Last month we had a little teaser of Psychadelic Fluids, as CDM reader Memo was preparing to install the project (as part of a crew put together by Seeper) at the massive Glastonbury festival in the UK.

Well, the festival is over now, and Memo has followed up with a video documenting the project, and some more technical details on his site:

Glastonbury 2008 - Pi Interactive Installation from evan on Vimeo.

The biggest challenge in creating an application of this scale was to structure and optimize it in a way so it could analyze upto 6 camera feeds, and run at a large enough resolution to cover the entire tent. A multiple computer approach was out of the question due to the complications of synchronising a fluid simulation across multiple PC’s, so the decision was made to go with a multi-threaded app running on an 8-core Mac Pro. The motion estimation was split into 6 threads (one for each camera), the fluid solver ran in its own thread, and the particles (glitter & orb) ran in another thread - all of these threads ran in parallel. Once all threads were finished processing their data for one frame, they exchanged their results ready for processing for the next frame (camera motion fed into fluid solver ready for next frame, fluid currents fed into particles ready for next frame etc.). This approach allowed everything to run in parallel with smooth framerates of 30fps.

Tech aside, the crowd definitely seemed to like it.

More information @ memo.tv. Photos on Flickr.

Some lovely, light-hearted motion tracking and compositing here from Lovely Productions.

ORBA SQUARA “GRAVEL” MUSIC VIDEO from LORCANFINNEGAN on Vimeo.

Apparently for this type of head tracking you need 8-12 tracks to be visible. This was achieved using a skullcap covered with different colored balls.

CDMo reader Memo writes:

I’m just rushing out the door off to Glastonbury to set things up.. I thought you might be interested in this little (!) project…

Glastonbury 2008 PI Teaser (Webcam Piano + Psychedelic Fluids) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Everything is entirely camera driven and realtime. Originally started this app in processing, but realized I needed as much power as possible so switched to C++ / OpenFrameworks. Not using the GPU as much as I’d liked due to time restraints, v2 will be fully GPU hopefully ;)

Anyone going to Glastonbury? Drop in and play Memo’s piano for us. Working on your own (little!) project? Contact form’s to the right.

Peter posted last week about Flight of the Conchords’ new video.

For additional CDMo flavour, Toolfarm have an interview with the visual effects gurus for this clip, talking about the shoot, with lots of motion tracking and colour correction thrown in:

Michele: The job involved tracking the stunt double’s heads with the singer’s heads. I noticed tracking dots on the stunt double’s cheeks, nose and chin in your photos. Jemaine and Bret were shot against a greenscreen and with a green cape. How did you get it to match? Can you talk a bit about the process of tracking and rotoscoping and matching angles?

Dave: This was a very tedious process that had to planned out for the entire video factoring in the limitations we were facing. We had placed tape on the doubles faces for reference as to how their heads rotated and twisted. We made sure to keep our doubles aware of what was happening in each shot, but allowing them room to perform their stunts.

Dave: Some of the takes were really wild and crazy and we would have to come in and tone down the movement a little to make sure we were going to able to recreate the same move on the greenscreen with Bret and Jemaine. The most difficult part was getting Bret and Jemaine to match these moves and be able to maintain lip-sync. On set (greenscreen) we would run each guy through individually and have them watch a monitor playing back the footage from the shoot. This footage was played back, mirrored in some cases, and slowed down to 50%. This gave the guys a chance to lip sync and get the head movements down.

Check out the full interview on Toolfarm, there’s some fascinating insights there from some obviously talented artists creating big things with a tiny team.

In the immortal words of Burt Bacharach:

Beware of The Blob, it creeps
And leaps and glides and slides
Across the floor
Right through the door
And all around the wall
A splotch, a blotch
Be careful of The Blob

It’s true, Burt. Tracking multiple blobs in an image for motion tracking, in order to analyze a video source to track points of movement within that image, is hard. The open source, multimedia processing Pure Data library Gridflow does a lovely job in a new patch by Mathieu Bouchard. Found via the excellent PD-Announce list, which manages to be useful but not overwhelming. Mathieu writes:

It’s actually my own implementation: it’s not been ported from anywhere else. Each cross is centered on the centroid (1st order moment) of its corresponding region (”blob”), and the size of the cross is the square root of the area of the region.

I will make another version which will use rotated rectangular crosses. The two lines of each cross will represent the two radiuses of the standard deviation of the region, and the angle will represent the angle of the standard deviation. I will use [#moment_polar], an abstraction based on [lti.Jacobi].

Mathieu explains how to get it (ain’t open source great?):

If you get your GridFlow from the CVS, just update and you’ll have [#labeling].

(It’s called like that because it “labels” each region of the picture with a different number, so it creates something called “a labeling”).

You’ll find lots of Pure Data goodness at Mathieu’s site. See the full image of the patch.

Mostly, I’m going to use this as yet another excuse to go grab the pure:dyne Linux distro. GridFlow and Pd are already on there, so you need to know very little about setting up Linux and installing them. pure:dyne should be Intel Mac ready any day now, and it’ll boot from a key, a hard drive, or a disc, so it’s very easy to just boot it up and give this stuff a go. I’m dying to run it on my MacBook, so I’ll post here once that version becomes available. (Note, Mathieu observes that of course this is too new to be on pure:dyne yet … but that’s okay with me; it still demonstrates the utility of Gridflow, and there’s nothing stopping you from using pure:dyne as a starting point and switching to CVS if you can handle a little bleeding-edge code.)

Has it really been 2 months since episode 1 of Steven Watkins‘ Backspace podcast was released?

Episode 2 came out on Friday. It doesn’t quite recapture the ethereal feel and technical polish of that first episode, but it’s still very impressive work for a one-man band (showreel here).

Previously:
Interview with Stephen Watkins.
Backspace Episode 1.

I interviewed Stephen Watkins of the beautiful Float video podcast earlier this week. Unfortunately his site, Backspace, was taken down due to bandwidth overusage. It’s back now, so here’s the interview to go with it:

You mention on your site that you’re interested in Podcasts as a delivery medium. Do you subscribe to any video podcasts have any sites which are regular sources of inspiration?

My iTunes is overflowing with video podcasts of all genres from the hilarious Ricky Gervais podcast to my current favourite, the Portable Film Festival Videocast. I also spend a bit of time at motionographer.com which is a fantastic watering hole for motion graphics. The fantastic thing about podcasts is that they are accessible, global and most importantly free. There is something invigorating about being able to share your content and videos with people from around the world.

What do you think makes podcasts work for artists, and is there a revenue stream at some point? (Or does there even need to be?)

Podcasts work for artists because it is a way to broadcast your work (generally) free of censorship and advertising restrictions. In terms of obtaining revenue I guess this depends on the individual artist. You have to ask yourself the question, are doing this for the money? or are doing it to just get your work out there. However, financial income could come in a more indirect fashion such as the exposure of your work leading to freelance work.

What’s your background in moving images? What happened before Float?

I have been studying in a graphic design course for the past 4 years so most of my motion graphics skills have been self taught. However, the basic principles of design remain the same across graphic design and motion graphics. Before float I have created a few other films for various projects ranging from a film for a local city council to some personal experimental pieces.

Can you give us a little technical information: Hardware and software used? Project timeline? Budget?

I run on a G5 powermac and created Float using After Effects 6.5, Final Cut Pro 5 and Photoshop CS2. Float was also filmed on a Sony PD150. Float took around 30 hours to create not including a days worth of shooting and rendering time. The cost of creating Float was essentially nothing as I was able to borrow most equipment free of charge from my university. I was also provided with free website hosting from www.wdata.com.au

I received my Arduino today, and in preparation I’ve been saving up some Arduino/Wiring/Processing links of interest to a newbie physical-computerer.

If you haven’t Arduino’d before, here’s Todbot on why it’s a rocking little microcontroller. Tod also tells us how to make an Arduino Breadboard Shield, for quick circuit prototyping.

You should probably familiarise yourself with the Arduino Board, then have a look at ARDUINO meets PROCESSING - physical computing and computer graphics site: Projects containing the basic physical interactions mediated by an Arduino board.

The Arduino meets Processing project intends to make it as easy as possible for anyone to explore the world of physical computing. All you need is an Arduino board as well as the Arduino and Processing software, which you can download on their project websites.

Some of the pages seem a little incomplete, but it contains basic circuit information and code for: Pushbutton, Switch(es), Tilt Sensor, Accelerometer, Potentiometer, LDR Light Sensor, NTC Temperature Sensor, Joystick, Ultrasonic Sensor, Piezo Element.

Of course the Arduino Tutorials page has loads of examples. Of major interest to VJs may be:
Blinking LED.
Dimming 2 LEDs (RGB colour mixing).
LED Driver makes use of an LED Driver in order to control an almost endless amount of LEDs with only 4 pins.

Both Peter and I have Arduinos now, so you can expect things to be getting a little more physical in the future. Don’t be scared, we’ll be gentle.

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.

No, really. VJing is half motion graphics, half performance and half tech-nerding. Sadly, most of the best motion graphics is going on in TV advertisments, and as I try to avoid watching ads on TV at all costs, I end up collecting the good ones online.

When I work with an artist I like to create visuals which relate to them and what they do. Even just dropping some effected DV footage or a couple of simple stop-motion clips of them into your set will make it feel more integrated with whatever else is going on. I have a shoot soon with a local 2 piece for some upcoming gigs, and one of my shoot ideas involves motion tracking, inspired by Motion Theory’s “Pharrell” spot for HP.

This type of motion tracking doesn’t need to be particularly difficult to look effective, especially if you’re using a regular object such as the effective-but-played-out picture frame (overused in the below clip Bernard Fanning - Wish You Well). However, I can’t seem to find any tutorials for this online. So if there’s any interest I’ll put together a tutorial while I work on production for this shoot.

via Accent Feed