Some smooth, stretchy After Effects work mixed with spot-on sound design gives us Tales of the Unexpected, by More Soon.

Tales of the Unexpected from More Soon on Vimeo.

Here’s the only clue so far on the techniques used:

Yeah pretty much.. it’s a really long video made in After Effects layered over a series of displacements.

I’ll try to get some more secrets out of the creator, but in the meantime: Any CDM readers like to step up on how this might have been created?

This is my favorite part of video production, the “figuring out someone else’s Kung Fu” process, but I don’t know enough about displacement maps to even get started on this one.

Peter and I have been having a serious love-in with Sony’s Vegas Video editing software this year. I’m a long-time Premiere user, but it hasn’t been getting a look in since I realised just how much faster it is for me to edit video with Vegas. I’ve had my eyes opened to the flow. Vegas lets you make edits, rearrange, delete, fade, and layer clips without interrupting playback. As a VJ, of course I’m used to “editing live”, so when I tried to go back to the play-stop-edit-play workflow of Premiere, it felt completely unnatural and archaic.

The one thing I’ve been missing is the tight integration between Premiere and After Effects. Vegas has some reasonably capable post-production tools, but as soon as things got beyond simple colour-correction or pan and scan, I would reach for After Effects, and things would get messy - exporting uncompressed AVIs, multi-layer exports… Unpleasant for everyone involved.

So, Peter and I were counting the ways we love Vegas, and I remarked that “if Vegas could save a file which could be imported in to AFX for post-production - absolute bliss”. I quickly followed this up with “it’s never going to happen”, and started to theorize about converting Vegas project files into XML to be then hacked into Premiere, while clicking around Vegas in a hopeful manner.

CDM’s Most Eligible Bachelor 2008, Adam Buxton (who is indeed married), had the pilot of his new TV show - MeeBox - playing on BBC3 last night, so it’s now available to people inside the UK, and nobody else. However, Adam has posted some clips on YouTube:

Beautifully simple, effective, cheap-arse post production. Hopefully the full version of MeeBox will appear somewhere online soon.

(For more Adam, check out Radiohead, Spoon, and camping and racing on Dermott’s Sporting Buddies [Parts 1, 2, 3, 4])

Last week I spent about half an hour under a bridge with some musicians, 2 guitars, a microphone and a camera.

About 2 hours of post-production later, I released a music video for one of my new collaborators: Edward Guglielmino.

Edward Guglielmino - Late At Night (Bridge Sessions) from Jaymis.

The idea for this piece was that it start out looking like it was shot on a camera phone, and seamlessly segue into a lovely HD panorama. The camera was locked-off on a tripod. All zoom and camera moves were created in After Effects. I’m very happy with the effect, but that’s not really why I post it here. I’ve been considering, discussing, and planning my future as a visualist, and I’d like to share some of where I’m aiming, and hear what you, lovely CDM readers, are pointing your considerable talents towards.

This video is part of a slightly new direction for me. Previously I’ve striven for “perfection” with every work. The cleanest image, the highest resolution, the perfect performance, the seamless post-production. These are all noble goals, clearly, but they’re not really compatible with an abundant output, and it’s an abundance of output which I feel is the way for myself - and others - to transition from weekend-VJ to full-time visualist.

Some interesting production techniques used in this video from the Lightsurgeons.

This film was created entirely from the waste collected and produced during the Sapporo ICC International Creative Workshop 2008 that took place between 4th -14th March. It was led by Light Surgeons creatives Chris Allen, Tim Cowie and James Price. The resulting piece of work was informed through the ingenuity, creativity and collaboration of the workshops 16 participants.

More Information.

via VJ.TV.

I’ve posted my first two videos for the Vixid@CDM Minisite. These cover both the ridiculously basic - how to get started with the VJX - and the reasonably advanced - using cameras, midi and Ableton Live to create a seamless-scrolling effect across two projectors:

Vixid 101 - The Basics: Inputs, Outputs, Routing, Blend Modes, Compositing
Multi-projector Spanning: Cameras, Cables, Midi and Ableton Live

Aside from the exciting possibilities this opens, I’m also happy about the Vixid 101 video as it uses a rather strange aspect resolution - 500×600px - which allowed me to display both the physical view of what’s being done to the mixer and the output.

This is all quite new for me, I don’t have much practice actually talking to cameras, so I’d love to hear your feedback. Is the format working for you? Does my trim-every-extraneous-second editing style scare you? Would you like to see more videos like this on CDMo?

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.

My love of time-lapse meshes perfectly with my love of, well, the 5 foot carpet python I share my house with. Having a companion animal (is it politically correct to say “pet” these days?) around is great for any visual artist. More specifically, having Python around an HD, slow-motion capable video camera, well I think that’s a fantastic combination:

I am yet to create any actual “HD” material with this camera, but for web-resolution work it has been an absolute revelation. The ability to shoot a show as a single wide shot from a tripod and then pan and scan in post production means that those previously unexciting “gig documentation” tapes are now actually worth editing. Similarly, if you’re shooting hand-held HD but delivering web resolution you have huge latitude for image stabilization.

For the python dinner I had a couple of DV cameras as backup angles, and the difference in detail is frightening.

We’re all about the cheap, characterful, DIY aesthetic here at CDMo, but sometimes bigger really is better.

This is something I’ve been working on for quite a while, but I’ve realised that there are too many new things on the horizon which will take up my time (and my computers’ CPU cycles) so I’ve decided to release it as a draft rather than sitting on it until "perfect".

While there’s still some editing and motion tweaking to be done, this piece is rather time consuming to preview and render. As the action speeds up it is blending many high resolution images together for each frame.

The video compresses around 10 hours of stencil cutting into 4 minutes. Shot with the same Pentax *ist DS as my previous time lapse efforts, the camera takes around 35 frames per minute at 1536×1024. This gives plenty of leeway for pan and scan in post production if outputting to SD or lower resolutions.

This method of shooting allows a very high quality look, with minimal expenditure. I had some problems with this camera’s viewfinder focus and auto-aperture function recently, the repair quote was AU$300, while a new K100D (the new version of the *ist) is under AU$600 including a lens. With prices for digital SLRs getting this low, a proper SLR version of the ghetto timeslice rig can’t be too far away.

To distract from their intensely repetitive subject matter, skateboarding videos have used a variety of techniques, from blooper reels showing people hurting themselves, to Spike Jonze post-producing the decks to invisibility.

The latest iteration of this process I will let speak for itself:

Updated: Lakai had the video removed from Youtube. Does anybody understand why a company would do this? The video went seriously viral last week. I encountered it via Dooce (which, if you’re not in to reading about Mormonism and constipation, is one of the most popular blogs on the whole internets), and when I added it to CDMo it had well over 1 million views. The actual video was released in November, so any initial buzz has long faded. Suddenly there is a resurgence of interest in the video, and by association the company, and they respond by removing the video which is causing all of this positive publicity?