Once, digital image editing was a fringe medium. Now, almost everyone who uses a computer does basic image editing. So, I’m pleased to get to talk today at Macworld Expo about live visuals and reactive/interactive animation. I chose some relatively simple examples since time was short, just to cover the basics. I think some of these might be useful to people at the show and away from it, so I’ll share them here.

Visualism 101

DJs and computer musicians have turned electronic and electrical music into live, improvisatory forms. Likewise, motion graphics, video, and animation are evolving from being exclusively linear, pre-composed works into reactive, interactive, and performative media. This medium is so new that there’s no name for it yet. You’ll hear about video artists, a tradition extending back to innovative visionaries like Nam June Paik. But “video” is only one of a number of media now at the digital artists’ disposal, from lighting to digital animation and 3D graphics. (Nam June Paik certainly didn’t fit so narrow a category, as a composer, artist, and performer.) You’ll hear “interactive designers”, but to most people that means website interfaces. And you’ll hear “VJs”, but that suggests people mixing two to four channels of pre-rendered video, as a DJ would with sound. (And it could mean a host on MTV)

All of these terms are useful in cases. But at Create Digital Motion, we prefer the term “visualist”, for artists whose love of live visual media crosses these arbitrary boundaries.

Visualism Examples

Visualism extends to a broad variety of artists. Here are just a few to whet your appetite:

1. Toshio Iwai: Mixing art and gaming. Tenori-On interactive music controller, ICE Installation, Tokyo. Toshio Iwai understands the way gaming interactions have become a part of our culture, and has become a hero to musicians and visualists on this site for his forward-thinking approach to digital media.
2. Daniel Shiffman, NYU: Transforming video into 3D worlds and back again. Interactive installations translating motion into particle systems. (Dan is also a reader of this site, so, hi, Dan!)
3. Nikolai Cornell: Futuristic installations. Nikolai’s interactive mirror proves how powerful a few simple, inexpensive sensors can be when used artfully.
4. ART+COM: Computational art. Reimagining computation and data itself as beautiful, ART+COM is one of a growing generation of artists whose work is helping digital media to change rapidly.

That’s not even getting into the enormous range of VJs and visual performers. A number of us will be sharing our work Thursday night at Macworld, including renowned VJ Grant Davis.

Links to Tools

I routinely browse through the tags here on CDM just to see what topics have come up regarding a certain app or piece of gear:

Quartz Composer
Flash
Processing
Max/MSP/Jitter

If you want free/open source tools, here are some important resources:

Quartz Composer (I set up a simple blog for a class I was teaching)
(Boot Camp / virtualized Windows users) FlashDevelop (see also their official site)
Processing.org
Arduino sensor interface
Open Source Flash

Pd (Pure Data) (Pure Data is the open source cousin of Max/MSP/Jitter)

And lastly, the primary resources for the two tools with which I spent the most time today:

Adobe Flash Developer Center
Apple Introduction to Quartz Composer Programming Guide

I’m also developing online curricula on some of these subjects; the place to watch will remain this site. Thanks to everyone who came, and feel free to comment here publicly or contact me directly via this site’s contact form.

Studiodaily has a fluff piece for Customflix which caught the attention of HD4NDs.

Step by step instructions. Pretty easy looking, actually.

If you have an indie produced film with no distribution deal, this is one way to get it out on the market (albeit with no marketing, and closing off other distro deals).

But it is there.

For an indie filmmaker who’s spent a chunk of their life and all their savings on a project this may be a last resort. For a visualist producing loop or installation DVDs this looks like a great option, giving you a professionally printed disc and case, and listing on Amazon (and Amazon Unbox for downloads).

Their prices seem quite reasonable. Of course revenue share varies (95% for customflix’ own store, 35% for Amazon, 50% Unbox), but for a passive distro in which no large initial outlay for pressing and no continued time for payment processing and shipping is required I’m not going to argue.

In related news: CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner has published an excerpt from his book The Future of Web Video: New Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers, listing 20+ sites which will pay for video content. Specifying whether they’re paid per view or click, revenue share etc. This compares Customflix with the other major offerings.

Some interesting options there if selling stock on iStockVideo hasn’t quite turned out how you’d hoped.

via BoingBoing

I received my Arduino today, and in preparation I’ve been saving up some Arduino/Wiring/Processing links of interest to a newbie physical-computerer.

If you haven’t Arduino’d before, here’s Todbot on why it’s a rocking little microcontroller. Tod also tells us how to make an Arduino Breadboard Shield, for quick circuit prototyping.

You should probably familiarise yourself with the Arduino Board, then have a look at ARDUINO meets PROCESSING - physical computing and computer graphics site: Projects containing the basic physical interactions mediated by an Arduino board.

The Arduino meets Processing project intends to make it as easy as possible for anyone to explore the world of physical computing. All you need is an Arduino board as well as the Arduino and Processing software, which you can download on their project websites.

Some of the pages seem a little incomplete, but it contains basic circuit information and code for: Pushbutton, Switch(es), Tilt Sensor, Accelerometer, Potentiometer, LDR Light Sensor, NTC Temperature Sensor, Joystick, Ultrasonic Sensor, Piezo Element.

Of course the Arduino Tutorials page has loads of examples. Of major interest to VJs may be:
Blinking LED.
Dimming 2 LEDs (RGB colour mixing).
LED Driver makes use of an LED Driver in order to control an almost endless amount of LEDs with only 4 pins.

Both Peter and I have Arduinos now, so you can expect things to be getting a little more physical in the future. Don’t be scared, we’ll be gentle.

I pulled Digg from my RSS reader soon after they opened up more categories a month or so ago. That site was killed by Popular Website: Retard Influx Syndrome faster than anything I’ve ever seen. So I wasn’t up to date enough to check out the 20 million “private” search queries AOL published before it was pulled on the weekend.

Fortunately some enterprising souls have mirrored the files and created sites with searchable databases, so we can all practice our online private eye skills, or even better, get all visualist and create projects using the data!

(Un?)fortunately AOL doesn’t seem to have much of a hold in Australia, so photonbombing the searches wouldn’t be quite as topical here as in the US. It’s still interesting, humorous, depressing data though, perfect source material for random word space filling or visualization experiments in Processing.

Personally, I’ve just started working on translating the HPGL Label command for my Processing Plotter library. I’m thinking a forest of generative trees, their limbs spelt out in search queries like “MY NAME IS JAYMIS AND I DON’T LIKE MY WIFE SO MUCH ANY MORE“.

Welcome starving visualists! I know there’s plenty of you reading this. Well, perhaps not starving, but you’d definitely like more pocket money so you can buy some of the cool stuff you’re seeing on CDMo or CDMu. You’ve got plenty of original material right? Now all you need is a way for that material to make you some money, a way that doesn’t involve carting all of your precious gear to some grimy club and producing beautiful live imagery alongside music of questionable artistic merit. Make money while sitting at home in your socks watching My Name Is Earl. Sound like a plan?

Community-driven royalty free imagery hub iStockPhoto have just announced iStockVideo. Moving picture creators can sign up and submit content as of yesterday, and videos will be on sale from September 5th, 2006.

iStockVideo is looking for animation, stop-motion, digitized film and of course boring old video. Acceptable clip sizes are 640×480 to 1920×1080, 24-30 FPS, 5-30 seconds long. This may feel a little constrained length-wise, but keep in mind that they’re looking for stock, not stories. Single shots are more useful than pre-edited material, and using shorter length clips means you can sell more of them! $50 for a HD 1080 clip sounds like a plan to me.

You know what to do.

Sellout Disclosure: Links to iStockPhoto contain an affiliate code. If you join the program and upload videos, CDMotion gets a cut for each clip you upload.
Peter: Iceland VJ Adventure anyone?

Broadband is almost ubiquitous, so sending draft renders or completed video projects to remote clients and collaborators electronically is becoming more viable. That they have the bandwidth to receive your file doesn’t mean they have the technical knowledge to connect to an FTP server though. VLOBLIVE (Very LOw Budget LIve Video for Events) has some useful tips and links to get that file delivered easily:

Often you will be in a situation before a VLOBLIVE gig where you want someone to send you a powerpoint file, or a movie clip or a graphic file in advance of the gig so you can do some work on it, (or at least check it’s not totally unusable!). Or you may have a ‘work in progress’ clip or image that you want approval on, or comments on, and you don’t have time to send a CD or DVD in the post.

The need is for an easy, efficient way to send VERY large files to people, and, more importantly for allowing other non-techie people to send them to you.

Of course you COULD set up your own ftp server or web server and do it yourself, but setting up a system where any member of the public (who is only just coping with the concept of attaching files to an email) can use it successfully isn’t so easy. (trust me on that one!)

I personally tend to upload files to my webserver and send web links, but if you don’t want to shell out the $10 or so monthly for a hosting account, or don’t really care for another set of protocols, programs and passwords, then these tips may be very useful.

VLOBLIVE - Tips for sending & receiving BIG media files electronically.

What are you going to do when the revolution comes and power goes out? You won’t be able to fire up your small form factor visuals bomb and knock out storyboard cells for that zombie/nature documentary that’s been orbiting your head all day. Don’t worry though, the GTD nerds have visualists covered too.

D*I*Y Planner have been producing great CC licenced productivity tools for a while now. I’ve been using their Hipster PDA format To-do, Actions, and Grid templates, but somehow I’d forgotten that they also include:

A series of cards to unleash your creative side — Story Idea, Plot Point, Character, Item, Story Board(s), Mind Map, a pocket Photographic Release, and more.

I have to admit, I’ve printed out a nice sheaf of these and have been doing a little brainstorming creative side unleashing of my own. One of the great things about index cards is their shuffle factor, you can put a fragment or idea on each and move them in relation to each other. This would be fantastic for working on story flow or scene structures. Of course there’s purpose built software such as Final Draft, Storyboard Artist or even The Movies, but there’s something comfortable about scribbling on a collection of little cards.

Welcome, Keyboard Laptops Live and Computer Music Readers! Feel free to say hi and check out the rest of the site.

Photo: Vello Virkhaus with Red Hot Chili Peppers in London (thanks, Vello!)

Live visuals for keyboardists? Absolutely: if you’ve got MIDI chops, slick new tools can help you tickle projected imagery while you tickle the ivories. There’s just too much to say about VJing to fit into one story, so when I wrote up an introduction to live visuals for Keyboard Magazine’s Laptops Live special, I ran out of space fast. Here’s a quick roundup of some of the gear and tools you’ll need to pump out live visuals at your next gig.

CDM Sister Site: Incidentally, thanks to all of you who sent in thoughtful feedback about where VJ content belongs here at CDM, or on its own site. After careful consideration, I have decided to launch a new visual performance site towards the end of the year. But don’t worry: those of you who want to occasionally read VJ content will be able to follow the new site here on CDM, and thanks to a bunch of volunteer writers, I expect both sites to grow, not languish. More on that in December . . . now on with our VJ roundup.

I’d be remiss on VJ Day if I didn’t point to some great sources of VJ information. Above all, the greatest out there is the terrific Website VJ Central. Think of it a bit like the EM411 of VJing; you’ll find discussion boards, articles, news (both of the product and event variety), calls for VJs, and (if you’re having trouble picking a tool), software reviews, plus a lot more.

While not strictly a VJ site, Video Thing certainly belongs among your RSS feeds for video-related oddities. (No, Music Thing is not becoming a franchise, though the blogger’s a friend of Tom’s.)

“But what about paper?” you say. For reading compatible with use on subways and toilets, you’ll have to wait for VJ-Book. It’s a promising project currently in seek of a publisher; in the mean time you can “beta test” as a reader.

Oh, yeah, and of course there’s this site, too. I should have more VJ-related coverage soon because of some projects I’m working on, but in the meantime check out a few of my previous stories:

Report from the LAVA VJ party in LA
“VST for video”: the FreeFame video plug-in format
Expensive video hardware: Korg Kaptivator, Edirol CG-8, and Pioneer DVJ-X1
Free software: Neuromixer for scratching with video
Profile of a VJ: Melissa Ulto, aka Mixxy

Got more favorite resources, or want to pimp your own blog / portfolio? Hit comments or drop me a line.