iHologram - iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Speaking of iPhones, here’s some really brilliant work by David O’Reilly. You may have seen it already, as it looks like it’s made the rounds, but I love the technique. By doing anamorphic perspective warping of the 3D scene on the device, this app simulates a holographic 3D on the screen of the iPhone, courtesy the device’s motion sensors. Correction: Okay, it’s not actually possible to do this on the iPhone. So why not build your own hardware for the job? Rotation sensors should be possible with the proper gyro-sensor. That makes all of this even less about the iPhone, and more about what is possible with augmented reality and mobile devices. (It looks absolutely possible — and suggests still other ideas. Thanks, visceralX, for the correction.)

It’s a fairly simple gimmick here, but it suggests some of the possibility of making art not just for big screens, but small screens, too, turning a “weakness” into a strength. Way back when CD-ROMs were in vogue, I remember hearing composer Morton Subotnik talk about how multimedia for computers was a new kind of chamber music performance. He saw the shift to smaller screens not as damaging large-scale performance spectacle, but making the work more “intimate.” I wonder if motion graphics and even live visuals might be able to do the same.

One possibility: invite three or four of your closest friends to your next gig. Gather them round a little screen, uncork some wine, and enjoy real appreciation instead of a massive club full of people.

When the creative team behind Radiohead’s new video for House of Cards released 3D imaging data of Tom Yorke’s head, I’m sure they looked forward to finding out what people would do with it. I’m guessing one thing they didn’t expect was for someone to go manually through the data and painstakingly reproduce it in actual, physical Legos, one … brick … at … a … time, then make it into motion again with time lapse photography (okay, with a fair bit of fakery and digital legos added, though quite nicely).

Be sure to go watch the high-quality version on YouTube for the full effect. (Check the direct YouTube link and look for the option directly below the player.)

I think I’m going to go just watch TV for the rest of the day or something.

The making of: Nokia Friends, generative characters from postspectacular on Vimeo.

Karsten Schmidt sends us a behind-the-scenes mini-movie that reveals how he created pudgy, bouncy animated characters using generative code in Processing. It’s fun to watch these cute creatures evolve through a process of iteration, from bare-bone physics to the finished product. The results are now in flagship Nokia stores worldwide as well as in a big installation at England’s Heathrow Airport in Terminal 5.

TRACTOR from tsaworks_martin Böttger on Vimeo.

Composer/electronic musician Bruno Dias sends us his latest collaboration, with visualist Martin Bottger. It was a distance collaboration – so just the kind of thing you could be working on with musicians and visualists you know. Bruno writes:

We never had the opportunity to meet face-to-face and this work was carried along the last couples months with Martin working on the visual side in Maya and then After Effects in Berlin and me developing the sound narrative that would then drive the visuals one here in London. I worked on sound using as main tools Ableton Live and its sampler, NI Reaktor, NI Absynth and Logic/Pro Tools for post-production.

This is just the sort of thing you could do pre-rendered in this way, then adapt for real-time use, just as musicians routinely do a “studio” version and then rework it for live.(You might even export OBJ models from Maya and pull them into an environment like Processing, Jitter, or vvvv, if you have the savvy – or use a VJ app to remix, if that’s more your speed.) So, Martin and Bruno, you can take that as a subtle hint for your next step, coming from a real-time evangelist.

I love the description of the, um, fourth-dimensional tractor (maybe it’s my childhood in Louisville, Kentucky spent visiting the huge annual farm equipment show – seriously):

You know it when you see it: media starting to actually evolve past what you expect, mimicking each other, and pushing at the obvious sense of what they are. One particularly exciting trend is real-world, kinetic sculptures influenced by digital media and taking on new movements and shapes. It’s the kind of thing I hope will push those of us working in software and projection to push back and make our medium look different, too.

Via Toxi, here’s just that kind of work, a kinetic sculpture at the BMW Museum. I find it “interesting” immediately, but the poster notes that things get even more fun a minute in.

The work comes from our friends at wildly-talented design house ART+COM, one of a number of interactive installations they designed for the museum in Munich. Previous creations of theirs include the moving floating.numbers in 2004 for the Jewish Museum, and an exhibition that let visitors enter an alien world at the London Science Museum.

Here’s the official video, with annoying music – hit mute and put on a favorite track for a better effect:

Also seen on Engadget.

And BMW in general seems to be fans of kinetic sculpture in general. They shot this terrific-looking ad using Theo Jansen’s insect-like, walking sculptures:

Here’s a lovely piece of animation and motion design (oh, and talking, if you’re in to that kind of thing):

Here’s a wonderful film we sneaked in at the end of BUG 07 that I think withstood the crappy sound. It’s called ‘I Met The Walrus’ and although it isn’t strictly a music video it features the words of John Lennon and it’s amazing so we hoped no-one would object to us including it. The story behind it is that in 1969 when John and Yoko were in Toronto as part of their bed-in for peace tour, a 14 year old Beatles fan with a tape recorder called Jerry Levitan knocked on every door of the hotel where he knew Lennon was staying until he found him at which point Lennon was good enough to give him a 40 minute interview. The tape of the interview gathered dust for around 35 years until Jerry Levitan met a young animator called Josh Raskin whose work impressed him sufficiently for him to allow Josh to make a film to accompany an edited section of this Lennon tape. The result was nominated for an Oscar this year but remarkably few people seen it. Enjoy.

Not mentioned is the illustrator, James Braithwaite.

Via Adam Buxton. Londonish CDM readers, you should check out Adam’s music video night series, Bug, because I can’t.

Bjork lays on the spectacle in a new music video for “Wanderlust,” and the results are quite gorgeous, even in advance of a promised 3D version. If you had the misfortune of trying to watch it in Yahoo’s world-premiere, horribly-overcompressed video early this week, give it another go. (I’m glad I waited to post this rather than have to show that! Yikes!)

As of press time, Motionographer has a high-quality QuickTime file so you can watch this in all its glory.

The results are a real multimedia extravaganza. The painterly wonderland in the surrounding world is clever digital graphics and computer 3D, though made to look organic, while foreground beasties, costumes, and prosthetics are all real-for-real. Here’s the timelapse of it all coming together:

The cast of thousands includes:

• Directors Encyclopedia Pictura (Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch), who got the music vid world buzzing earlier with their video “Knife” for Grizzly Bear; see further commentary from blog Shots Ring Out
• NYC motion graphics firm UVPHACTORY, seen before working on My Chemical Romance’s “I Don’t Love You.”
• Damijan Saccio led the CG team from UVPHACTORY. I don’t know who he is, not that that means much. Damijan, say hi if you’re out there…
• John Weissberger and Vanessa Waring did the puppetry; Circus Minimus member Jessica Scott was lead pupeteer
• Chris Elam, whom I do happen to know personally, was choreographer

… to say nothing of the stereography work which we’ll be seeing soon.

Now, the odds of any of us ascending to Bjork-like budgets tend on the slim side, but I do like the convergence of the pro digital motion scene with the artsy puppetry - making physical stuff crowd. I know at least a couple of the people on the dance/puppetry side of this project, and I also know making that convergence work is a tremendous challenge, artistically and technically. The challenge remains making it come together in lower-budget projects and with the often more-challenging realm of live performance.

How to get free 3D specs for the 3D version [bjork.com]

Making of video timelapse on Facebook

Roger Bolton - Quartz Composer/Core Melt programmer, Quartonian developer and all around motion graphics whiz was kind enough to let us know he has released some free plugins for Motion and Final Cut Studio. VeeYou is a set of audio plugins that animate EQs and AUs. For those of you who VJ with Motion, these might be quite handy. For those that dont, they can be a huge timesaver for making baked animations.

You can read more and download the free plugins at the Core Melt Website.

iPhonewhat? Apple’s Pro Apps division unleashed an enormous upgrade to its Final Cut suite in May, and Macworld.com put up the full reviews on its site last week, just before the deluge of coverage of a certain consumer multifunction device. There’s a lot in Final Cut Studio 2: ProRes codec in Final Cut Pro, 3D and painting in Motion, HD in DVD Studio, conforming in Soundtrack, and a “new” (acquired) app called Color.

The reviewers for Macworld are people worth paying attention to. HD consultant and writer of one of our all-time favorite blogs, HD For Indies, Mike Curtis, wrote the review of flagship Final Cut Pro. The Color app was reviewed by none other than the technical chairman for HD Postproduction for the National Association of Broadcasters, Gary Adcock (who’s also a consultant out of Chicago). I’m humbled just to get my byline among people of this caliber. (I did the Motion and Soundtrack Pro reviews). Online is the only place you can read our full, detailed reviews, so while there are still great reasons to pick up the print rag, you’ll definitely want to go online for the Final Cut reviews.

The Reviews

The apps are all reviewed one by one. As of Final Cut Studio 2, you can’t purchase them a la carte, but they’re certainly worth looking through in detail individually, as they retain some standalone character.

Final Cut Pro 6

In terms of bang for the buck, the Final Cut Studio 2 package offers many more features and capabilities than previous versions of the suite … Apple has also made a slew of improvements and fixes to existing features: FCP 6 is better, easier to use, and faster than previous versions. -Mike Curtis

Motion 3

With Motion 3, Apple has focused on the major capabilities previous versions lacked: motion tracking and stabilization, painting tools, and a true 3-D graphical environment to augment speed and easy, improvisational control. Motion may not become your only motion-graphics program, but it could easily become your favorite tool for quickly creating visuals. -Peter Kirn

Color 1.0

Color 1.0 is a solid, best-in-class addition to the Final Cut Studio 2 suite, offering one of the most powerful color-correction tools available in video production … However, its complex, less-than-familiar interface will take some getting used to. And its lack of support for third-party codecs will likely deter some video pros. -Gary Adcock

Soundtrack Pro 2

Sound editors and video editors—the humans, not the software—often seem to live in different worlds. … Soundtrack Pro … seeks to bridge some of those divisions, at least within the suite’s workflows. Enhanced recording tools aid dialogue and Foley recording (which includes sound effects and incidental sound), and a new audio Conform facility promises to make reconciling video and audio edits easier. -Peter Kirn

With all the attention on the other parts of Final Cut Studio 2’s fixes, released in an update yesterday, it’s worth noting some major tweaks to Motion. If you’ve been playing with Motion and found some — erm, kinks, as you tend to get in point-oh releases — this is great news. Motion 3 was a huge release, with lots of motion analysis tools and new 3D generators, cameras, and vector paint, so accordingly some of the biggest fixes in the Final Cut Studio update impact Motion.

Normalized flipping - new feature: When working with text on a path, the new Flip Normal shortcut menu option makes it easier to flip based on segments of a curve — i.e., one control point at a time. (Don’t worry, if you have to ask, it’s probably not an issue.)

Tracker size - new feature: I was already pleased with Motion’s tracking options, but the new Tracker Size lets you customize the size of the region you’re manipulating for better results. This is a bit like changing the range of what you’re tracking: you can configure it to track small details or bigger moving features.

Performance workaround for trackers: Motion does work in real-time, but complexity can slow it down — that’s just fundamental to some of what it’s doing, and the fact that it’s an open-ended tool. But this update does address some of the bottlenecks. “Soloing” a tracked object, for instance, can keep cameras in a scene from bogging down the system. That’s a step, but I’d love to see controls over entire compositions as far as what renders and how, so you can manage system performance, which is still an issue even on fast machines.

Optical flow disk management: Optical flow analysis (for smoothing between frames, retiming, and so on) requires rendering hard disk files; now you can manage those files.

Better thin shape performance: I’m still testing this to see how much of a difference this made, but this is promising, as I found shapes a bit slow.

Lots and lots of performance/stability fixes: Thin shapes are improved. Stability of shape and paint strokes and motion tracking behaviors are improved. Situations that could cause the software to stop responding have been fixed: certain tasks related to retimed audio scrubbing, third-party filters, reordering “Point At” behaviors, the Zoom Layer behavior, Directional Blur filter, cloned Clouds, Timing pane tabs, Lens Flare behavior, Curves Steel Menu template, Brush Source well, Mac Pro export, multiple filter dragging, and Frame Blending’s Optical Flow parameter. I’ll add, incidentally, that I used many of these features without incident, so some of the specific conditions are — well, very, very specific.

If anyone has experience testing the update they want to share, please do. Motion gets a lot less attention than its big brother Final Cut Pro, understandably, but it’s a fascinating tool for visualists.