Delving into Audiovisual performance, it’s easy to get overwhelming. Mashing up commercials, music videos, sampled footage and more can quickly lead to eyeball meltdown.

Here, then - Mike Winkelmann (as Beeple) takes simple and distinct typographic elements, synced to a minimal lo-fi tech soundtrack to create AV that is masterfully compelling and straightforward.

Beeple - Century Gothic from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Mr. Winkelmann continues to produce and release as Beeple - he’s created new more fanciful works since his first appearance on CDM. See his whole library at Beeple.com.

Also, he’s got screenings of IV.7(annoyingly small mix) coming up at Ann Arbor Film Festival (March 25-30), as well as the Wisconsin Film Festival (April 3-6th).

The era of the visualist has come to an exciting point. From a relatively fringe activity, we have seen tools and techniques develop quickly over the last couple of years. The idea of a VJ as a performer is steadily gaining more public mind share. Along with this growth, hardware and software concepts from both new and established developers are helping to further expand the possibilities we have for production and performance.

One of the most exciting groups to enter the VJ consciousness recently is Vixid. They’ve been working on their VJ mixer - the VJX16-4 - for several years, and it finally started hitting the market in 2007.

Unlike the other semi-recent entries to the vision mixer market - Numark’s AVM02 and Pioneer’s Big Expensive Thing - the VJX16-4 isn’t just an incremental upgrade to the basic task of "mixing between two sources of video". Vixid have designed it from the ground up to be a considerably more advanced way of working with live video.

Fortunately, Michael and Todd of artificialeyes were available to guide us through this exciting and slightly confusing new world. We shot many hours of video with the ae guys at ByteMe Festival last December, including plenty of time with the VJX. First up: An intro and overview to this superb piece of kit. The video runs for 10:30. Considerably longer than we’d intended to make these CDMtv videos, however we believe the Vixid is such an important and potentially influential piece of hardware - and such a big investment - that you’d want to get more detailed information rather than a superficial overview. For those who are impatient or feeling texty I’ll follow up the video with some of my first impressions and thoughts.

I’ve fallen behind. I apologise. These videos all deserve posts of their very own, but that will take mucho time, so instead I’ll just hang them out there and get on with whatever’s next:

MIT Sketching

Bugger the Jetpack, I want one of those! (via Wooster Collective)

WOFL on Motionographer. Simple animation that creeps up and tears out your brain.
Alpen - Start Now - some innovation in human-based stop motion. The frame morphing causes some unfortunate artefacting, but the rest of the production and photography are superb.
Make: Ruben’s Tube - Sound visualization… with FIRE! If you can watch this video without thinking “I wonder if I’d be able to bring one of those to my next gig”, you’re stronger than I.

Backspace is the Honors project of Melbourne Communication Design student Stephen Watkins.

… a Stimulating video podcast showcasing experimental short films to provoke your imagination.

I’ll be interviewing Stephen soon about his project, but for now: Watch that wonderful video again, and subscribe to the podcast.

via Wooster Collective.

Light Emitting Textiles is a technological theme which keeps reappearing year after year. In fact, a year ago for the Internationale Funkaustellung (IFA) Phillips announced their Photonic Textile Prototypes - rather blocky but undeniably cool flexible LED arrays.

For this year’s IFA, Phillips have upped the ante with: better resolution? Cliched example loops? Come on people, an @ symbol hasn’t meant “super cutting edge technological stuff” for at least eight years now. This is just showing that you’re as out of touch with the cool kids as the corporations who will pay to use this for their marketing.

Motion design weakness aside: I think this would go beautifully with something like the Remote VJs Control, which is way too limited for serious VJ action, but probably just daft enough to work with a fabric-embedded display.

via Processing Blogs

This video is technically from the same crop as the post-apocalyptic roundup, but it’s so fantastic it deserves its own post.

Machinima, made in Trackmania Sunrise. 1K Project II.

Beautiful.

via Ticklebooth

I’ve had a bit of a personal technological apocalypse over the weekend. There’s a post coming, but in the meantime here’s a couple of things which have caught my eye while catching up on my RSS subscriptions:

Cinematical has a great collection of resources titled: How to make a Short Film.

DVGuru points us to apple’s instructions on importing Motion projects into After Effects, and feeds my Stop-motion obsession with video and production notes from a Sydney-produced filmclip - YUNYU - Lenore’s Song:

Also rocking the stop-motion (in an origami kind of way) is The Format - The Compromise

Neither of those are featured in Stylus Magazine’s top 100 Music Videos of All Time.

HowTo: Electronic design on a budget - I’ve got some more solder-based projects coming up, so this is an interesting read.

Throughout the recent spate of slow motion posts I’ve been looking at sites for the cameras themselves. These sites all have something in common: None of them list a single price anywhere.

So I sent an email to my local high speed camera dealer, and they have generously allowed me to reprint some of their prices to give people an idea of how much working with these things is going to cost. I’m not going to steal their thunder with an exact line or price list, but a ballpark figure will help you get started.

Photron FastCam-X 1024 PCI

Up to 1500fps @ 1024×768. US$80,000+ to buy, around US$2000 per day to rent in stripped down form.

If you want to spend less money you get less resolution and lower framerate. The upcoming Fastec SportsCam will do 250fps @ 640×480 and 500fpx @ 440×330. US$8800 to buy or US$350 per day to rent (US$1400 per week).

If all of this expensive gear is getting you down maybe this may cheer you up: Shot with 12 Sony K750i camera phones at 10fps. Presidents of the United States of America’s Some Postman:

(Higher quality quicktime version, more information and making of video)

I seem to be addicted to slow motion video at the moment. It may be the imminent release of the Red with its promised 120 full frames per second, or maybe I’ve just been watching too much Mythbusters. But all this high speed video showing up on TV has me excited. I’m willing to submit the world to almost endless slow motion criket or drag racing if the end result is my own 1000FPS video camera.

Motionographer just set me off again with these beautiful PSAs (1, 2) by Duckling. Intimate high speed camerawork joined with fantastic post production delivers the required road safety message with the poise of Sony’s Bravia spots but without the gore Australians are submitted to by our government sponsored propaganda.

The reverse-time gambit is getting a little played out, but only because it’s so very effective. Also linked from the Motionographer is Coldplay’s clip for The Scientist, which takes the same concept but wraps it in soppy pop ballad and unrealistic crash physics. It hardly matters though, as Rabbit In Your Headlights did it best, and David Lynch’s Bambi ad for the PS2 copied that best… Really, if it involves a combination of cars, explosions, slow motion or time-reversing it’s been done before, so we might as well just enjoy the pretty pictures.

Pleix’ “Birds” filmclip for Vitalic’s awesome Poney, Pt 1.
Fatboy Slim’s Gangster Trippin’, the logical extension being Helios‘ recent Nokia 6265 Explosion Ad.
Unkle again, with Reign.

Want to do it yourself? This Rarevision article is a little dated, but covers the basics.

But the purpose of this article is not to point out the benefits of true progressive scan 24 frames per second. It’s to talk about something I haven’t seen a lot of on the web, which is how to achieve great slow-motion photography while shooting a 24p project.

Some of you may be thinking, “it hasn’t been talked about because it’s really not that big of a deal.” Well, the truth is that many filmmakers put great emphasis on visual style, and the limitations of cheap cameras (even 24p cameras) have restricted the creative potential of visual filmmakers. The ability to shoot slow motion sequences is part of that potential, and is an issue that needs addressing.

Ok. I think I’m done with Slow Motion videos for now, but if I’ve missed any important ones please hit the comments.

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.