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!)

In case you haven’t seen it, several readers wrote in to tell us about how the “journalists” at Gizmodo went around CES disabling video screens. The invention used to do it — the TV-B-Gone — is capable of far more worthy goals, like disabling the invasive crap on Fox News at an airport. (Addendum: unless anyone mistakes me as someone brave enough to operate a TV-B-Gone, see comments. I’m not. I’m a wimp. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume this could be used for good.) Here, Gizmodo simply tortures presenters at press events they were invited to. Cool? Uh, no, not particularly.

Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Now, we like mischief us much as the next guy. But randomly killing displays? Consensus of the CDMers I’ve talked to is that this is more wrong than funny — not to mention, we don’t need any special technology to have fancy flat-panel displays stop working. Worse, bloggers fighting for credibility have to deal with the antics of the Gizmodo crew (see cnet Crave’s take on that) — and this could unfairly vilify a wonderful invention. After all, the beauty of TV-B-Gone is that it gives people control over invasive TVs in their environment. This prank did the opposite.

I think we need a code of TV-B-Gone ethics: disable the TV screens that are asking for it, folks.

Dan Reetz points out that a previous blogger at Gizmodo (we can’t say whom, as it seems to date from a period without bylines in 2004), said of the TV-B-Gone creator “Mitch Altman is an asshole,” and that “the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.” Prophetic words.

I’m always amazed when I meet After Effects users who don’t know about or utilize expressions. I’m no scripting guru, but the few expression tricks I know get used constantly. A couple of simple expressions are extremely useful for visualists, allowing you to quickly pump out incremental clips by just changing slider values.

The creatively titled “After Effects Expressions” (Come on people, Google Juice isn’t the only rationale you need to consider when naming your blog) starts with the basics, but quickly gets into conditional expressions and slider-driven animation, which is visualist gold as far as I’m concerned.

In After Effects, an expression is a Javascript based script in that can either modify a parameter or drive the parameter entirely, like position, opacity, or perhaps a Gaussian blur level. We can add an expression to any parameter that has a stopwatch icon next to the parameter. The exclusion to this rule are Masks parameters like Mask Shape, Mask Feather, etc.

This stuff is coming from Graymachine’s Harry J Frank, who is also involved in AE Freemart, so you can expect plenty more goodness to come.

Reader Dave Chalmers sends us a link to his blog; he writes:

It is a collection of tips and tricks aimed at the practicalities of doing live video on no money, but it is very applicable to VJs too, as it discusses playback formats, projector setup, etc. etc. This is all based on my own experience of doing dozens of live video events, and I am trying to pass some of that experience back to others.

Live video on no money . . . that sure sounds familiar! vloblive.info is in fact a terrific practical resource, and a reminder that practical info and affordable is truly essential. (Uh . . . I am sorry about all that coverage of $5,000 video mixers, okay?)

Speaking of practical tips, here’s mine for the day: S-Video connections on PCs are problematic, as I discovered the hard way the other night. It seems many video matrixes/mixers have cable termination issues, so that when you plug a laptop into them, like my Toshiba, the video card doesn’t recognize that it’s been plugged in and won’t turn on the video out port. I found that setting up Display Properties manually did nothing, but bizarrely, plugging into another device’s video in worked like a charm. (If anyone has another explanation, let me know.)

Anyway, Dave, thanks for the site — we’ll be reading. There are absolutely all kinds of live video events out there, from religious events to concerts. And increasingly, some of these may tend toward VJ skills, as well. If you can keep it cheap, you can throw some imagery in with the music.