You know it when you see it: media starting to actually evolve past what you expect, mimicking each other, and pushing at the obvious sense of what they are. One particularly exciting trend is real-world, kinetic sculptures influenced by digital media and taking on new movements and shapes. It’s the kind of thing I hope will push those of us working in software and projection to push back and make our medium look different, too.

Via Toxi, here’s just that kind of work, a kinetic sculpture at the BMW Museum. I find it “interesting” immediately, but the poster notes that things get even more fun a minute in.

The work comes from our friends at wildly-talented design house ART+COM, one of a number of interactive installations they designed for the museum in Munich. Previous creations of theirs include the moving floating.numbers in 2004 for the Jewish Museum, and an exhibition that let visitors enter an alien world at the London Science Museum.

Here’s the official video, with annoying music – hit mute and put on a favorite track for a better effect:

Also seen on Engadget.

And BMW in general seems to be fans of kinetic sculpture in general. They shot this terrific-looking ad using Theo Jansen’s insect-like, walking sculptures:

In 1983, Panasonic presented a bold future of videography, one in which cameras adjusted exposure and focus all by themselves, and we would sling portable VCRs over our arm to film ourselves doing interpretive jazz dance as the sun set over the Pacific. We would have terrific legs and short shorts, and dance with the sheer exuberance auto-focus inspired … until we realized we neglected to move the tripod as the tide came in, and our expensive Panasonic gear floated out to sea.

It’s nice to hear Panasonic’s old slogan “Just Slightly Ahead of Our Time” — an atypically pragmatic marketing slogan. (Like, “Futuristic Looking for At Least a Few Months, We Think.”) Maybe even they knew this whole clunky VCR - docking station wasn’t going to catch on. Yet, I still kinda want that camera.

Via stepheno.net, a Norwegian TV and Media Production student, and TechEBlog.

There’s nothing like the occasional reminder that commercial effects pros get to do stuff we can’t. Today’s example: a real-life Katamari Damacy, starting with a single person (ouch) and rolling through a city, courtesy the Travelers Insurance group.

The results are stunningly realistic, particularly at the beginning: there’s a sense of real physicality to it, which is hard to do with things that are physically impossible. Why so well done? Read the list of credits: none other than Kiwi Lord of the Rings vet Weta Digital (motto: “Industrial Light and what?”) did the effects.

No Fat Clips has full details, credits, and video links

For video inspiration, you can’t do much better than No Fat Clips; they’re a fantastic source of entertainment and knowledge. Now, there’s some kind of message here, something about … insurance? Oh, I don’t know. I’m just going to watch this thing again.

Mixing traditional low-framerate stop motion photography with some beautifully composited morphs, Impactist’s Peace Corps spot is utterly stunning.

via Motionographer

The Impactist guys weighed in to the comments with these notes on technique:

We shot using a digital SLR for a number of reasons. First off, the resolution. The project was finished in HD, so of course we’d need greater than HD frame size. This huge frame also was neccessary for realignment since it was all hand held to achieve the end result where we’d be able to recompose within the frame.

There was no tracking software used, no plugin trickery. The majority of the work involved frame by frame painting and reconstruction of images. A custom solution was developed and tested prior to the actual production. No motion footage was used, everything was captured using the digital SLR.

In total, over 14,000 stills were shot over two days at eight different locations around New York City.

Hope that helped to make a little more sense of it.

Plenty of great stop motion and animated work on their site

I’ve watched the new “Coke Theft Auto” spot quite a few times, and I’m not quite sure whether it’s pure genius or pop culture cash-in, so I thought I’d post and let the collective sort it out. You can download the video from Motionographer’s article, or check the ugly compressified youtube version.

This could be considered about as much a Machinima as James Brown’s Trafalgar Square spot from a couple of years ago. They both reference a computer game, but throwing in an ad agency and a large wad of cash negates any possible “machinima” tag, I think. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Coke spot had a bigger budget than Trafalgar Square, despite the live action, trashing of cars and probably exorbitant fees to shoot at Trafalgar Square.

So if this isn’t Machinima, it’s just another big budget TV ad, and useful how? Well it did remind me of the Machinima world, which is a world which visualists should feel an affinity towards. Repurposing games old or new is a great way to get source material (Resolume’s Freeframe plugins even include a ZX Spectrum emulator). I’m feeling quite surprised that I don’t have any Quake3 samples (or at least a collection of gibbings) to keep my Tron clips company.

Has anyone been using games to produce material for their VJ sets? Mixing in video from the geeks playing Halo in the green room?

A slightly related aside: I’d love to hear any suggestions people have for alternatives to youtube or google video . Youtube is an amazing resource but their compression and implementation isn’t of the highest quality.

No, really. VJing is half motion graphics, half performance and half tech-nerding. Sadly, most of the best motion graphics is going on in TV advertisments, and as I try to avoid watching ads on TV at all costs, I end up collecting the good ones online.

When I work with an artist I like to create visuals which relate to them and what they do. Even just dropping some effected DV footage or a couple of simple stop-motion clips of them into your set will make it feel more integrated with whatever else is going on. I have a shoot soon with a local 2 piece for some upcoming gigs, and one of my shoot ideas involves motion tracking, inspired by Motion Theory’s “Pharrell” spot for HP.

This type of motion tracking doesn’t need to be particularly difficult to look effective, especially if you’re using a regular object such as the effective-but-played-out picture frame (overused in the below clip Bernard Fanning - Wish You Well). However, I can’t seem to find any tutorials for this online. So if there’s any interest I’ll put together a tutorial while I work on production for this shoot.

via Accent Feed