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Diarytwo screengrabs of output featuring footage andrew shot at tynemouth. oil rigs, beaches and a bleaching sun.
two screengrabs of output featuring footage andrew shot at tynemouth. oil rigs, beaches and a bleaching sun.
diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse
the title should really be ‘live at sea’ by the looks of this clip. not to mention the setup looked a bit like the bow of a ship.
the performance had some really beautiful moments, and clips made to pan across the full triplehead work so well in that triangular setup, making lighthouse beams in the space. in my opinion we let ourselves down by not having time for a full run through beforehand, the to and fro between ‘particle-as-is plus a newcastle bit’, or ‘newcastle-in-the-style-of-particle’, resolving itself live and as a factor of SSD drive capacities.
diary | 02 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · live cinema
the performance was to be the newly transformed great north museum’s event space, a big, white, and empty room. standard two layer ‘proscenium arch’ presentation not so suitable, mike came up with a triangular staging.
up to newcastle with d-fuse for a performance of particle as part of reinventing the city. we collaborated with locals novak for a day of filming and a day of performance/prep. nice to be out with them with a camera on a glorious day rather than worrying about wiimotes and audience interaction.
geordie hospitality really can be great. me and andrew were just scoping out an alleyway in byker that got the sunset over the city centre, and literally at the moment we turned around and saw a balcony above a house’s garage perfectly positioned for the shot, when the owner rocked up and offered to take us up there. cups of tea and all.
(and excuse the contrast pump on the shot, couldn’t help myself)
diary | 01 oct 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · reinventing the city
and to answer the title of the first post, here is the best i can do, courtesy of the freestate photographer.
of course, you’re missing six of the satellite screens, two facing in just out of sight offset at the far end, and the four to mirror that end behind the camera’s position. buts the nature of the beast: you can’t watch a 11,000px quicktime, you can’t watch a 3200x1080 crop alongside four 768x768 crops, you can’t get everything in with the viewing angle of the unaided eye even in the stand. thats what immersive, or certainly surround, means.
i hope we can pitch again next year, impressive as it all was i really want to break away from these big white walls…
having spent a day documenting our work, i can say this steadycam rig may look the part but is the most awful thing to actually try and use. makes you realise why the film-grade ones are basically terminator suits.
a tribute to fellow frequent d-fuser paul mumford: its pretty tough: you’ve been holed up for weeks on end with the impossible brief of this video environment; master of after effects or no, a 11,000px canvas is going to hurt, and you’re finally seeing the results… and you can’t even get a photo of it all, 'cos its wrapped around walls and towers surrounding you!
diary | 03 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse
from pitch and the day-long meetings to kick it off, its now three months later and i’m actually in the sony stand at ifa 2009. a non-disclosure agreement, a 11,000x1080px canvas in after effects, 15 full-bore mac pros compositing their slice of the 400GB drive image full of particle layers and product prisms, eight screens pixelmapped in surround across the stand’s towers… its been one of those projects of scary statistics, corporate reputations riding on the line and knowing there is no preview, the not-yet-there architecture is the output monitor.
to take a step back, d-fuse won the commission to create the video environment that forms the centrepiece of the stand. having contributed to what in effect were a series of brand films last year, this year was the real thing: together with andy visser’s sound design, creating an audio-visual environment to give a… well, how to describe: something between an emotional journey and a feeling of space to the stand. i like freestate’s vision for the stand, almost as parkland with scattered mini-booths of products, rather than the products! products! products! you find elsewhere.
so its a nice moment to see have mike, mr d-fuse, and adam, mr freestate, in-situ and discussing the finer points of trade-show land with smiles, looking at a stand that pretty much nailed what was discussed those months ago.
…but all that fades away against the rift of paraisópolis and morumbi. o m g. to see this was why we’d hired the helicopter. just unreal.
urban conditions…? i would just stick this on a cinema screen for an hour and let people deal with thinking it through.
lots of urban visual goodness from the air in são paulo… great concrete vistas, modernism old and new…
and then there we were. above the city, doors removed, pointing cameras wherever we could.
for the record, this is one of the more stress-full things i’ve done: knowing the cost per minute, not having a tripod fitting let alone the gyro stabilised camera of the newscopters, being blown around by the tremendous headwind, barely being able to see the screen in the glare, everything going too quick, and only having a car seatbelt type affair holding me in as i leant out. but it was amazing. just need to raise the money to hire a full HD filming equipped 'copter: having experienced the diy version and then looked at the real deal in its hanger, i’d say worth every penny. you just need something to justify it…
são paulo is an interesting city for a number of reasons. statistically, its a big hitter in the d-fuse world of urban conditions: the first or second most populous metropolitan area in the americas with a cool 21 million, and with the rich escaping the traffic via the largest helicopter fleet in the world. and so, mulling on that, we found ourselves at the heliport…
with the standard in the bank, it was onto the experiemental performance, the world premiere of ‘particle’.
Particle explores urban conditions on an abstracted level. While projects like Undercurrent, Latitude and Surface look at city life in its social and psychogeographical dimensions, Particle zooms in on details of the urban fabric and reveals a web of rhythms, patterns and textures.
particle is also in many ways a rite of passage for me; its not often you get the chance to take an HD film and transform it into the next-generation ‘we wrote the book on vjing’ d-fuse performance. there’s a lot more work to do, especially in creating an audio-visual syncronicity in collaboration with particle’s musician matthais kispert, but we rocked it and got such a positive response. there is a video showing some excerpts of the performance here: http://vimeo.com/5787905
i’m really happy with
thanks to itaú cultural for the photo
diary | 25 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · on_off · vdmx · live cinema
latitude is d-fuse’s established live cinema piece, and the one that took me to rio last year. apple like it too: quicktime hd gallery
produced for twin dvds and a bit of optional laptop noodle, here at on_off is its first outing as an entirely laptop based performance. the change is to bring it in-line with the new HD-savvy live setup i’ve been developing, where adding ever more SD dvd streams won’t cut it. the benefit is we should get better quality content with twin 800x600 progressive outputs rather than twin PAL/NTSC, and we have far greater creative control now the performance sits in our vdmx setup. the try-it-for-the-first-time surprise was that we weren’t getting 100.00% smooth playback for the straight sequences, which on a cinema screen for a theatrical audience becomes an issue. so with some juggling with quicktime player, we had the best of both worlds and rocked it.
of course, now that we’re dvi/vga+progressive, and have spent the past year dealing with HD, we need to go back to the original sources and remaster it all!
thanks to itaú cultural for the photo
diary | 24 jul 2009 | tagged: vj · dfuse · on_off · live cinema
abertura was the first time i really got to throw myself into a ‘particle-esque’ performance, using the d-fuse content with the live setup i’d created. as a warm-up for são paulo, it was a great one: the music and visuals really came together to give an intense show in the relatively small space of abertura’s hall, it really gave me a confidence boost.
i captured five minutes worth from abertura’s documentary footage, and its on vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/5731407
diary | 19 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · abertura · vdmx · live cinema
as a warm-up to d-fuse’s trip to brazil, we performed a test of the new live piece “particle” at electrovision. it definitely felt like a test, as things were plugged in and loaded up to be used in anger in for the first time, and while i wasn’t so happy creatively with the form this first rendition took, that is secondary to what happened there: the dvi-mixer i’ve been dreaming of for years - and that my work turning transforming d-fuse’s live shows has been predicated on - worked as simply and unobtrusively as it should. all the sophistication and craziness lives in the laptop, where we have creative control as far as we’re wishing to configure and code, and we have hardware reliabiliy to ensure we can a) guarantee solid output signal to the projectors no matter what is going on with the laptops and b) mix together and tag team the performance between two visuals laptops.
i am working on getting this out to the vj world for a limited run, and a full announce will follow. it will cost somewhere in the range of a $1000 - £1000 , input and output VGA and DVI, and allow you to do what nothing else will: dualhead at 1600x600, triplehead at 1920x480, HD at 1920x1080@60Hz. it is based on a conference bit of kit that i have developed a controller for, and that i hope to get some extra vj-love put into its firmware. the trick to both those goals is to aggregate our demand into one order big enough for a production run of the controller to be made and for it to be worthwhile for the developers of the conference kit to spend some time enhancing it for our uses. so expect a full announcement once everything is locked down and orders can be taken.
diary | 18 jul 2009 | tagged: dvi-mixer · dfuse · *spark · vj · electrovision · particle
beyond visible things like keane3D, lots of work has been going on in the background with d-fuse this past year or so. some of it pitching, some of it pushing along internal projects, and at the moment a massive commercial job under NDA: all things which don’t really get to this diary. but i’m glad to announce a little preview of something i’ve been working on a while, which is transforming d-fuse live.
as part of electrovision on saturday the 18th july at roxy bar and screen, d-fuse will be performing for the first time with their high-def laptop live setup. it will be something between a test of the setup and a preview of the performance that will become ‘particle’, so all are welcome and beta-tester feedback appreciated!
there’s much more to say about what has been developed for this setup, but in the meantime here is the blurb i wrote for electrovision:
D-Fuse present a work-in-progress viewing of their new live performance, an experimental audio-visual triptych exploring urban conditions. Having mastered an HD production process for films such as Brilliant City and Surface, they have challenged themselves to bring this back into the live arena and with the graphical sensibility they are noted for.
pictured: vdmx work-in-progress setup, with amongst other things custom quartz composer 4x3 into 12x3 layer, backed by unreleased open-gl based qc plugins, and fronted by a native vidvox control layout.
diary | 09 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · electrovision · vdmx
after much shenanigans, keane3D did happen and d-fuse were part of it. no mapping-on-keane-artwork-triangles-with-antivj, no live layered-in-space reactive projections, either of which should have worked amazingly with the multi-3Dcamera filming setup, instead the program graphics. this meant on the day i was in charge of getting the content into the more-than-impressive and bespoke for the occasion outside broadcast rig - always be prepared to reencode everything squatting round the back of a rack of equipment - so always a nice moment when you actually see it going out live from the gallery.
i started writing an essay about this gig - the light surgeons performed “true fictions” and d-fuse presented “surface”, both huge and important works shown to a sell-out audience on the biggest screen in europe - but the window of opportunity to get it coherent let alone finished has passed for now, so here is a placeholder to say at least to say it happened.
thanks to laura fiorio for the photo
diary | 15 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · dfuse · light surgeons · onedotzero · live cinema
this is during the ‘straight’ performance of latitude, essentially an edit. as i hoped, there was call for an encore and i had vdmx ready for a much more layered, graphical remix. its so gratifying when an improvisation like that goes really well, especially when the time you’d planned to rehearse and shape it was taken with dealing with after effects consistently crashing half way through the updated led renders.
thanks to multiplicidade for the photo.
diary | 14 oct 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · video-out · multiplicidade · dfuse · live cinema
