Strangely motivated

Well I'm in a strange mood this evening so I might as well continue with this as its been going so well lately. A bit pissed off with my installation, not gonna lie. The damn thing broke after about hour. Also I seem to be at a loose end these days as everyone is either revising or has a job. On a completely different topic, I'm really getting into experimental music lately, earlier in the year it was dubstep and psytrance but I'm getting more into my electro now, probably because of the new Crystal Castles album. Battles and Telefon Tel Aviv are two of my favourite new discoveries.


This next bit is weird. After finishing for the year I seem to have retained my motivation (I never have any motivation?) and have started work on my third year modules today. Inspiration came from seeing a couple of music videos on youtube, Linkin Park's video for breaking the habit and Nero's video for innocence. I really like how the pace of the animation reflects the music. Though I need to get better at the whole music production thing quickly.


My initial idea is to draw over video in the typical rotoscope style, similar to that used in Waking Life. My own development from this is to incorporate some timeslicing images similar to those I created for my exhibition piece, along with some special post processing tricks I've picked up. There may be yet more MaxMSP fun times. Subject for the animation is as yet unknown, I have a few ideas but they all seem stupid. This film/animatic/whatev would probably be for the individual practice module though some may transfer to collab. Its strange how most of this year has been a struggle for inspiration and motivation but now the third year hasn't even started and I'm getting so many crazy and fantastic ideas every couple of hours. That said, I don't know how many of them I could actually pull off =/

Installation Frustration

Just finished prepping my installation for our end of year exhibition. I finished the coding earlier this afternoon but I had to write a new soundtrack for it seeing as the old one was wank. Basically I'm using the footage from the archive copy in the previous post combined with the power of MaxMSP/Jitter. I'm using Max to capture the movement of the audience in the space as they walk in to look at my installation. This is then translated into data which determines the direction of video playback so to the viewer it appears as if you are walking around the object. It's not perfect but it works and hopefully is stable enough to last the opening night without me having to tweak it. I was really pissed off with the whole thing this morning but I'm so happy now its done.

My patch, using large portions of cv.jit.track:

Absence

Wow haven't posted on this for an age, I'm rubbish at stuff like this. Anyway here are two of the films I feel happy putting up from the last couple of months and a short update. Enjoy.





There's more blurb about them on youtube, I don't wanna repeat myself on here so have a look if you're interested. It's scary how quickly this year has gone, I'm practically finished with my second year of uni now and wow what a year. Some crazy stuff has happened. I have been broken both physically and mentally at times but came out on top, all you can do is look back and smile. Personal revelations and epiphanies are all very well but they have a tendency to make you feel like utter crap. Soon there will be collaborations and dissertations to worry about along with all kinds of mess, although I'm looking forward to next year and feel much more confident than I did about this past year. Sad to be leaving a group of people I have known since the start of this whole misadventure but glad to be moving in with some crazy and brilliant people. That's all for now.