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Diary
there’s a 2006 diary entry i keep on coming back to professionally – showing my live cinema piece rbn_esc, or rather, what’s on my laptop screen when i perform it. ableton live and vdmx5, side-by-side. audio and visual, although it’s not quite that simple.
i have this as my basic template for whatever this new piece around fuel records may be. ableton will certainly be sequencing. but then things get… unsure. ultimately, this is an exploration of the terrain around volta – 3D worlds, hybrid performance, artist presence. but in the meantime, there’s a lot of stuff i’ve built my visual career on that’s very 2D, and very… vdmx.
cue thoughts that get very complicated and very custom, very quickly. plus the almost existential wrangling of my happily 2D, happily framed visual style into an open, 3D one.
i may yet get back to where i was going with that, custom camera engine and all, but i had a moment of realisation. this piece is, in some way, like me giving a talk, so let’s sketch it out like that, using a deck in keynote. could i actually just perform an a/v show with ableton and keynote? start there, feed it into volta. keep it simple.
this was a good call. it’s also good for the democratisation pitch of volta: i’m still going for the *spark style of video-fused motion graphics, but there’s a decent first pass achievable with standard stuff: those motion graphics are courtesy of the deck’s builds and transitions[1][2]. oh, that and my luma-crossfading *spark mixer i smuggled into volta create the minute i was on the team.
keynote’s magic move transition remains a wonder of the modern world, perhaps my favourite product feature ever. ↩︎
the actual performance has the deck exported into video clips, which live inside ableton thanks to the new-to-me and well-executed videosync. i’d like syphon-out per channel, but i’ll live with going via returns. ↩︎
