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.

Just as VDMX and Resolume have been treated to ground-up rewrites, so, too, has a name in VJ apps that has endured since the early days of computer VJing: ArKaos. GrandVJ is a completely new program, though it does maintain ArKaos’ signature feature - a music keyboard along the bottom of the screen.

Now, I’ve wanted to root for GrandVJ’s new release since the beginning, partly because of its MIDI keyboard-savvy design but especially because the new release is fast — blazingly fast. Thanks to a rebuilt, ffmpeg-based video backend, it can really rock its way through high-framerate playback without a second thought, which goes nicely with all the jamming you might like to do on a MIDI keyboard with clips.

That said, the initial release of GrandVJ just felt a little too minimal. Now, nothing against minimal - not every set has to be an audiovisual mash-up a la Resolume 3 or some elaborate modular setup of effects as you can build in VDMX. But just getting basic alpha support or setting up a simple crossfader for clips proved to be challenging.

That’s why I’m really pleased by the direction taken by GrandVJ 1.1. ArKaos are aggressively attacking a lot of the main things I wanted address:

For further proof that you can make footage in Blender, here’s an example whipped up by Troy James Sobotka. Troy’s approach is one familiar to a lot of us: grab the simplest camera possible, go shoot something, go make something. I think it’s part of what I find appealing about the world of live visualists - exploration is encouraged. The tools in this case:

• A Kodak Zi6 camera - cost: US$160. (I’m impressed; sure, it’s broad daylight which is ideal for cheap cameras - but it still looks better than what I’ve seen from the Flip.)
• Blender for editing, effects
• ffmpeg for export (no capture necessary — thanks, flash memory camera!)
• Two hours shooting, four hours editing. (Now, if they did it on the day they had a gig, then they’d be a VJ.

I’m not saying you wouldn’t still prefer your fancy pro HD cam and Final Cut, but that’s not the point - the point is, you can make these tools work if you like. And, hey, if I had to choose, I’d save my money there and go buy my favorite VJ software package / more projectors and gear. More details:

The Driblet of an Aphorism: Right Where it Belongs (via)

As a follow-up to why I’m interested in Blender for video editing.

Life is short. You find yourself having to absorb the work techniques of a lot of different software. And some of those divisions — between vector and pixels, 3D and 2D, motion and stills — look increasingly old-fashioned. Since the early 90s, we’ve seen a succession of software try to bridge those gaps. But for the first time, there’s an open-source entrant that promises to bring just about everything involving 3D and motion, minus audio, into a single tool. That means the ability to run on any OS, and a greater sense of a community that can hack the app itself.

The surprise: the app is a 3D tool, Blender.

For more information on Spacetime Fusion, check out the project’s website at University of Washington’s CS Departments page here. I’d say something witty, but I’m too stunned.