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Diarymodel vv campers as stylus running round the record’s groove and transmitting to their adjacent radio set. craziness at the bar for avfest’s opening gala.
model vv campers as stylus running round the record’s groove and transmitting to their adjacent radio set. craziness at the bar for avfest’s opening gala.
diary | 29 feb 2008 | tagged: vj
wiimote with 2 diy ir markers + 2 bullet cameras into uncompressed quicktime stream converters -> laptop running quartz composer with 2 weeks of custom coding -> triplehead2go giving a canvas of 2400x600, 18” wide when projected.
of course, qc won’t accept the two streams simultaneously. vidvox worked it out, apple didn’t for the own tool. tsssck.
diary | 27 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · video-out · kinetxt · video-in
being able to code custom plug-ins is really making quartz composer so much better: not just giving the ability to make different types of ‘teh pretty’, but letting qc’s patching world do what its best at - fiddling with views - and leaving the coordination and control aspects to a dedicated lump of code, like a brain sitting in the middle of the patch.
long story short, this kinetxt installation is seeming like a case study in the object-orientated / model-view-controller way.
diary | 25 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os
exyzt, ever the prototype, hq no exception. note to self: next time go with illustrator files and fabric, those cushion’s don’t come from the shops.
diary | 22 feb 2008 | tagged: errata of life · vj
having worked through the hillegass cocoa book, its time to start putting that to good use. and project number one was always going to be one of the big glaring omissions in quartz composer to my mind: a means of animating a string on a per-character basis.
if you want to compete with after-effects, then you need to be able to produce the various type animations directors are used to, and you need to do so at a decent framerate. to animate say the entry of a character onto the screen, you would create the animation for one character and then iterate that operation along the string. the problem is, rendering each glyph inside the iterator is both massively expensive and massively redundant, but thats the only approach qc allows, hacks on the back of hacks apart. a much better approach would be to have a single patch that takes a string and produces a data glob of rendered characters and their sizing and spacing information, firing off just once at the beginning and feeding the result to the animation iterator: at which point you’re just moving sprites around and the gpu barely notices.
the patch is released under gplv3, and is attached below.
a massive shout to the kineme duo for leading the way with their custom plug-ins and general all-round heroic qualities. in particular their ‘structure tools’ patches were the enabler for those early text sequencing experiments.
diary | 15 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · release | downloads: SPK-StringToImageStructure-1.0.zip
system diagram: discussed, ok’d.
wiimote: check. triplehead2go: check. folder of text messages: check. custom qc patch to enable text animation: check.
blend together for kinetxt v0.00000001.
it doesn’t do much, but its a start.
diary | 15 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · kinetxt
up in newcastle to start work proper on the kinetxt project, a collaboration with novak commissioned for the ‘av festival’ as part of the after dark programme. they had a town full of script writers with nothing to do in the evening, novak wanted to combine the interactive possibilities of tools such as quartz composer with vj production and performance techniques. we put those together and proposed an installation space where those in the space can leave their mark and become part of an ongoing conversation: with an audience of authors, we are really hopeful about embracing text entry and display to create a kind of storytelling space.
whats nice about this, is that this is a geniune case of business development money actually making things happen: name approached me for mentoring based on my live cinema and dynamic content programming work, and following three days of quartz composer and other allied things, we were talking in the pub about project ideas enabled by this kind of work, and here is one of those ideas actually commissioned and fitting an audience profile perfectly.
kinetxt: tuesday 4th march, middlesborough, ‘the basement’, 8pm - 12am, free.
diary | 11 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · kinetxt · name · novak · live cinema | downloads: final proof poster.pdf
aka “thats what i call a real motor show”. rock on italy. thanks to will for the photo - my s80’s zoom wasn’t able to get anything like this.
for the three people who will know what this is, it was worth the wait… mmmm, zip!
diary | 12 dec 2007 | tagged: vj · adventures · sónar
a little round-up of spark interviews in the past month, as part of the compass film festival in bristol and a hazy californian morning post-motorshow (strange how you can lose a weekend then find yourself online in interview form). it would probably a good idea if i actually watched these before posting online, but hey, here i am in a little motorshow vj break, and so are the links as i got them:
http://operator11.com/shows/1054/episodes/32121
http://crustea.vjfrance.com/article-198583.html
diary | 12 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj
walking home over a drawbridge is just something that doesn’t get tired. a! drawbridge! with! a river! and ruins! underneath!
diary | 10 dec 2007 | tagged: vj
had a night “at home”. felt so good not to be in a hotel or restaurant. didn’t realise the dog was a robot tho’.
diary | 10 dec 2007 | tagged: vj
hello gianluca, organiser of avit-like live performers meeting. while i couldn’t be part of the event as i was doing this in frankfurt, it came in useful when a selection of italian vjs was needed to chose my vj partner here…
diary | 10 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · avit-vj-network · vj · ford vj
saturday was super-rammed. and then this guy came round, as if in a bubble. totally immersed, clicking things in space in front of him. no way of finding out more or hitting up the autowebpagediarylogthing the rig may or may not produce.
the second day of the motor show was picketed by anti-car protesters. i barely got in to the show, check further back in the photo and you’ll see the red banners of them marching in to close down the entrance. photo was just holding the camera up and pointing back. crazy times. should i mention i ride a push-bike around london?
suffice to say i haven’t seen this happen at any other motor show.
diary | 05 dec 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination
speaking of inés, here she is, my vj partner for this italian show. check www.pintaycolorea.com, much goodness there.
