You know the types - I’d say I had a music video made in MS Paint, and you’d watch it and it’d turn out to be made by some hypergenius insomniac who made some intricate animated film using only the spraycan tool. Happily, that is not the case here. “jono” writes to tell us about his Microsoft Paint music video, which he made while he had the flu. And you may feel a wave of nostalgia for MS Paint or the Bill Atkinson-created MacPaint that Microsoft cloned, because the illustrations look like the illustrations you did while bored in computer class. (I may be projecting here.)

And then there’s a flying copy machine. It’s sublime.

klerical team - by New Zealand’s EFT
Electronic Masters of Tapestry [MySpace]

I am also really feeling the lyrics - seriously. I have so, so much to do … so much follow-up to do. Off to Gmail.

Also, they’re from New Zealand, so expect an HBO show next week.

The pixel-mangling madness continues. Here are the latest goodies to show up in our inbox.

Enrico Nau aka naus3ayt is playing with code-for-artists environment Processing (site | cdmo tag). It’s yet another example that reveals that computer vision, aside from the useful-ish applications like tracking what you’re doing, can be used to purely aesthetic ends. No code excerpt here, but the best place to begin here would be the official Processing tutorials or the OpenCV tutorial recently posted here on CDM.

Blog post here:

Chroma-sampler: painting with light

Enrico describes his creation to us:

I recently coded a toy that samples colors from a video feed and used them to create virtual brushes; similar mood to data moshing, different approach.

In other news, we have this gorgeous glitchy … something or other. Okay, actually, I have no idea what this is or where it came from (and neither does tipster con), but boy, does it take the opposite tack compared to the one suggested by David O’Reilly – it’s a maximalist, intentional overuse of a particular data compression artifact. In this case, though, it fits nicely with the musical content, which is what O’Reilly suggested.

godxilliary.com [QuickTime link]

I guess my ban on datamosh, incidentally, is well over, especially after I temporarily moshed the story database on Create Digital Music by importing with some setting wrong. (It doesn’t help that WordPress and MySQL once defaulted to Swedish. Swedish: the new lingua franca.)

Anyway, enjoy – and keep experimenting, everyone. Experiments, by definition, can be ugly, and that’s good. It’s all part of the process.

Compression Reel from David OReilly on Vimeo.

8-bit chip music went mainstream in the last few years. Well, now it’s video compression’s turn. What, you thought crunchy blippy glitch sounds were cool, but that video could only look crap when over-compressed digitally? Too late: even Kanye West is doing it now.

First up: the best of this genre seems to come from director David O’Reilly, pictured above. The man has his own compression-themed t-shirts.

The music video getting the most blogosphere airplay comes from Chairlift. Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil” is a music video made of datamosh errors - a twisted visual special effect formed from an algorithmic anomaly. You’ve seen it before, and like many of us, were as fascinated by these digital artifacts as you were by the patterns your NES made when the carts got dusty and the VHS’s when you taped one few too many Cinemax feature presentations. Of course, because this is pieced together from compression artifacts, it looks even more horrible compressed, so you need the HD version. As the uploader says:

NORMAL QUALITY LOOKS LIKE BUNK. clink on “WATCH IN HD” to WATCH IN HD!!! HD stands for “HOLY DATAMOSH,” which is what G-D bestowed upon us in the form of a MASSIVE COMPUTER GLITCH that eats up INDIE MUSIC VIDEOS and turns them into INTERNET GOLD. See the gold in its purest form at:
http://www.court13.com/Chairlift-EvidentUtensil.mov

Evident Utensil, HD on Vimeo

But don’t think for a second this is going to stay some obscure “Internet” thing. No, media moves too fast for that now. Enter Kanye West. As Jeremy Elder writes on his blog shape+colour:

Datamoshing is the new tiltshift. I guarantee. Now it’s just a matter of who’ll do it well and which big company will soullessly made a campaign out of it “because the kids think it’s ‘dope.’”

datamoshing: kanye west + nabil elderkin: welcome to heartbreak. chairlift + ray tintori: evident utensil. « shape+colour

That’s just the beginning.

Then you discover a visual wormhole full of datamosh. After all, YouTube’s “related” feature is only going to pull up more digital nonsense. And so you dive in — and the vids with 300 counts turn out to be way more interesting.

They start normal, but get strange. You’re soon under someone’s umbrella of glitch.

And then you’re here, like, following a glowing piñata down your own optic nerve.

We are truly entering a glorious era of visual effects, one in which you won’t have to wait for epic, budget-blowing fantasy box office train wrecks (ah, Willow) just to see eye candy onscreen. Now you just need to wait for someone to blow a massive budget on a music video.

Want proof? How about this music video from LA’s Chris Dane Owens. Sure, some people in the blogosphere get cranky about the post-a-palooza going on here. I think they’re just jealous of Owens, who works with director effects god Robert Short (E.T., Beetle Juice, and even a black rhino on MacGyver).

I was saddened to learn this wasn’t quite parody – I suppose in LA people actually get serious about this stuff. But what does artist intent matter, anyway? If you imagined somehow combining every 1980s fantasy effects piece into five musical minutes, I think you couldn’t come up with half of this. Even that random crocodile fits in, somehow. And explosions. So many explosions.

Be sure to watch the better-quality Flash version. Direct link:

Shine on Me [Flash]

There’s an interview with Chris Dane Owens on the LA Times’ entertainment blog, though it’s really Robert Short I want to hear from. Intentionally or not, it’s as though the talented Mr. Short has made a massive in joke between him and other 80s effects artists.

An Internet star is born: Chris Dane Owens to singlehandedly slay bad economy via new music video [Pop & Hiss blog]

I’m just wrapping my head around how huge this is, but MTV has posted a massive archive of music videos on their site. That can mean only one thing: it’s time to assemble CDMotion’s list of the ultimate music videos ever. Now, we don’t want the music videos everyone else likes — we want the really inspirational music videos that every aspiring visualist should go watch. After all, it was MTV that co-opted the term “VJ” and all kinds of avant-garde live visual and experimental cinema techniques at its inception, then somehow managed to systematically destroy before eliminating the “music” and “vision” from their name, leaving only reality “tele.” (Sorry, MTV.)

But yes, we want Fairlight CVIs.

We want great directors and effects.

We want techniques that inspire live visuals, putting the music video onstage and at the rave where it belongs.

Nominees are now open. Call in sick to work (especially since the weather everywhere seems terrible today) and take the day to watch old videos if you have to. And yes, if you can include links to the new MTV, that’d be great. Obviously, Viacom needs more money. (Actually, wait, some of you work for Viacom, so I’m sure the ad money will come back to us in the form of a round of beer or something.)

MTV.com