Robert Heel is a visual musician who’s been creating some lovely instructional films on topics dear to the heart of a visualist.

Of special interest, A Kick A Snare A Hat. Documenting a little AV performance in Resolume Avenue.

A Kick A Snare A Hat from Robert Heel on Vimeo.

"MGFest (Motion Graphics Festival) continues its tour of the US, opening tonight in Austin, Texas. The conference is still $7 total for all the live events and the conference itself. For the workshops, you add $240 a day (bulk discounts available) – but that means that, if you’re low on change, you Texans can absolutely go hit this.

A number of highlights:

• Conference events, including iPhone/Wii game development, code alongside design, and music topics (yes, even Ableton Live) alongside the visual stuff
• Prototyping with Microsoft’s Expression Blend workshop, even before it’s available (you sign an NDA)
• Installations and performances
• Something really cool-looking called the “Open Collaboration Summit,” which I hope will be the start of more music + motion + code-focused events in other places (read on if you’re interested in that, even if you’re not in Texas, as we may bring it to you)

Some interesting-looking live audiovisual stuff, via our friend Troy:

There’s a ever-expanding scene that appreciates digital motion graphic design and art worldwide, but while the US has the awesome research shindig SIGGRAPH, it’s been tougher for the community around digital motion to come together. MGFest has been working to change that. Its first five years have done a lot to promote the best in motion – see the lovely imagery above — but 2009 is the year it explodes, with a year of events focused regionally. By going from city to city, it’s amplifying the best of the art happening in the corners of our geographically-huge nation. And it’s found an ideal place to start: Chicago.

If you’re nearby, you can get into all the MGFest events (minus the Imagination College workshops) for a ridiculously-tiny $7. That’s seven bucks total – I didn’t leave off the zeroes usually associated with events. (Ahem. TED recession special, anyone?)

mgfest.com [All the latest event details]

There’s quite a lot to cover, but to get things kicked off, here’s a look at what’s coming to Chicago. And, oh yeah, I’ll be part of the festivities, giving a short panel talk Friday, a big set of workshops for Saturday, and performing Sunday evening (Michael Una of CDM will be there, too). More on that soon.

I’m really pleased Create Digital Motion gets the chance to sponsor and cover this series. Stay tuned, as we’ll try to bring as much of this to the rest of the world as we can.

I’ve had my VJX16-4 for around 6 months now. It’s no secret that I think it’s an amazing piece of kit, but it’s a tribute to the vision of those crazy Frenchies that every time I think I’m ready to review the thing, I discover something else exciting and have to spend another couple of weeks exploring the new techniques and possibilities made available to me.

Vixid Advanced: Keying and Titling Transparency with Channel Masks from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Music by Edward Guglielmino.

The above video shows some advanced uses of “Channel Mask” keying. The VJX’s keyer functions allow you to select any of the 4 tracks as a “Key Layer” for Colour-, Chroma- or Lumakeying. Additionally, there are “RGB Mask” functions, which use the Red, Green or Blue channel of a selected layer as an alpha mask for the keyed layer. This allows you to use one layer to individually mask the other three layers, or do titling with detailed transparency as displayed above.

As far as I’m aware, no other mixer has this RGB Mask capability. It’s a deceptively simple thing, but once you spend some time experimenting with it, an ocean of possibilities flood your skull, and you need to go for a quiet lie down somewhere.

I have a project launching soon which uses this technique to pretty exciting effect. In the meantime there’s more technical information at Vixid.Noisepages.

On Tuesday I assembled a small posse of visualists at the State Library of Queensland to test the venue for our proposed projection mapping setup at the Game On Launch Party later this month.

As with any tech run, we discovered good and bad news. The good: That venue is just as cool as we had expected. The bad: We didn’t have access to the truss we’ll be mounting our projector on for the launch, so “real” 3D mapping isn’t really an option for this project, as we have contributors from around the world delivering content, and our pre-show setup time is extremely tight.

Fortunately, VVVV ninja Kyle McLean came to the rescue with some quick patching which allowed us to identify the most promising surfaces for “2.5D” mapping.

Projection Mapping Test - Game On from Jaymis on Vimeo.

So we’re not going to be able to unleash the full might of our 3D model on the event, but this does mean that content will be a little easier to produce as we’re back to reasonably boring rectangles. Karl Kwasny has also given us some fantastic custom game character illustrations to work with for our animating and remixing pleasure.

More instructions and links to our models and resources are now online at CDM Labs.

If you haven’t already got in touch with me and you’re now totally inspired and would like to get involved, email gameon@createdigitalmedia.net and I’ll bring you into the loop.