You’ll know live visualism has arrived when visualists regularly “headline” the way music does. But if you’re tired of waiting, look no further than Western Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh’s spectacular Via Festival this week is doing it right.
See what they’re doing for a great example of what’s possible when visualists and musicians meet — and, since the vast majority of you likely can’t make it to Pittsburgh this week, we’ve put together some videos from the VIA folks to give you a cross section of this work.
We’ve covered Abstract Birds/Quayola’s retina-tingling visuals here before, from Montréal’s Elektra Festival. Now, they’re coupled with Four Tet, a meeting of talents that also attracted the attention of New York’s Creator’s Project event also this month.
The whole lineup includes this kind of work, though, at once technologically stunning and creatively inspiring, from some of the best live visual artists around (and a few of them Friends of the Site, to boot). VIA Festival lines it up for CDM:
The beauty of the visualist movement is sometimes, amidst spectacle, you get little gems of creative ideas. Those could, in turn, become the imaginative original products used in live visual sets.
And for those who can appreciate such work, even an everyday moment can become creative fodder.
Florian Dobler managed to fight the boredom of a road trip by making something new. He writes:
“I’m a motion designer and an avid reader of your blog. Recently, I finished a small motion short called ‘Sisters’. I shot it while stuck in a car with three beautiful sisters and a dog during a dull, 10-hour drive. Later, I added some visual effects using After Effects, [with] some trapcode plugins (Form and Particular).
On behalf of the dog, I’d like to say, that’s three beautiful sisters and one beautiful dog. Ahem. Four beautiful fellow travelers.
“shot on a canon 60d and a 50mm 1.8 in 720p50.”
I really love the subtlety of some of the effects atop the cinematography, and hte way they blend together, and it seems a nice bite-sized morsel for the weekend. Cheers, folks. Keep them coming.
Can hacking the innards of a file give you insight into how the underlying data works – and how to unlock the aesthetic of a digital file? Here’s one way to look at that question.
Rosa Menkman, presenting at the Patterns and Pleasure Festival run by Amsterdam’s STEIM, gave a workshop today on glitch aesthetics. Based on her ongoing Vernacular of File Formats work, in particular the document above, she starts with the basics of poking and prodding bytes of data inside a file, then moves toward making images and motion out of those effects. We’ve discussed that direction in general – and “glitch” as aesthetic and technique. But I had the pleasure today of seeing Rosa work with a class full of workshop attendees on the topic.
As Rosa puts it: “Just put a little error in any file, and you see a data structure come to the surface.”
Simple File Exploration
Rosa had some nice examples in mucking about in the raw data of file formats. Simply put, though it’s worth getting the full workshop from her, this involves things like: Continue reading »
For people working with ProRes heavily in their workflow, I’d be curious to hear how far along the project is and how it’s working. And if you can help…
And if someone is crazy enough to use ProRes live, well, I’d be curious to hear about that, too!
Click “Timeline” instead of “Sceneline,” and Premiere Elements 10 becomes a more conventional editor.
Macworld has published the review I wrote of Premiere Elements 10. Windows users for some time have enjoyed budget-priced video editors from Sony and Adobe; the Mac user base has had only Final Cut Express. Then, Adobe brought their Premiere Elements to the Mac, complete with native AVCHD editing – something Apple’s editors lacked (at the time requiring time-consuming transcoding).
Now, Apple has ditched Final Cut Express – Final Cut Pro X is its only option. If you weren’t sold on FCPX, or if you don’t feel like shelling out for either it or Premiere Pro, that makes Premiere Elements 10 an intriguing choice. It’s only a hundred bucks, and it’s surprisingly capable. As I write:
But if what you really want is a powerful editor that gives you room to grow— without paying too high a cost in either dollars or complexity—Premiere Elements really shows its colors. Yes, Adobe seems to hope this is something you’ll use to make more interesting video slideshows of your Facebook friends. But what they’ve come up with is a powerful editor with extensive color controls and native AVCHD editing, with quick ways of getting videos online or in HD on disc.
That’s all the more meaningful as FCPX hasn’t won over everyone.
On Windows, Sony’s bargain-priced versions of Vegas remain strong choices, and without necessarily requiring you to learn any beginner-level interfaces. But I have to say, I do like those color controls and photo pan-and-scan in Premiere.
Also, thanks to my editors for keeping the “Dr. Jeckyl and Fluffy the Bear” subhead. This marks the second time for Macworld this summer I get to cover a perhaps-overlooked product — last time it was Motion. And they’re each $100 or less.
I’d still get Premiere Pro over Elements if possible – the editing interface is more familiar, there’s gobs more stuff there, and even simple things like exporting is more direct. But for a bargain price, Elements does far more than I would have expected, and it is absolutely usable in a pinch.
Even as studios abandon cell animation and all the attention in effects tends to go do digital rendering, there’s something to be said for real-for-real — photographing real-world things, making real things in miniature, and setting the real world into motion. While it runs afield of our usual subject matter, this video definitely qualifies as creating digital motion: marvel as an elaborate set of computer-controlled electronics makes tiny airplanes taxi, ad flags on the road flutter in miniaturized wind, choreographs intricate sets of perfect lighting, and even launches a plane on “takeoff.” These German engineers seem bright enough to put that Space Shuttle model into orbit and start servicing the ISS if they had to.
The project is the latest addition to the make-anyone-a-kid-again magic at the aptly-named Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany. Blog post announcing the news on their official site: LAUNCH OF THE KNUFFINGEN AIRPORT
Below, a video of the painstakingly, achingly-delicate construction process – with a lot of the electronic wizardry that goes into this place.
It’s a reminder in all motion graphics and digital motion of the power of the physical – a revelation that could be applied as much to the production of abstract or imaginary imagery as, for those with these kinds of chops, real-world locations.
Thanks to Thomas Paulsen, whose work you’ll hopefully soon on our sister Music site. (Old news to some of you, I imagine, but certainly nothing we or similar sites have covered! Now I have to get back to Hamburg.)
Virtuoso coder and prolific digital artist Kyle McDonald is at it again, here in collaboration with similarly expressive and skilled coder Arturo Castro. Together, working in openFrameworks, they make use of a face tracking library to turn the image of a face into new, terrifying visions once imagined only in science fiction. Here, going beyond a pirate hat or mustache, they transform the appearance of the face. (I hesitate to use the word “avatar” because I start to think of 90s “new media” or James Cameron films, but — damn. Yeah. This is what everyone was imagining.)
Arturo and Kyle provide thoughtful notes and technical details via Vimeo, so I’ll let them speak here. If you have other questions to ask them or want to reflect more on what this all means, we can certainly do a CDM follow-up.
But perhaps the most exciting evidence is visual: the latest two videos from Kyle conceive faces from the Philip K. Dick novel “A Scanner Darkly” and its scramble suit and active face substitution.
Peter Kirn
Jaymis Loveday
Matt Ganucheau
toby
joshue ott
michaeluna
vade
dan-winckler
Momo The Monster
songcarver
dj-rndm
nathanal-lcaud
christian.ryan
craig-dorety
Surya Buchwald
Kyle McDonald
Annapurna Kumar
Sofy Yuditskaya