Melbourne director and animator Matt Arnold has put together a lovely little cutout nautical world in After Effects [CDMo tag] for The Basics’ “Built This Ship”.

I’m currently working on a similarly nautically themed project, using similar post-production techniques, so it’s fascinating to see another artist’s take on the concept.

Via excellent video production site Pro Juice, who have also interviewed Matt on a previous video for Whitley.

See full report…

Jim Myogenic talks to SPIN about doing live visuals with Jon Hopkins during Club Transmediale. Everything about these visuals looks great, even from a low-res online video and chat: prominent projection behind the stage, lots of thoughtful and original content, intelligent focus on materials instead of just a chaotic assemblage of things, and what sounds like the right balance of pre-set preparation and live triggering. Jim and Jon, if you’re ever passing through New York… hope you say hi.

Jim’s setup is Resolume, both The Original Series and The Next Generation. That is, the saucy new MacBook Pro with its more powerful GPU runs the new Resolume Avenue, and the old PC runs the tried-and-true Resolume 2.x. It’s funny, as a lot of Resolume users I know are hanging on to their old sets, which I think says a lot about that tool – you live with it even as the technology ages.

Found via Resolume on Twitter.

Part of what makes Resolume Avenue so compelling as a live visual solution is that it can mix, mash, and loop audio alongside video, in ways often resembling Ableton Live. But that, of course, doesn’t make Resolume nearly as deep a live sonic tool as Ableton. So, to combine two great tastes – live video in Resolume Avenue, plus live audio and elaborate sequencing control in Ableton Live – the folks at Resolume have assembled a recipe that allows Resolume to be controlled via Live using MIDI.

The basic process:

1. Route MIDI from Resolume to Ableton, using the IAC Driver on Mac and MIDI-Yoke on Windows.

2. Make a MIDI sequence in Ableton that controls clips in Resolume.

3. Add some audio clips and scenes in Live for some live audio goodness.

4. Link parameters and sync for effects and icing.

Controlling Resolume Avenue with Ableton Live

This does nothing to stop a fantasy I’ve heard other folks discussing of late: imagine if we had an OSC (OpenSoundControl) sequencer? OSC is by nature time-based as a protocol, and you could even still sequence MIDI events (using MIDI over OSC) – or arbitrary events that wouldn’t be restricted by overly rigid event types like the MIDI Note? Does anyone know if such a thing has been tried? (Maybe it’s time to write one.)

Live Plus…?

That’s not to take away from the beauties of Ableton Live in this sort of setup. Combining Live and visuals, whether to add audio or sequence visuals or both, has been an ongoing theme on this site.

Live + Resolume (like the above tutorial, but + Ethernet) Tutorial: Ableton Live + Resolume with MIDI Over Ethernet, Free on PC (Linux, Mac Soon)

Live + Isadora + Max + The Karate Kid: Karate Kid AV Remix – and a how-to using the awesome Lucifer plug-in (which could also be nice with Resolume): AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live

Live + Isadora: Ableton Live + Isadora: Slicing, Syncing Audiovisual Tutorials

Live + VDMX: Toby *spark and Live Cinema: Ableton and VDMX, Soundtrack and Narrative

Live + robotic mirrors on projectors: DMX For Dummies: Controlling iCue Robotic Mirrors with uDMX and Ableton Live

Live + Jitter: Christopher Willits on XLR8R with Live Jitter, Ableton Live Visual Setup

Live + robotic cameras: Interview: Josh Cardenas’ Robotic, Midi Controlled Cameras and tour with DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist

And one instance of Live failing to be the tool for the job, only to be replaced by Max: Progress Report: 8 Cameras Plus Vixid Plus Patching Gives Craziness (Pd would work, too, which would be nice for a Linux netbook)

Now that Bart has gotten the ball rolling for Resolume, though, I suspect we’ll see a lot more ideas for combining Resolume Avenue with Ableton Live, or using Avenue as an audiovisual tool in itself; it just makes sense. If you work up your own setup or add your own twist after following this tutorial, let us know!

Memo’s ongoing quest to get his application MSARemote on the iTunes App Store has hit what is hopefully its last rejection today, this time because one of the screens “infringes an Apple trademark image.”

This is a reasonably well documented failure mode, so hopefully this is the final invisible, electrified hurdle they expect Memo to sense and clear before MSA Remote is made available.

In the meantime, Memo has published a new video displaying the app controlling VDMX [on CDMo] and Ableton Live [on CDMo, on CDMu], and showcasing its velocity sensitive keyboard.

MSA Remote + VDMX + Ableton Live from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Via: Twitter @memotv. The CDM account is @cdmblogs. I’m @jaymis, and Peter is @peterkirn.

The OFFF Festival, held last week in Lisbon, Portugal, has to be one of the most visually stimulating places I’ve ever been. Herds of bright-faced, young, handsome European artist boys and girls pack by the thousands into an old steel mill. In a cavernous, resonant concrete bunker, the echo of excited chatter never really stops. Instead, to be noticed, presenters have to create visual flash – visual demos here are everything. It almost seems like it shouldn’t work. I notice a few bloggers complained about sometimes-disorganized presentations, the difficulty in hearing (tough for me, and the presentations were in my native language), and the general mayhem. But somehow, it’s the experience of the thing, the fact that presenters have to singe their ideas on optic nerves, that brings it all together.

Lisbon itself is stunning, too – perhaps not the flashiest of European towns, but in its blend of layers of North African, Moorish, Catholic, Latin, it blends into something special that seems to transcend everything around you. It’s never a cliché.

Given all this optical richness and the assembled lenses of some of the best designers in the world, it’s no surprise that Flickr was just overloaded with spectacular images of faces, scenery, and creations from the conference. The conference catalog seems itself like it came from another age: Flickr is the real catalog now. (See the OFFF tag above. If you find some particular gems, please call out your favorite OFFF photographers in comments.)

Oh, yeah … uh … I also took some kinda lo-fi snapshots.(Nope, not a photographer.)

Let’s draw more: a new rallying cry?

But one of my favorite moments of the whole weekend was watching a who’s-who of digital designers pick up Sharpies and sign the back of OFFF chief curator Hector Ayuso’s laptop. This is great on a number of levels. For one, getting to deface Apple’s pure minimalist design is deeply satisfying. And there’s something terrific about overlaying a digital design object with that old standby of creation, the Sharpie marker. But mostly, it was seeing these folks draw. I hope onstage doodling could be mandatory for next year’s conference.