of the existing examples but adapted to teaching; I’ll be open sourcing that on CDM Labs and certainly welcome input. (Stay tuned — and any of you other Processing folk out there had to do something like this? Ben Fry has a folder of code he uses, I know; Dan Shiffman has gobs of great stuff but it assumes a timeframe more like a semester.)

I’m really excited about the conference itself. There’s unfortunately far too little real focus on how media impacts teaching, and that’s exactly what this event addresses:

Massaging Media 2: Graphic Design Education in the Age of Dynamic Media conference will gather a diverse group of presenters and attendees from around the world for a provocative conversation on how graphic design education is being affected by dynamic media.

Through keynote presentations, panel discussions, multiple-track speaker sessions, a working lunch, and a breakfast roundtable, we will focus our discussion on five key subject areas: pedagogy; practice; theory; future history; and making it work.

In the lineup: designers of the future, kinetic typography, algorithmic design and open code, motion literacy (which unfortunately I think does NOT mean how many people are subscribed to our RSS, but hey), fluid, dynamic design, and naturally lots on pedagogy.

And I absolutely have to catch up Kyle Buza, who gave us the mmonoplayer Max 8-bit externals.

If you’re a student, you can attend the conference for as little as US$75; for everyone else you can register online for US$225 even without a membership in the AIGA, the sponsoring organization. And if you come, do say hi!

massagingmedia2