Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:
An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.
My description:
Mmmm…
Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!
artificialeyes are keeping us updated on the impending release of 3L (current status: Soon), and while I’m still in “getting my studio in order” mode in the lead-up to the “2008 massive VJ geek-out and CDMoFest” and unable to play with new toys, CyberPatrolUnit has posted some great demo videos (and followup), showing us some of the places that 3L may be able to take us.
Exciting? Maybe a little. I still have lots of 3L video to edit from Perth last year, and I’ve promised Michael that I’ll have some videos ready for the official launch. Stay tuned!
How do you make a computer-animated sequence of 3D wireframe visuals of fancy, Empire-built battle stations — in 1977? Very, very slowly. Our friend James at Retro Thing, aside from being a electronic-sonic inventor, is a fan of vintage visuals and was already teaching the history of computer animation in the mid 80s. (Hint: prepping that class didn’t take quite as long then as it would now.)
James explains the origins of the famous Death Star briefing room sequence:
The wizard behind the early Star Wars CG was Larry Cuba, who worked out of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois. Legend has it that he was pushing the hardware so hard to create the simple wireframe images that he constantly had to adjust the air conditioning in the computer room to avoid system crashes. Cuba used a vector graphics scripting language called GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System), written by Tom DeFanti at Ohio State in 1974. The system he used incorporated a Vector General CRT, DEC PDP-11 minicomputer, along with various cameras and recorders.
I have a special place in my heart for the original film Star Wars because — James will appreciate this — I initially experienced it as a kid only on sound Super 8 film, cut down to a svelte 17 minutes. (My understanding of narrative was never quite the same.)
But to me, these graphics don’t look primitive; they look elemental, much in the same way that you don’t get tired of ancient Egyptian art. (And in the timeline of computer graphics, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine thousands of years of art history happening in a few decades.)
The real star, though, is the film Cuba used to pitch computer graphics to George Lucas, Arabesque, made with John Whitney. If this 1975 film doesn’t inspire you as a visualist, nothing will. Correction: Evidently it wasn’t Arabesque, but the movie First Fig. Larry Cuba himself writes in comments:
Thank you for the appreciation of “Arabesque.” The film I screened for Lucas was actually my first CG film, “First Fig.”
(And you can connect the historical dots here, too: without Arabesque First Fig, no CG in Star Wars, no ILM CG, no Pixar.)
Well, George Lucas may or may not have seen Arabesque, but you can, below, and it’s still inspiring:
And for another Larry Cuba film, here’s the 1985 Calculated Movements:
Put them all together with a dash of virtual midi port, and you get this:
Or as Jeff describes it:
Whorld is a free, open-source, live visual synthesizer for sacred geometry. It uses math to create a seamless animation of mesmerizing psychedelic images. You can VJ with it, make unique digital artwork with it, or sit back and watch it like a screensaver. The WiiWhorld project makes it possible to control the Whorld visualizer with the Nintendo Wiimote.
Continuing our current vvvv love-in. Aforementioned generative AV project “Va” will be performaing at the Node08 festival in Frankfurt, which started on the 5th and continues until the 12th. Lots of exciting workshops and lectures happening, and concluding with “vvvvinisage”, featuring visualists from around the world.
I’m sure I’m not the only visualist to have been inspired by Autechre’s Gantz Graf video, nor the only person to have watched it and though “some day, we will be able to do that in realtime”:
This is created realtime in VDMX from a quartz composer generator, controlled by 9-band audio analysis, and topped off with a very nice little effects chain.
A few people have mentioned they don’t get the same look when they use the QTZ file, this is because the QTZ file renders with very basic shading and there is quite a bit of post done in VDMX. The Effects I’m using (from top to bottom) are:
Serpia Tone (100%, Source Atop)
Shaded Material (0-40% tied to audio analysis, Soft Light)
City Lights (100%, Source Atop)
Bloom (100%, Screen)
I’ve also got a 9-band audio analysis going on, with different frequencies driving all the parameters of QTZ. You can just setup the frequencies randomly and it will do pretty cool stuff to almost any song (see http://www.memo.tv/amoeba_dance_v1_5 for an example!!), but it is best to taylor the frequencies to the specific song…
Memo shares the GLSL code and the QTZ file on his site, which contains some interesting nuggets of QC, Actionscript, Processing and other codey goodness. PK: Because this uses GLSL which runs in any OpenGL environment, you could also port the geometry stuff to Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd/GEM, or (with some adjustments) even things like vvvv, etc. — no need for Quartz Composer per se.
For all of the other CDMo readers who are doing cool things, don’t wait for us to find you: Hit the comments or the contact page and tell us what you’re up to!
Jeff Mission writes to say he’s been working on a new project that couples the Wii remote with generative visuals — all built in free software. Like it, but think it could go further? It’s free, so have a go (soon, at least). Jeff writes:
Chris Korda, developer of the open-source VJ softwares Whorld and FFRend, and I have been working on a project to control real-time, generative geometric visuals with the ever-popular Nintendo Wiimote. We dubbed the project WiiWhorld.
I am pleased to announce that the first proper WiiWhorld demo video is now available online:
Swirly colors, techno, dancing, and lots of smiling faces! Anyway, I think it does a decent job of capturing people having fun playing with our little digital toy.
The video was cobbled together from about 90 minutes of party footage shot a couple months ago. We set up our rig and invited people to play around, with a minimum of instruction. It was great fun to watch people play around, figure it out, and then teach new techniques to one another.
As for the project itself, it requires a Wiimote and a bluetooth-enabled computer. All the software involved (GlovePIE, Whorld, and FFRend) is 100% free, making this (we hope) a project that others can adopt and expand in the future, at minimal cost. We hope to publish more detailed information soon, so that others can try WiiWhorld for themselves.
Please give it a look, leave comments and ratings, and pass it on!
The project is apparently brand new — and Jeff says more web content and videos and documentation and such are all coming soon.
And yes, GlovePIE, Whorld, and FFRend are all free and open-source Windows apps. (And you thought Linux had all the fun.) beatfix (aka Jeff) suggested them and got our Windows free apps round-up going:
The Digital Worlds blog, an Open University blog, has an excellent look back at the artistry of early video tubes entitled “Oscilloscopy.”
There’s John Whitney’s “showreel” from 1961, which shows off the ground-breaking (1961, folks!) possibilities of his “mechanical analog computer,” as appropriated from an antiaircraft gun director. Wait … say that again? Yep, Whitney actually used a mechanical contrivance to rotate layers of graphics. When that technique met up with the power of It’s an idea that’s just waiting for today’s DIYers to tackle, perhaps mixing modern digital techniques with mechanical ones.
Next, also from the above blog post, witness the gorgeous oscilloscope graphics and mechanical control pads of Tennis for Two, an early (thought to be the second-ever, though you never know with these things) video game made by William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Again, DIY project? Mechanical controllers, but this time coupled with 3D graphics? It is the 50th anniversary year of the title. (People under 35, remember that the next time your parents start talking about “back in their day” before video games. Tell them it’s not your fault they never dropped by the Brookhaven National Laboratory.)
Heck, I wish even oscilloscopes looked that pretty now.
There’s something really inspiring and elemental about these works — amplified by mechanical elements used in their creation and control. It’s something I think is possible in code; maybe it’s just challenging in a different way. (And maybe when you have that feeling of magic, you know you’re in the right place.)
This certainly gives me a different source of inspiration as I work with generative techniques in Java/Processing and the like. If this inspires any of your work, send us photos / video links — we’d love to see it! And motion graphics history buffs, happy to know more about these — and other — pioneers.
You’re an incurable font geek and you love sound. Can’t choose? Combine them. The MeekFM synth is both a visual synthesizer for typography, and a synthesizer — it actually sonifies the letterforms you generate. This is synesthesia on such a high geeky level that my mind is blown wrapping my head around it. But I love the approach — and while I can’t search even my deepest serif fetish to work out how anyone would come up with this, perhaps there’s a parallel for other generative visuals. Think synth.
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2008-Apr-08@06:22
