Archive for the ‘imaging’Category
friday night in marrickville
Here is a little fragment from wandering around the streets of Marrickville last friday night.
06
04 2010
footage from a short river journey
23
03 2010
Moon riff
We watched Moon last night down here in the holiday shack, the surf a constant pounding white noise and the moths flying into the projector beam up onto the fibro wall. It was directed by Duncan Jones, famously the son of David Bowie & is his first feature. It is a weird collection of 70s sci-fi riffs joined together into what feels like an elegant though unadventurous cover version.
The look and feel is equal parts Silent Running, Dark Star, Solaris, 2001, Alien and the TV series Space 1999 and the later Star Trek series. It is also owes a lot to the stories of Phillip K Dick and Thomas Disch, even early Arthur C Clarke. It doesn’t do much with these ingredients except join them together and re-present them, though it does so with conviction and heart. One thing you can see them going for that doesn’t quite work is the tone of mystery and horror contained in some of these source films. Finding out what happens (which I won’t reveal in case you haven’t seen it) feels quite procedural, though gripping in a low key way.
Still, it is great to see someone trying to do something psychologically challenging with science fiction as it is rarely attempted in cinema post Star Wars with any of the depth you find in the written form. Clint Mansell did a fairly over the top score, heavy on complex synth textures which I enjoyed and was prominent in the mix filling lot of the space left by tracking shots across empty moonscapes.
06
01 2010
Golden Live video
The wonderful Golden Live performers. Videos below in order or appearance on the night. Roger Mills & performers with Idea of South, Emily MacDaniel & Emma Ramsay as well as Alphabet Soup the first collaboration between Nick Wishart & Miguel Velenzuela.
02
11 2009
Hitler feels buyers remorse
21
10 2009
Flags of Convenience
New short video piece just completed tonight. Its a collaboration with John Cheeseman who wrote a short text based around the title Flags of Convenience that I’d had laying around for a while. I used the text as a stimulus for some imagery and another text I wrote to animate in counterpoint to the spoken text from John. I recorded John & Jes Tyrrell reading his text over the phone and then spent an inordinately long time composing some sound to underpin an edit of the voice text. The sound didn’t fall into place for me until I used it as material for a performance at the launch of an issue of Runway magazine where somewhere in the live mix I worked out how to deal with the unruly textures. You can download a 1280 x 720 mpeg4 version of it here (just right click and save as), its 150mb. Or see a low res streaming version below.
26
08 2009
Looking into the Past
One of my favourite pics (by jason powell) from the flicker group Looking Into The Past.
Tags: locative media
05
08 2009
Sound & Vision
I love bits of gear & software that you can work with like an instrument. By that I mean, fluidly and fast and where time spent honing some proficiency and familiarity is repaid with more interesting and unique results. Aside from the sort of relationship you can have with a video or stills camera you use over a long period this isn’t a common way of working in film or video. Editing software and compositing, animation and effects packages lean toward a complex detail oriented non realtime workflow that while it can of course be engrossing, doesn’t lead to the sort of play you can experience with a softsynth or something like Ableton Live.
When I started out making video one of the tools I had was a Fairlight Computer Video Instrument, the much much cheaper visual partner to the famous pioneering CMI sampling keyboard. What was most amazing about the CVI was that it really was an instrument, the tactile sliders and buttons allowed for live play with digital video in ways that haven’t been equaled till recent years.
While most of the presets were cheesy as hell, the synthesis model it was based on meant you could develop your own patches and save them to memory. And if you were like me, then laying the treatments out to tape, layering them up later in expensive online suites. While the sampling inspired by the CMI of course became foundational to modern sound and music production, live video instrumentation and manipulation as a performance or compositional tool has only slowly developed in response to the rise of VJ culture in clubs and in live music. There are now a range of decent software tools and importantly control surfaces like this nanoKontrol (note the similarities to the CVI surface) are becoming widespread amongst the live visuals fraternity.
While live visualism is certainly diversifying into live cinema, the architectural and harking back to ideas of expanded cinema, the tools and techniques still fall into the domain of the eye candy techno Vj style aesthetics that completely dominated not so long ago. One thing holding back integration into more established (and high resolution) video workflows is the lack of recording options in many of the key software packages, the emphasis is all on the moment. While in some ways this is laudable, it is also a stumbling block for allowing live visual “playing” to become part of the process of image generation workflow for high resolution video and for the sort of visuals unable to be generated in realtime. This is only partly about the computer speeds & video hardware improvements required, it is most importantly about recognising what this sort of instrumental play brings to moving image practice in general, both how we produce and read video.
01
07 2009
Check. One. Two.
Never have I used so much gear for a performance, this Liquid Architecture gig is turning into a Pink Floyd style equipment fest. We got the streaming working the other day, its a bit of a complicated thing, but luckily we have the resources to make it happen.
The chain goes like this:
Jes & I with separate laptop VJ rigs (mine probably with two computers) running Modul8 & VDMX5.
These are mixed together in a edirol HD video mixer and output to the projector, the streaming encoder and a HDV tape deck for recording the performance.
Shannon has his laptop/controller sound rig with a submixer that as well as outputting to the main 7.1 PA also sends feeds to both Jes and I so we can use audio frequencies to control some of the visual FX we have going on. The visual and audio feeds are fed to the encoder machine a Tricaster, which is a mixer in itself and a bit overkill for this job but happily sends out a flash video stream to the flash media server sitting elsewhere on the campus. We got it working the other day and the Tricaster is now sitting down it its room sending out some random stock footage to the server, you can see it working here.
The only thing that remains to be worked out re: the streaming I think is how we might send a different high quality stream out to the screens in the main campus tower and a lower quality one out to the pages it will be embedded in, Kat Baird & I are going to sort this through the week hopefully. A lot of setup for a short performance yes?
06
06 2009
Charlotte Sometimes
A few weeks back I drove down to the snowy mountains with the boot full of cameras. It was gorgeous as it usually is with a suprising amount of snow, Charlotte Pass is my favourite spot, something so still and otherworldly about it.
02
06 2009
Coded at Writers Festival
I was part of a panel at the Sydney Writers Festival ten or so days ago, it was part of a project I’m involved with in western Sydney called Coded that has a strong element of locative art & writing involved. Even though it was conceived of as a panel discussion it was advertised as a reading & as that is the sort of thing people do at writers festivals I read some bits from an old locative story project for mobiles called “go this way” and some stuff from a newer work developed to be heard as readings on the Sydney freeway network. The panel was organised and Coded is produced/curated by Sophia Kouyoumdjian.
Thanks to Jes for kindly shooting the video & stills. This is just the bit where I was doing my rambling. Whole thing was two hours, thanks to the Writers Festival for putting on something a bit left field for them & to Blacktown Arts Centre for hosting.