I’m in the middle of editing a video that combines an artist interview with event footage. The supplied raw material is 10 minutes of interview footage and 45 minutes of the event, shot from a single camera. From that footage I was able to extract 5 minutes of usable interview, but just 40 seconds of the gig. It’s not that the gig video was badly shot, it was just homogenous. Medium-long shot of people dancing. Medium shot of the DJ. Over the shoulder shot of the DJ. Medium shot of girls dancing. Repeat.
This is sad, because a single camera and half an hour is plenty of time to capture a dynamic performance. The secret sauce? Close ups.
Yes, you read that right: realtime stop motion. While stop motion is, by definition, associated with a painstaking process of creating animation frame by frame, a free and open source tool takes a different approach. ToonLoop provides the usual stop motion tools for creating loops, but takes a live performance approach to the recording and playback process, so you can turn your stop motion into a performance. The creator brought up the tool Saturday at the Open Video Conference in New York and got just the reaction you’d expect - a few confused (if delighted) chuckles, and someone asking, “That must be … slow.”
Now, if the framerate is low, you have no one to blame but yourself.
For fans of animation and live visualism, though, this is a dream. The first build was in Processing for Mac and Windows, but a new version for Linux (which should also work on Mac) is built on Python (with PyOpenGL, PyGame, Video4Linux and — oddly — Pure Data for MIDI).
In fact, I’m not sure whether I should tell you to download the thing or just run with the idea itself. (There’s no reason Java/Processing shouldn’t still work, by the way, if you use the excellent GSVideo library - and OpenFrameworks and others could be likely candidates, too.)
The idea is brilliant - and yet more evidence that being a visualist can be a much broader category than simply being a “VJ,” with the two-channel mix paradigm the more conventional term suggests.
And performances evidently look like what you might expect. Below, Joy Penroz uses Toonloop in Mérida, Yucatán, México, via the ToonLoop site.
Bonus video: as I was looking for more work done with ToonLoop (there’s not much out there just yet), I came across another creation by Joy Penroz. It’s not a stop motion performance, but it runs with parallel ideas, looping to manipulate time in a modern pop take on the work of Dutch master painter Jan Vermeer. The contemporary “Milkmaid”:
Apple has rolled out its 10.5.7 OS update. First, the good news: it may enhance video support. Apple’s tech document claims the update “Improves performance of video playback and cursor movements for recent Macs with NVIDIA graphics.”
The (potentially) bad news is that it could cause issues with video output and external monitor resolution. There’s a growing thread on the topic:
Those will be forum contributor’s exclamation marks, not mine. I’m staying calm; don’t worry.
Now, oddly, a lot of the discussion seems to be related to HDMI-to-DVI connections, something that may be less common among live visualists (and thus less concern to readers of the site.) But it looks to me like DVI may have issues, too.
I think if you haven’t upgraded yet, you may want to hold off as the update is so new – that is, if you’re gigging or presenting in the next few days, for instance. If you do update, the usual advice holds: back up, so you can roll back if you have to. (I wish Mac updates allowed manual roll-backs, as with Windows updates, though even that is no substitute for a real backup.)
Of course, if you do have the update, I’m curious how it’s going – especially if it enhances performance. Stay tuned.
Also, 10.5.7 or not, there’s a hidden gem in that thread:
AntiVJ, that projection mapping luminary, has shared some behind the scenes video of a live painting and projection mapping performance in December 2008.
It’s fantastic to see this kind of process stuff, and a beautiful reminder that projection mapping doesn’t need to be paired with 3D objects to be highly effective.
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