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.
Perhaps it’s the church setting for the installation, or the strains of 17th-Century choral composition by Allegri. But Streetwise Opera’s My Secret Heart, binding together reactive visuals and post-Minimalist musical strains, has the feeling of a 21st Century passion play, a digital devotional piece.
My Secret Heart is a commission by Streetwise Opera, which develops work in the UK’s homeless centers, featuring performers from those shelters as stars, then transposing them to venues like Westminster Abbey. This work is a collaboration between electronic composer Mira Calix (Warp) with sound designer Dave Sheppard, and directed by video artists Flat-e with custom software programmed by visualist Memo Akten.
An installation, a film, and a performance, My Secret Heart’s 100 performers are wrapped in a virtual sonic and visual world, interwoven with digitally-generated, flowing tendrils, and driven by software that responds to sound and user interaction.
Artificially-intelligent flocking behaviors, forming the particle strands that wend their way through the piece, as initially prototyped in Processing
A new, original particle/physics engine built for OpenFrameWorks. Originally inspired by the open source traer.physics library for Processing, Memo’s library will support advanced features like recording and playback and pluggable force fields. (That makes me think of the Death Star tractor beam and the Millenium Falcon, but that’s probably just me.)
A multi-dimensional spline interpolator for translating the particles into the flowing tendrils of the piece, also built for OpenFrameWorks.
Cylindrical projection on a 16m-circumference “aquarium” rig by Gaianova
On Monday I had a CT scan. If you haven’t already, every visualist should go for a ride in a computed tomography machine. It’s the best mix of futuristic medicine and video geekness I’ve ever encountered. As happens with most medical imaging these days, I came away with both a collection of printed films and a CD full of images. However, unlike previous scans and xrays which were generally disparate grainy stills of amorphous organs or bones, these prints showed hundreds of clear, consecutive slices through my body.
Yes, that’s my heart and lungs. I love technology so damn much.
Looking at the films I knew immediately that I should be able to use the frames to create an animation. Checking through the CD I found a folder of images named “CT000000″, “CT000001″ etc. Some quick googling informed me that these are DICOM format files, which contain both patient information and imagery.
Anyone on Windows who works with images should know the fantastic, free image viewer/toolkit Irfanview - it’s the VLC of the still-image world! Irfanview has a plugin in its default bundle which allows it to read and operate on DICOM files, as long as they have a .DCM extension. Fortunately Irfanview’s batch functions feature both Rename and Convert, so I was able to quickly go from the aforementioned folders of consecutively named, extensionless files; to folders filled with consecutively named .BMPs, which any visualist will recognize as a Good Thing.
From there it was a quick hop to After Effects [tag on CDM], and I was able to scrub a timeline to look through my organs. Quite the definition of “freaky technology”. The human body is quite full of various blobs and tubes though (well mine is anyway), so instead of turning this into a blobby animation I spent some time colour correcting to isolate just the brightest points: My skeleton.
At 25FPS the animation only lasted 11 seconds, so I used After Effects’ time stretch and frame-blending (the “high quality” morphing type) to slow it down and stretch it out. This looks great for the most part, but some sections have quite obvious frame-morphing distortion going on. I also applied the “CC Wide Time” effect, which onionskinned 8 frames before and after. This gives a better feel of the 3D volume, as opposed to the “narrow time” version, which shows only one frame at a time. This is more accurate, but slightly harder to understand.
And yes, I do feel that my skeleton is epic enough to warrant Mogwai Fear Satan.
So I’ve had a great time with my small CT scan, enough to hope that I get sent in for another one soon so I can scam the technician into scanning my whole body. In the meantime, I’m sure there’s more which can be done with this imagery. Looking at the slices, it seems as though I should be able to turn them into a 3D model of my spine… Which I could get printed and give to my girlfriend as ear rings.
I’ve been looking around and haven’t been able to locate any tools which will convert flat slices in to 3D data. I’m sure that at least a couple of CDMsters have done so in the past though. Any suggestions? Would anyone like to send me their CT scan data so I can make a 3D model of their skull?
Friend of CDM Simulcast caught up with Australian video remixers Soda Jerk last year, to talk about their technically intense, epic, narrative remixes.
Soda_Jerk are two remix artists who create brand spanking new stories with their compositions. They work across several mediums but are probably best known for their entirely sample based audiovisual films that range from a couple of minutes to an hour long.
Their feature length and excellently named, “Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone” uses over 300 video and audio sources and stars Elvis Presley doing battle with the evil Moses and his Copyright Commandments fighting for the ancient art of the remix. The film also stars The Hulk, Monkey, Batman & Robin, Michael Jackson and The Ghostbusters.
I had the chance to hear these two inspiring artists speak at a recent exhibition and thought I’d hit them up for an interview…
So there’s an endless amount of content to sample and remix out there…what grabs your eye and ear?
We never know what’s going to grab us until we hear it or see it, so we just watch and listen to as much stuff as we can, as much of the time as we can. We do have a soft spot for aged or damaged footage though: decaying celluloid, warped video grain or digital glitches.
I really like your decision to use narrative in your remixes. Can you give us some insight into your workflow? Do you come up with a story first, or just sample everything that sounds and looks good and say “Cool, we can make a remixed feature film starring Moses, Elvis and Bill Murray.”
Our work is largely research driven, in the sense that we generally start with a concept that we are interested in and investigate it by consuming culture that’s related to the area (books, films, audio tracks etc). So with our most recent project “Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop” we were looking into this interesting field of theory called Afrofuturism and that lead us to dig through science fiction films and anything related to African-American sonic culture. It’s from these viewing sessions that usually an idea will emerge about what shape the project might take and then we’ll search in a more focused way for shots we could use. The way the narrative evolves is constantly shifting as we discover new footage that leads us in new directions. It involves a degree of openness to improvisation.
And what about technical workflow, I’m guessing there’s a fair bit of masking going on there?!
Yeah, our process is definitely large on the tedious and labor intensive aspects. Most projects involve weeks or months of doing nothing but just pushing masks around in After Effects.
I think this integration is where the future of the music industry lies. Previously the model was to save up money and art, to take it somewhere secret for a long time, then eventually release a monolithic product - an album or a live show - and hope people identify with that. I feel the future of music and video is smaller, incremental works. Gathering fans steadily, through free, easily accessible releases in whatever media and networks are available, rather than holding out for the giant fanfare of an album or tour, which has a single shot at success.
Which is why I shot the Bridge Sessions with Edward Guglielmino. We spent a couple of hours - considerably less time than I wasted last year discussing CD packaging options or album revenue shares, and created something which lets people identify what we’re doing, to become fans, and to join our journey as artists. Because it’s a piece of art, some people will love it, some will think it’s boring, or terrible. If it was an album we’d spent a year making, those latter reactions would be a tragedy, but we only spent a couple of hours, which means we have another chance to turn those people into fans next week.
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