On March 10th I did live video projections for the final rounds of the Laptop Battle at the AMODA Digital Showcase at South by Southwest 2012. Many talented musicians and visualists performed and showed their work — check them out.
Music: “plexiglass afternoon” by DXM (who was one of the eight contestants and came in second!)
Video documentation: Emily Kornblut
Thanks to Chris Jordan and Anton Marini for loaning me their gear! Chris has built a number of multi-mirror reflectors (that you can see briefly at 01:05 in the video) that split the projection beam up into a rotating spray of smaller images. The result is gorgeous and I am very thankful I have such generous friends who’ll share the gear and expertise with me.
Shot on a Panasonic GH2 with hacked firmware and a Canon FD 50mm f/1.4, no color correction. The trains are an annual holiday display at the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, NY. Music graciously provided by the wonderful band The Octopus Project.
Hi folks. The weekend before last I shot some pretty footage in my office and turned it into a music video. It’s set to a beautiful, minimal/ambient track by John Chantler and you can watch it below. Once you’re done watching it, scroll down to read an explanation of what the footage is of.
I shot and edited this video as exercise. I was spurred to do it, to do it expeditiously, and to finish it when someone tweeted about the Cult of Done Manifesto, which I hadn’t read in a while. All in all, it was very satisfying and I hope people like it.
Mysteries revealed
The two first guesses about the nature of the footage that I received (from Benton-C Bainbridge and Chris Jordan) were pretty much dead-on. It’s sunlight reflecting off a plastic (mylar?) book cover, which I crinkled and tugged at slightly while recording. Benton guessed it right first so he gets the cookies. If I’m getting my optics right, these kinds of reflections are known as caustics, and I have always found them very, very beautiful. All of the effects were done in post and I tried to keep them subtle. I’m pleased that I succeeded to some measure since CJ guessed that the chromatic aberrations were done with a polarizer.
Alright, this will be a five minute blog post and I will absolutely post it no matter what. There, the timer is set.
What’s going on with me? Well, since getting married in September, we’ve reclaimed all that time-that-was-spent-wedding-planning and put it to other uses, mostly turning up the heat under the kettle that is our business. Things had been heating up steadily since well before the wedding and the past nearly six months has seen us working our butts off, shooting tons of video, editing lots of footage, making new clients, and stretching outwards and upwards in satisfying ways, including more very enjoyable work for Wiley Wiggins and the Octopus Project. I have not had or made nearly as much time for artistic projects as I would like but I do manage to fit stuff in here and there. Yikes, 30 seconds left! Uh, uh, uh….we redesigned our home office. It’s great. I’m fitting in a little time to work on Open Emu here and there. For more on that, keep your eyes on openemu.org. Time’s up!
Update: this five minute blog post is now sponsored by my cat.
Roger Ho has a great eye. He also has really impressive focus-pulling ability. Check out this video he shot of The Octopus Project playing in Dallas on Thursday night.
Also, Roger Ho is an enigma. What’s your story, Roger? Drop me a line.
This is a brief sketch I put together to bounce off a new collaborator — just a little something that popped into my mind while out the other day, a manifestation of an homage to Ed Ruscha that I’ve been meaning to do for years. Here’s the 720p Quicktime version, which looks much better than the one above. The black line is an unintentional rendering glitch; however, as my collab said, “The black line is a nice touch; as the Persian rugmakers said, perfection is an offense to God.”
A beautiful installation done with lasers. Excuse me — forgot this was the the Internet — I meant, LASERZ. United Visual Artists are a UK-based team who create live visuals and interactive installations with an architectural bent, meaning, not just the usual glowing rectangles: really striking work. As I tweeted moments ago, I can haz laserz, too? I’m tired of weak projectors on dingy screens.
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