There are some serious, high-profile indications that big artists are beginning to embrace alternative licensing for their content, whether it’s pay-what-you-wish distribution, “please remix this for us” marketing campaigns, or genuinely open content. Whether that’s just a brief fad or the sign of things to come, it’s too early to say. But R.E.M. have at least uploaded a full eleven videos, nicely encoded in MPEG4, under an open source license:
Perth VJ Kat (one third of VJzoo) at the helm of her Resolume rig.
We’ve said it before, but worth mentioning again: Resolume, with its super-clean interface, reliable performance, and support for extras like Flash files and open FreeFrame video effects, is bar-none our favorite Windows-based performance. It runs nicely even on my old Pentium M Toshiba laptop, and powers Jaymis’ globe-trotting tour with rockstar Bobby Flynn. If you’re looking to get into the program, Kat Black from visualist trio VJzoo has some good news:
Thought your readers might find this useful - we’ve released the handbook from our courses last year free for personal use. Covers the basics of PC-based VJing using Resolume, making loops etc. Linked off the forum at http://resolume.com or from our site http://VJzoo.com
Featured: Basic PC-based VJing techniques, VJzoo’s perspective on VJ-ing, Creating your own VJ loops, Formatting content for PC-based VJ-ing and using Resolume v2.3.
Here’s VJzoo setting up their rig and rocking Sevilla, Spain, because churches totally get me hot:
And even if you’re not on Windows, you can reap the benefits of the Resolume peoples’ generosity on free media treasure-trove Archive.org:
We’re in the process of uploading a bunch of clips to Archive.org, although geez it’s exhausting. I’ve been working constantly for three days to upload two new batches of clips. So far, only one works:
The other ones… Argh.. Maybe in another day or two, will let you know. None of them are as weird as our vintage CVI clips - although thanks for even being nice about those ;)
In case you missed them, you can catch the full set of CVI clips:
Hope Kat will forgive me for posting that whole email, but it brings up a good point — Archive.org is great, but maybe we need a new, faster service for uploading visuals. Would you be willing to pay for such a service, if you could pay a flat fee for uploads and then use bandwidth freely or cheaply?
Australians: If you happen to be in Perth, Australia — and, really, if you’re anybody, I’m sure you are — VJzoo is at the center of the Perth audiovisual scene. (The scene does sound genuinely awesome. How many hours does it take to fly from Melbourne or Brisbane to Perth again? Might have to drop by and see more of the continent.)
You’ve got open source and public domain video footage, operating systems, software tools, photos (hello, Creative Commons flickr search), music … why not fonts, as well?
Open fonts are especially useful to visualists, because it means fonts can be freely embedded in web applications, remixed and edited, and otherwise abused.
Free Fonts of Fonts
My current favorite resource is Orgdot’s open source font page. If you love pixel/LED fonts, you’ll find some truly top-notch choices here, plus links to many, many other resources. Lovers of typography could easily spend a weekend doing nothing but creating animations and visuals out of the pixel fonts from this site and the various linked repositories:
I’ve got these pixel fonts specifically slated for some experiments with Processing. Could open source typography catch on the way Creative Commons / open source licenses have for other media? Possibly, but so far the efforts are a little immature. One of the best resources is Bitstream, which has open sourced its Vera font family:
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