08/04/10 – Esperi Gig Footage

At last, I have put together the footage from the Esperi gig.  Had to cheat it a bit though because the sound recording we had was pretty bad – something we need to sort out for future gigs that we record.

Our next gigs with Esperi will be this Sunday 11th April at Pivo Pivo in Glasgow and then Dexters in Dundee on the 25th April.  I’m currently trying to figure out how to make bits of the performance sound reactive in Modul8 so it synchs up a bit better.  But mainly so I can just sit back and not do anything :D More on that later… Let me know what you think.

02/04/10 – Mapping

I know process month is over now but I’m gonna continue talking about my work here for a bit longer and tie up any loose ends I’ve left lying about. I’m just getting round to editing some footage of the Esperi gig at the moment (the absolute worst part of the process for this project – I hate Final Cut Pro!), and consequently my brain seems to be incapable of thinking about anything other than projection mapping.  I started playing about with the technique while I was studying in Norwich – the most common use is to manipulate static, rigid objects like the architectural structures of buildings.  It’s probably easiest to show you a video, AntiVJ is one of the best I reckon…

I love this kind of stuff but I didn’t really have the resources to try out something quite so ambitious, so I decided to try and develop the technique a bit and see what I could come up with.  I ended up creating something that kind of revealed the process behind it, but confused people at the same time.  I think :)  It’s hard to tell because I know the process behind it so well – I’ll try to explain it after you’ve watched it… would be good to here what your reaction is too.

So, firstly I had to figure out exactly where I should be drawing the main triangles that later line up with the floating ones, and to do this I pointed a camera at my hand and projected the output onto the floating triangles as I was drawing so I could mark the six points where the corners of my drawn triangles would match up with the floating ones.  With the camera and projector kept in exactly the same position I filmed myself joining up the points and drawing all the other random triangles, and finally lining it up again with the floaters once I was finished.

That video was then processed and speeded up, and I took the final resting frame as a still image and manipulated it in after effects to create the short transition animation you see about half way through.  I then took the processed, sped up video and created a version of it that only had the main triangles visible and not the surrounding desk and arm – this is because I was using two projectors and didn’t want the floating triangles to cast a shadow on the background projection, and I also needed to be able to separate the two layers in order to fade the background projection to black after the transition.

These two videos were then projected at exactly the same time on their separate projectors as I filmed it, moving the camera once the triangles had aligned and then triggering the transition animation so that the background projection would fade to black and allow the camera’s live feed to be projected in it’s place, which in turn created the feedback effect at the end.  This earlier video might give you a better insight into how it all works – this was a test using just one projector, so you can see the shadows that I wanted to avoid in the final version…

I hope you can glean some sort of understanding of the process from all that – it did my head in a bit trying to remember it all, although not as much as it did at the time :D  I was doing all this in an old abandoned factory out of town and I discovered about three times that I needed to get back into town to buy some cable extension or some adapter or other – not good for the stress levels when there’s a looming deadline the next day… Anyway, I might be doing some more experiments along these lines soon, so it’s good to refresh my head with it.

24/03/10 – Performance + Sound Analysis

Here’s that performance of The Lyre Of Orpheus I was talking about before. It happened last night at Videolab, a night of presentations, performances and discussions about film, animation, vj-ing and other fun things at the Arts Complex in Edinburgh.

Had a great night, but still can’t seem to get through the performance without screwing something up. The adrenaline (or blind panic) seems to just take over when I’m doing it in front of people and I end up throwing stuff out of sight that I need again later in the performance. All part of the fun though, and I’d love to do this more often so I can get used to all the excitement. In fact, I’ve been fantasizing about doing a whole VJ set with an OHP and a massive pile of drawings :)

The video below is an unfinished animation I’ve been working on to help me analyse a piece of music – I’m planning to do a mini music video to test out the 3D zoetrope technique and to see what I can do with it within some sort of structure. So I’ve separated out the individual sounds of the track and given each one a different shape and movement so that they can be easily identified later on. The movement of the circle in the middle was generated in Modul8 and made to change scale as it reacted to a live feed of the track, but the rest was all done in the After Effects timeline. The plan is to render out each of the shapes (which are animated on separate layers) as an image sequence and then lay them out in some sort of grid system that I have yet to figure out, so I can analyse it and make decisions about where and how to synch up the finished zoetrope animation.

 

My Process
08/04/10 – Esperi Gig Footage

At last, I have put together the footage from the Esperi gig.  Had to cheat it a bit though because the sound recording we had was pretty bad – something we need to sort out for future gigs that we record.

Our next gigs with Esperi will be this Sunday 11th April at Pivo Pivo in Glasgow and then Dexters in Dundee on the 25th April.  I’m currently trying to figure out how to make bits of the performance sound reactive in Modul8 so it synchs up a bit better.  But mainly so I can just sit back and not do anything :D More on that later… Let me know what you think.

02/04/10 – Mapping

I know process month is over now but I’m gonna continue talking about my work here for a bit longer and tie up any loose ends I’ve left lying about. I’m just getting round to editing some footage of the Esperi gig at the moment (the absolute worst part of the process for this project – I hate Final Cut Pro!), and consequently my brain seems to be incapable of thinking about anything other than projection mapping.  I started playing about with the technique while I was studying in Norwich – the most common use is to manipulate static, rigid objects like the architectural structures of buildings.  It’s probably easiest to show you a video, AntiVJ is one of the best I reckon…

I love this kind of stuff but I didn’t really have the resources to try out something quite so ambitious, so I decided to try and develop the technique a bit and see what I could come up with.  I ended up creating something that kind of revealed the process behind it, but confused people at the same time.  I think :)  It’s hard to tell because I know the process behind it so well – I’ll try to explain it after you’ve watched it… would be good to here what your reaction is too.

So, firstly I had to figure out exactly where I should be drawing the main triangles that later line up with the floating ones, and to do this I pointed a camera at my hand and projected the output onto the floating triangles as I was drawing so I could mark the six points where the corners of my drawn triangles would match up with the floating ones.  With the camera and projector kept in exactly the same position I filmed myself joining up the points and drawing all the other random triangles, and finally lining it up again with the floaters once I was finished.

That video was then processed and speeded up, and I took the final resting frame as a still image and manipulated it in after effects to create the short transition animation you see about half way through.  I then took the processed, sped up video and created a version of it that only had the main triangles visible and not the surrounding desk and arm – this is because I was using two projectors and didn’t want the floating triangles to cast a shadow on the background projection, and I also needed to be able to separate the two layers in order to fade the background projection to black after the transition.

These two videos were then projected at exactly the same time on their separate projectors as I filmed it, moving the camera once the triangles had aligned and then triggering the transition animation so that the background projection would fade to black and allow the camera’s live feed to be projected in it’s place, which in turn created the feedback effect at the end.  This earlier video might give you a better insight into how it all works – this was a test using just one projector, so you can see the shadows that I wanted to avoid in the final version…

I hope you can glean some sort of understanding of the process from all that – it did my head in a bit trying to remember it all, although not as much as it did at the time :D  I was doing all this in an old abandoned factory out of town and I discovered about three times that I needed to get back into town to buy some cable extension or some adapter or other – not good for the stress levels when there’s a looming deadline the next day… Anyway, I might be doing some more experiments along these lines soon, so it’s good to refresh my head with it.

 24/03/10 – Performance + Sound Analysis

Here’s that performance of The Lyre Of Orpheus I was talking about before. It happened last night at Videolab, a night of presentations, performances and discussions about film, animation, vj-ing and other fun things at the Arts Complex in Edinburgh.

Had a great night, but still can’t seem to get through the performance without screwing something up.  The adrenaline (or blind panic) seems to just take over when I’m doing it in front of people and I end up throwing stuff out of sight that I need again later in the performance.  All part of the fun though, and I’d love to do this more often so I can get used to all the excitement.  In fact, I’ve been fantasizing about doing a whole VJ set with an OHP and a massive pile of drawings :)

The video below is an unfinished animation I’ve been working on to help me analyse a piece of music – I’m planning to do a mini music video to test out the 3D zoetrope technique and to see what I can do with it within some sort of structure.  So I’ve separated out the individual sounds of the track and given each one a different shape and movement so that they can be easily identified later on.  The movement of the circle in the middle was generated in Modul8 and made to change scale as it reacted to a live feed of the track, but the rest was all done in the After Effects timeline.  The plan is to render out each of the shapes (which are animated on separate layers) as an image sequence and then lay them out in some sort of grid system that I have yet to figure out, so I can analyse it and make decisions about where and how to synch up the finished zoetrope animation.

I’m making this technique up as I go along really, as I haven’t had to analyse a piece of music or a sound track since my third year at art college, and that was done by searching through the sound track on a umatic tape and noting the important parts down on dopesheet.  Not a computer in sight :D I think this method should work though.  I guess all I’m doing is visualising the process so it’s easier for me to recognise the changes and the beats, as opposed to just looking at the waveform and trying to figure it out from that.  I’ll post about this again once I’ve got the analysis animation finished and the grid system sorted out.

22/03/10 – Performance

The performance part of my process is where I really want to focus at the moment, and I think it probably needs a lot of work.  I spent pretty much all of last week preparing for the Esperi gig on saturday, but ninety-nine percent of that time was spent figuring out all of the technical problems and creating content for the night.  I had very little time to do any rehearsal or to plan out what I could do with each of the songs Esperi would be playing (he’d given me a set list in advance).  Having said that, I think any more planning may have just added to the already fairly high stress levels involved in setting the thing up – it took about two and a half hours to line up the projector, tweak all the masks and animations and then render all the movies out – so it was maybe for the best that I was able to just relax and go with the flow a bit when it came to the actual performance…  besides, all the hard work is done now and I can concentrate on the creative side a bit more for the next gig with Chris.

Esperi Gig

Esperi Gig

Another problem with all the build up (in my head, anyway) and preparation is the inevitable anti-climax on the night. Not that it wasn’t a great night, just that it becomes patently obvious, in front of a pissed up saturday night audience, that nobody really gives a shit about the amount of effort gone in to shining some pretty lights onto a kite! And why should they? I think the night went pretty well though, and we managed to make a few more contacts that will hopefully lead to more gigs – all part of the process etc ect.

17/03/10 – Puppetry

Is puppetry animation? I think so – certain types of puppetry are certainly closer to animation than others anyway. I performed this live music video when I was studying in Norwich, and it feels like animation to me when I watch it back… I like to call it “live animation” :)

Albeit slightly rubbish animation that I really wouldn’t be showing anyone if it wasn’t presented as a live performance. You can definitely get away with more when you’re doing stuff live, in front of people – I spent not much more than a day preparing for this (as you can probably tell :) but the audience seemed to enjoy it at the time, and I think if I’d prepared much more I would’ve been in danger of losing some of the spontaneity. I’ll try and bear this in mind when I prepare for my second ever performance at Videolab next Tuesday 23rd March at the Art’s Complex in Edinburgh. Plug plug :D

videolab poster

I developed the puppetry technique a bit more with this McDonalds On The Brain video. It’s pretty much just me waving some acetates in front of a camera (with a couple of shots played about with in After Effects), but I really like the freshness you end up with when you can just let go and not really give too much of a f**k about how it ends up looking. Daniel Johnston definitely helped to get me in that frame of mind :) I love the contrast between the techniques I employ – it’s great to be able to do this kind of thing after the horribly complicated technicalities of something like the kite mapping I was talking about before.

15/03/10 – Esperi Gig

Just a quick post today about one of the projects I’m working on at the moment. My VJ buddy Garry and I are working on putting together some visuals for singer songwriter Esperi at an upcoming gig of his on the 20th of March at the Doghouse in Dundee. We’re taking a bit of a risk with this one though, as it could all go terribly wrong. We’re going to be projecting onto a kite using the projection mapping technique, which means we can isolate each individual triangular plane of the kite and animate them separately. Here’s a quick test I did a while back…

My Process

08/04/10 – Esperi Gig Footage

At last, I have put together the footage from the Esperi gig. Had to cheat it a bit though because the sound recording we had was pretty bad – something we need to sort out for future gigs that we record.

Our next gigs with Esperi will be this Sunday 11th April at Pivo Pivo in Glasgow and then Dexters in Dundee on the 25th April. I’m currently trying to figure out how to make bits of the performance sound reactive in Modul8 so it synchs up a bit better. But mainly so I can just sit back and not do anything :D More on that later… Let me know what you think.

02/04/10 – Mapping

I know process month is over now but I’m gonna continue talking about my work here for a bit longer and tie up any loose ends I’ve left lying about. I’m just getting round to editing some footage of the Esperi gig at the moment (the absolute worst part of the process for this project – I hate Final Cut Pro!), and consequently my brain seems to be incapable of thinking about anything other than projection mapping. I started playing about with the technique while I was studying in Norwich – the most common use is to manipulate static, rigid objects like the architectural structures of buildings. It’s probably easiest to show you a video, AntiVJ is one of the best I reckon…

I love this kind of stuff but I didn’t really have the resources to try out something quite so ambitious, so I decided to try and develop the technique a bit and see what I could come up with. I ended up creating something that kind of revealed the process behind it, but confused people at the same time. I think :) It’s hard to tell because I know the process behind it so well – I’ll try to explain it after you’ve watched it… would be good to here what your reaction is too.

So, firstly I had to figure out exactly where I should be drawing the main triangles that later line up with the floating ones, and to do this I pointed a camera at my hand and projected the output onto the floating triangles as I was drawing so I could mark the six points where the corners of my drawn triangles would match up with the floating ones. With the camera and projector kept in exactly the same position I filmed myself joining up the points and drawing all the other random triangles, and finally lining it up again with the floaters once I was finished.

That video was then processed and speeded up, and I took the final resting frame as a still image and manipulated it in after effects to create the short transition animation you see about half way through. I then took the processed, sped up video and created a version of it that only had the main triangles visible and not the surrounding desk and arm – this is because I was using two projectors and didn’t want the floating triangles to cast a shadow on the background projection, and I also needed to be able to separate the two layers in order to fade the background projection to black after the transition.

These two videos were then projected at exactly the same time on their separate projectors as I filmed it, moving the camera once the triangles had aligned and then triggering the transition animation so that the background projection would fade to black and allow the camera’s live feed to be projected in it’s place, which in turn created the feedback effect at the end. This earlier video might give you a better insight into how it all works – this was a test using just one projector, so you can see the shadows that I wanted to avoid in the final version…

I hope you can glean some sort of understanding of the process from all that – it did my head in a bit trying to remember it all, although not as much as it did at the time :D I was doing all this in an old abandoned factory out of town and I discovered about three times that I needed to get back into town to buy some cable extension or some adapter or other – not good for the stress levels when there’s a looming deadline the next day… Anyway, I might be doing some more experiments along these lines soon, so it’s good to refresh my head with it.

24/03/10 – Performance + Sound Analysis

Here’s that performance of The Lyre Of Orpheus I was talking about before. It happened last night at Videolab, a night of presentations, performances and discussions about film, animation, vj-ing and other fun things at the Arts Complex in Edinburgh.

Had a great night, but still can’t seem to get through the performance without screwing something up. The adrenaline (or blind panic) seems to just take over when I’m doing it in front of people and I end up throwing stuff out of sight that I need again later in the performance. All part of the fun though, and I’d love to do this more often so I can get used to all the excitement. In fact, I’ve been fantasizing about doing a whole VJ set with an OHP and a massive pile of drawings :)

The video below is an unfinished animation I’ve been working on to help me analyse a piece of music – I’m planning to do a mini music video to test out the 3D zoetrope technique and to see what I can do with it within some sort of structure. So I’ve separated out the individual sounds of the track and given each one a different shape and movement so that they can be easily identified later on. The movement of the circle in the middle was generated in Modul8 and made to change scale as it reacted to a live feed of the track, but the rest was all done in the After Effects timeline. The plan is to render out each of the shapes (which are animated on separate layers) as an image sequence and then lay them out in some sort of grid system that I have yet to figure out, so I can analyse it and make decisions about where and how to synch up the finished zoetrope animation.

I’m making this technique up as I go along really, as I haven’t had to analyse a piece of music or a sound track since my third year at art college, and that was done by searching through the sound track on a umatic tape and noting the important parts down on dopesheet. Not a computer in sight :D I think this method should work though. I guess all I’m doing is visualising the process so it’s easier for me to recognise the changes and the beats, as opposed to just looking at the waveform and trying to figure it out from that. I’ll post about this again once I’ve got the analysis animation finished and the grid system sorted out.

22/03/10 – Performance

The performance part of my process is where I really want to focus at the moment, and I think it probably needs a lot of work. I spent pretty much all of last week preparing for the Esperi gig on saturday, but ninety-nine percent of that time was spent figuring out all of the technical problems and creating content for the night. I had very little time to do any rehearsal or to plan out what I could do with each of the songs Esperi would be playing (he’d given me a set list in advance). Having said that, I think any more planning may have just added to the already fairly high stress levels involved in setting the thing up – it took about two and a half hours to line up the projector, tweak all the masks and animations and then render all the movies out – so it was maybe for the best that I was able to just relax and go with the flow a bit when it came to the actual performance… besides, all the hard work is done now and I can concentrate on the creative side a bit more for the next gig with Chris.

Esperi Gig

Esperi Gig

Esperi Gig

Another problem with all the build up (in my head, anyway) and preparation is the inevitable anti-climax on the night. Not that it wasn’t a great night, just that it becomes patently obvious, in front of a pissed up saturday night audience, that nobody really gives a shit about the amount of effort gone in to shining some pretty lights onto a kite! And why should they? I think the night went pretty well though, and we managed to make a few more contacts that will hopefully lead to more gigs – all part of the process etc ect.

17/03/10 – Puppetry

Is puppetry animation? I think so – certain types of puppetry are certainly closer to animation than others anyway. I performed this live music video when I was studying in Norwich, and it feels like animation to me when I watch it back… I like to call it “live animation” :)

Albeit slightly rubbish animation that I really wouldn’t be showing anyone if it wasn’t presented as a live performance. You can definitely get away with more when you’re doing stuff live, in front of people – I spent not much more than a day preparing for this (as you can probably tell :) but the audience seemed to enjoy it at the time, and I think if I’d prepared much more I would’ve been in danger of losing some of the spontaneity. I’ll try and bear this in mind when I prepare for my second ever performance at Videolab next Tuesday 23rd March at the Art’s Complex in Edinburgh. Plug plug :D

videolab poster

I developed the puppetry technique a bit more with this McDonalds On The Brain video. It’s pretty much just me waving some acetates in front of a camera (with a couple of shots played about with in After Effects), but I really like the freshness you end up with when you can just let go and not really give too much of a f**k about how it ends up looking. Daniel Johnston definitely helped to get me in that frame of mind :) I love the contrast between the techniques I employ – it’s great to be able to do this kind of thing after the horribly complicated technicalities of something like the kite mapping I was talking about before.

15/03/10 – Esperi Gig

Just a quick post today about one of the projects I’m working on at the moment. My VJ buddy Garry and I are working on putting together some visuals for singer songwriter Esperi at an upcoming gig of his on the 20th of March at the Doghouse in Dundee. We’re taking a bit of a risk with this one though, as it could all go terribly wrong. We’re going to be projecting onto a kite using the projection mapping technique, which means we can isolate each individual triangular plane of the kite and animate them separately. Here’s a quick test I did a while back…

I’ve done this kind of thing before, but the challenge this time is to prepare all the different animations so that they can be quickly adapted to the different positions that the kite and projector will end up in on the night of the gig. I think I’m only going to have about three hours to do this, probably less, and I’m slightly worried that it’s just not going to be enough time. So this is how it’s (hopefully) going to work on the night – I’ll need to quickly position both the kite and projector (I’ve already done a dummy run of this bit) and hope that none of the musicians knock into it while they’re setting up their stuff. Then I need to create a mask of the outline of all the triangles in After Effects – this is done by projecting the output window of AE onto the kite as I manipulate the masks, essentially turning the kite into a second monitor. Once that’s done, I’ll end up with something like this -

mask example

Then I’ll need to adjust each of the individual triangles that I’ve already set up in AE so that they line up properly with the new mask, as there will inevitably be places where they spill over or leave gaps, and render out all of the different animations ready for projection. This should be relatively easy and quick when it’s just a solid colour being projected onto each triangle, but I plan have some animations that only project onto the edges of each shape, and I’ve yet to figure out how to streamline that process. I’ll let you know how it goes next week :D

kite mapping test

12/03/10 – Saint Mary

Ok, this project has been on my mind a bit recently due to the sad death of Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse the other day, so I guess I’ll talk a little bit about the process I went through while making this (unofficial) video for one of his songs…

My Dad leant me an old slide projector that he’d had as a young boy, and I was really itching to play around and see what kind of images I could get out of it. I set out wanting to do something fairly simple that could be filmed purely in-camera by just swapping slides between the two available slots on the projector, but within about a day this idea had gone out the window. I just found myself drifting down a different route without really noticing and without anything resembling a plan, so what I’d wanted to be a short two week project turned into two months of work (in hindsight not very surprising, considering the length of the song…). Here are a few of the slides I made – I love working on such a small scale :D

Saint Mary Slides

The great thing about the projector was that I could squeeze two slide cases in front of the bulb, so I could animate the change of focus between each layer to give a nice delicate depth of field effect. I could also open up the top of the projector and slide a long piece of acetate through, so it was possible to animate scrolling backgrounds like the trees in the first shot. But in reality, I ended up cheating most of the camera moves in After Effects just using still images generated by the projector, as opposed to taking multiple shots (moving each shot – just a tiny amount) and sequencing them on the computer. It was definitely more a case of the technology inspiring, if not dictating, the look of the film, and allowing me to focus much more on the narrative side of things.

So once the look was decided upon, I started just sketching a few ideas and illustrations of some of the lyrics and went pretty much straight into production of the final images, without any clue as to where the story was going or what the hell I was going to do next – I focused on one shot until it was finished, rendered and placed roughly in the timeline and then moved on to the next, usually chronologically. This is generally not the done thing in animation, as everything is tends to be planned down to the very last frame, but I was in the luxurious position of being unemployed, so I had all the time in the world to figure it out and make mistakes :D

projector

10/03/10 – Intro

Show me an animator that’s not in love with their process and I’ll show you an unhappy animator. I’ve been there myself, as I’m sure many people have, and I think it’s probably the biggest barrier to an animators’ creativity – it just takes soooo bloody long to do anything! I really hated the animation process until relatively recently, so much so that I gave it all up for about four years after my time on the BA course at Duncan of Jordanstone. I was limited back then by my lack of knowledge and confidence in the many processes involved in animation, and was kind of forced down a very traditional, you-must-draw-every-single-frame-on-a-piece-of-paper route by the tutors there. Which works fine for certain types of animation, and I’m sure there are people who love that process too, but I don’t have the patience or skill level for that kind of work. My work these days is all about playing with the animation process, and I’m constantly trying to find new ways to keep it surprising and spontaneous and exciting enough to hold my really pathetically short attention span for more than a couple of days :)

Animation is such a broad subject and can be so far removed from the ‘traditional’ methods that I was taught at DoJ, but an undisciplined approach to experimentation can also be quite damaging (again, something I’ve learned, and am still learning, the hard way) and can ultimately be just as time consuming and fruitless for me. I’ve spent a lot of time playing during and since I finished my MA in 2008, and have had some quite interesting results, but I’m only really now just coming to realise that I need to properly focus these experiments into some tangible, finished outcomes. After all, I need to make some money, so I need to be able to convince potential employers, commissioners or funding bodies that I’m able to follow my ideas through.

So that’s where I am currently with my process, and I’m going to be blogging about it here during Process Month, mainly by looking back at some of the projects I’ve worked on over the last couple of years, but I’ll also hopefully be able to show you some of the stuff I’m figuring out at the moment and perhaps go into more technical detail too.

It’d be great to hear your thoughts on the subject as well, so please feel free to post any comments…

Cheers for now,

Graeme