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

Delving into Audiovisual performance, it’s easy to get overwhelming. Mashing up commercials, music videos, sampled footage and more can quickly lead to eyeball meltdown.

Here, then - Mike Winkelmann (as Beeple) takes simple and distinct typographic elements, synced to a minimal lo-fi tech soundtrack to create AV that is masterfully compelling and straightforward.

Beeple - Century Gothic from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Mr. Winkelmann continues to produce and release as Beeple - he’s created new more fanciful works since his first appearance on CDM. See his whole library at Beeple.com.

Also, he’s got screenings of IV.7(annoyingly small mix) coming up at Ann Arbor Film Festival (March 25-30), as well as the Wisconsin Film Festival (April 3-6th).

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:

Supernatural Serious Album Page, with vids

R.E.M. Releases New Videos Under Open Source License [ReadWriteWeb, via vade]

R.E.M. aside, I wonder: will at least some VJs embrace open content, perhaps even exclusively?

Now, this isn’t without caveats:

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

People can argue and theorize about digital art as a medium all they want. The answer is as simple as a simple word:

Iterate.

Do it over and over and over again in little bits developing techniques. Start small, add small, but keep adding over and over and over again. Iterate.

flight404 does that about as well as anyone in the Processing community, and it shows. His latest visualization of a Goldfrapp tune, now with lyrics, is stunning. And the addition of lyrics shows that these kind of techniques aren’t just eye candy — they can convey information, and do it elegantly and expressively.

Robert’s techniques are typically far from real-time, so part of why I enjoy them so much is they’re a challenge to those of us on the performance end to figure out how to do more interesting things live.

The other interesting thing here is the beat detection. Eventually, he wound up adding the beats manually, as detailed in the post linked here. That in itself is telling to me — as a composer, having worked on scoring and how things line up creatively, I’ve always found indirect relationships compelling. So this speaks to me of the importance of creating some imperfect algorithms, algorithms that don’t always line up so they challenge our ear and eye to make the connection.

Oh, and I love the fact that “Frankenstein” appears in the end, like a cameo by Alfred Hitchcock.

Solar, with lyrics [ Flight 404 ]

(It’s a long weekend in the US, so I figured we could handle double the inspiration.)

Stores like iTunes (and all those Windows Media-based alternatives, if anyone ever uses them) aren’t just the domain of major labels. Indie artists and smaller labels are finding their way onto these services, courtesy the power of distributors and other conduits. (For music, tools like CD Baby have been a big boon.)

But part of the potential of all of this technology was supposed to be video content as well as music. TuneCore has stepped up to the plate with a beta service that lets artists sell music videos via iTunes. Many artists, I suspect, will prefer to use videos as promotional tools only, but what’s nice here is you get iTunes to cover bandwidth for higher-quality downloads and get a little revenue stream, to boot. TuneCore explains the arrangement:

Delivery of the video will be completed with a flat, upfront fee paid to TuneCore and, as always, TuneCore customers receive 100% of the revenue from the sale of their music in a non-exclusive agreement that they can cancel at any time.

Here’s one example, a music video from Grammy winner Ziggy Marley, “Love is My Religion”, now available for purchase via TuneCore. (And I expect this could be commonplace: promote on YouTube, sell on iTunes, etc.)

TuneCore

If you’ve been staring at After Effects too long, you’ll really love this one: common motion effects, painstakingly recreated by real people — jumping on trampolines. There’s even a status bar and, my personal favorite touch, an I/O error and — okay, I won’t give it away.

Directed by Roel Wouters a.k.a. Xelor. Here’s the full blurb (see also cast & crew on the YouTube page):

zZz is playing: Grip is a video for the band zZz. Its a one take, top shot videoclip with trampoline gymnasts simulating typical video effects. The video has been recorded live as part of the opening ‘Nederclips’ at the Stedelijk museum ‘S-Hertogenbosch SM’S (curated by Bart Rutten).

The project was commissioned by the TAX-videoclipfonds and an important criteria was that the audience of the opening was be able to witness the whole shoot, another criteria was that it should be added to the exhibition imediately after the shoot was done. So we had no option to reshoot or edit if something went wrong. This made us so focussed [sic] that we did better that any of us have could imagined.

Thanks to star blogger Christine Huang at PSFK, from whom I stole this, before she lost the draft of her blog post. Also seen on the excellent Motionographer.

Your challenge: recreate overused VJ effects using real people. Hmmm… kaleidoscope effects? (Oh, and by the way, those of you using sample clips from apps like Resolume and Onyx-VJ? We’re watching. We’re at the club. We know your secret. Stop it. Or go recreate it on trampolines.)

While we’re on the subject of animated pieces of paper: Switchfoot’s “Awakening” has been treated to a similar workflow (frames printed and photographed) with a very different result.

StudioDaily has an interview with Brandon Dickerson, on the workflow required to put this piece together.