Visualist and 3D animator Josh Cardenas gigged 6 times in 7 days for the recent ‘Hard Sell’ tour with DJ Shadow + Cut Chemist, yet still had enough pixel gadget stamina to hook-up later with VJs in most cities too. And so..

What Went Through The Customs X-Ray Machine
2 x Edirol V4 video mixers,
1 x Pioneer SVM-1000 AV mixer for final mixing – “It was cool cause it handled both video and audio – as we had some pre-recorded animated ‘intro’ to the show that had a voice over track. With the mixer I could control the audio levels from my feed. Also, it had a nifty touch-screen to add some super effects! i used this a bit, but sparingly as they are pretty heavy handed. = ))”
2 x DVDJs ( VJs can scratch too )
Laptops ( Who’d have thought?)
Midi controllers.
Cable spaghetti, and inevitable sprawl of AV and international power adaptors.
Portable Battery the Size-Of-A-Laptop which supplies 8 hours of power.
Various tools and tech problem-solvers.

Oh – and 4 x ‘robocams’ which could be remotely controlled by midi, for panning and tilting on the dual DJ action, 1x DJ wristcam for the trainspotters and 2 x cams on mic stands.

Getting It Together
Josh met up with a few Melbourne visualists at Horse Bazaar, where we showed him the resident panoramic screen and the Dataton Watchout software which stitches together the 6 screen wide panoramics, and then he whipped out one of the robots for us ( after cycling through a range of power adaptors before settling on his ‘back-up’ 8 hours of power Size-Of-A-Laptop battery… ). Soon enough, with impressively fluid arcs of movement, the camera was swooping around via controls on the computer. Josh built the hardware himself, mounting each cam on some movable parts ( see MAKE / createdigitalmotion / instructables etc for DIY midi, motors + electronics ), then connecting that up with some patch based software ( eg VVVV, processing / max-msp / quartz composer ) which allows midi signals to control the movements.

Once the software was launched, camera movement was a simple task, gliding the mouse this way or that way to swing the camera’s focus around the room. More impressively, software based control also allows a range of audio analysis or sine wave oscillators to steer the camera movement – eg letting the bass levels control the tilt of the camera, or setting an oscillator to swing the pan back and forth at a preferred speed or frequency. Save a few of these movements as presets, map these to be triggered a midi controller, multiply by 9 cameras, and Dr.Versatile is in.the.house. Kinda handy when VJing for highly improvisational DJs. Josh showed the setlist which featured extensive cues where he was supposed to trigger various video clips, but said inevitably the shows were different each night as the DJs extended out various sections on a whim, keeping Josh on his toes at all times. And with his 3D background, Josh has plenty of ideas for spatial exploration with camera rigs, expect to hear more in the future.

Hollywood Bowling
For those who missed the show, it’s already a disc on the shelf of indie DVD distributors, microcinema.com. Whereas the “Freeze” and “Product Placement” shows were also recorded for DVD, the Bowl setting inspired a less spartan treatment for this disc – with a full behind-the-scenes story of how the show came to be, the live performance, visuals, a gazillion camera angles, more interviews and a 40-page booklet.

(( + hat-tip to Jaymis from CDM + Plug N Play Brisbane for hooking up Josh with the Melb video peeps.. anddddd UPDATE: vidi-yo interview just posted by Jaymis over at the CDM Brisvegas ranch))

Collage animator Run Wrake ( yes, he of the Rabbit fame, but there’s much more to him ) was chosen to promote a collection of vintage stock-art by CSA Images recently, and Control Master is the resulting animation, every bit as personable and quirky as could be hoped for. The vintage stock-art is reworked with plenty of imaginative visual twists, with a creeping tension helped along by Daniel Morgan’s great soundtrack ( mistakenly I’d picked the music as Run Wrake’s also, which is enough to say that it’s broodingly similar to many of his other short films ).

On a negative note, the clip is flash only, so it can only be watched online, not saved and rewatched –
an annoyance and a big mistake according to Motiongrapher, who argue that :
“While Flash may be the most ubiquitous media player on the web, QuickTime is still the industry standard format for distribution. Some reasons for this:
Easily downloadable, Easily scrubbable, Huge array of supported codecs – and if your site is targeted at designers, producers, agencies and other video-savvy clients – QuickTime is currently the expected choice for distribution.”

The descent into Melbourne’s winter also means there’s a whole bunch of festivals on their way, kicking off right about now.

( May 15-31 http://2008.nextwave.org.au ).
By virtue of preferring to spread it’s grant money in smaller doses to a wider array of artists, this bi-annual festival for emerging artists tends to be a sprawling beast of quirks and charms, a never ending array of performances, exhibitions and installations in shopfront windows, hidden alleyways, underground tunnels, catwalks, nightclubs and occasionally, within art galleries. There’s a festival club this year at the Mercant Hotel near the Victoria Markets, where people can wander to each night, but other than that, it’s pin the dot on the map of inner-city Melbourne and browse the calendar on their ( well designed ) to see a long list of events jostling for attention. Some favourites below :

Yelling At Stars, a transmission into space

On the closing night, a performance at the Myer Music bowl will be recorded, filmed and streamed directly to Deep Space Communications Network in Florida, where it will be converted into radiowaves and become Australia’s first interstellar broadcast, travelling light-years into outer space. As the artist behind it, Willow S. Weiland notes, maybe the reason we haven’t received any transmissions back from outer space yet is something to do with the messages we’ve been sending out :

“It’s time for some honesty. The fastest way to make contact with others is to expose something about ourselves, our own frailty and vulnerability. We’re a beautiful yet destructive stressed-out plague of people destroying our habitat who feel in so many ways personally, culturally and geographically alone.”

House Proud – seven artists get to reinvent 7 homes. Aye, 7 sets of brave home dwellers have agreed to let artists develop site specific installations in their homes. They leave the house, the artists set to work, remixing their interior lives, and a few days later the homes are open for a short exhibition launch, the general public free to wander through these freshly intimate spaces.

Esky? A ‘moving architectural intervention’ – or a large inflatable venue doubling as a pop-up performance space and bar, appearing at various locations around Melbourne during the course of the festival. Need to know where it is? SMS the word ‘esky’ to 0428 477128 for location of the venue each night.

The Telepathy project – artists in 2 adjoining windows try to communicate with via telepathy, recording their messages every 15 minutes on time-coded post-it notes. Later to be published as a book.

The Movement Movement – Funny project where the general public is encouraged to run alongside artists inside museums in something that sounds like a cross between an obstacle course, comedy routine and aerobics class. Apparently they had 250+ people running a 5km course through a Canadian museum. Witness the fitness!

Paradise City – dance performance with BMX, skater, acrobat breakdancer and a fallen diva.

More? Survivalism in tents, handprinted wallpaper on Melbourne’s laneways, art performances in ‘Men’s Galleries’, Workshops – develop your own personal dancing style… learn about how to inject interactivity into new media installations… ( by Jon Pak of lightmatrixinterface.com ). Forums – on virtual communities, artist interventions in public spaces, recycling pop culture imagery, theatre in non-traditional spaces. Abundances more – website is very well organised and makes exploring and finding events very smooth and easy, well worth the browse.

And sure, the Festival has only just started, but has already run into controversy, the Melbourne City Council ruling that a Swedish artist’s works that feature male nudes must have the genitalia covered up. The work in question featured a stoned, naked Mickey Mouse character ‘dreaming of becoming as famous as Damien Hirst’ , and was looking to critique the whole art supermarket from an artist’s perspective… but naked male genitalia are best on stone statues it seems. ( see http://platformartistsgroup.blogspot.com, and the artists site : ceciliafogelberg.com )

Also Coming Up :

Melbourne International Animation Festival 2008 June 16-22
Melbourne International Film Festival 2008 – July 25 – August 10

Quick scan of a few media file management apps that can help get to the fun stuff quicker :

Snapper

Snapper is probably the quickest and simplest way to find and hear audio files on a computer. That alone renders it an attractive app in many people’s eyes ( or ears ), but it has a few other tricks up it’s sleeve too. Once launched, Snapper enhances the built in mac finder menu, by immediately displaying a wave file benath the current window whenever a sound ( or movie with soundtrack ) file has been selected. Use arrows or mouse to skip through the various sound files in your finder window, and each file plays near instantly as you do, the soundwave changing underneath at the same time. Above the soundwave are a range of tools, which allow easy selection of a portion of the sound file, and with a right click that portion can be saved as a standalone file, converted to mp3,
uploaded into protools, split from stereo into L and R tracks, converted to mp4 and attached to an email. It plays back over 50 different sound file types, playback speed can be adjusted to between half and double speed, it works under itunes as well and quickly and elegantly executes it’s operations.

Available with a 100 day free trial, $79 after that. (OS X 10.4 or higher ).

Audio Finder

Audiofinder has plumbed the same terrain since 2003, and so can offer a much more complex set of possibilities for manipulating selected audio. In it’s full featured mode, I found it loses a little of Snapper’s speed and ease of use in the process, but it also includes an option for running in a more limited mode as well. Loaded up and once a sound file has been selected, the richer array of possibility is evident from the Audiofinder toolbar : there’s a built in BPM detector, a small keyboard to play the sample at different pitches, an audio unit effects menu, the capacity to extract and export a section – but also the capacity to process this in many ways. Some options include normalising, reversing, changing the gain, processing the mono to stereo , or on a more advanced level, the sound portion can be opened up within an Audiofinder sample tool which offers the ability to slice the sample into increments, and move these around, trim and edit sections, add effects and export in a variety of ways. All of which can be done in more complex programs, but the key here is the speed at which an idea can be executed. Search for a file, highlight section, crop as needed, export and done. Audiofinder also emphasises it’s own search functions – once your directory has been scanned for sound files, you can save and retrieve specific searches – eg a seach for bass drum, or a search for cat or dog will bring up all related sounds found with that, and using the arrows or mouse will let each sample be quickly heard and edited if need be. External drive and even sample DVD drive searches etc can be saved as specific searches and used when need be. There’s a range of powerful batch commands available for processing multiple files easily, comprehensive renaming features, and supports ReCycle, REX playback and export, creates EXS instruments and includes sysex transmission and SMF playback.

US$69.95 ( For Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4 or 10.5 Intel / PPC )
( Yes, both apps are mac only, drop a line if you know of an equivalent on PC. )

Adobe Bridge

On the visual front, Adobe’s Bridge media manager has probably been lurking unused on most Photoshop user’s computers ( it comes with most recent versions of that program), but offers some vast improvements for organising, finding and displaying visual media. Vast folders of photos and movies can be seen and navigated through quickly, there’s powerful batch renaming functions, clips or photos can easily be clumped together in ways that suit and folders remember this layout when next opened. It feasibly has use as a storyboard tool too, there being nothing like it which allows a folder of 200 videoclips to be viewed and rearranged so easily. See all the video thumbnails in one go, click on a file to see it played in the corner, move like files together, and rename or label or add metadata tags to batches of clips as need be. Hat tip to DFUSE for pointing out how useful this is.

Like a continuously expanding themepark emerging sprouting towers through a forest floor, audiovisual tools – they keep developing at a cracking pace. Here’s a quick scan of the recent* topography. ( *well, actually, it was April Snippets, but then there was this minor issue of a spamwar and entire blog rebuild to deal with… still some pixel-juicy links below though.. )

(above Melb VJ Keith Deverell + DFUSE in last minute preparation mode )

Live Audiovisual Performance
Kids’ve been busy in the Northern hemisphere it seems. The Euro-experimental-media festival circuit has been charging ahead, much of it documented at createdigitalmotion.com by by 1 x Toby *spark, wolverine UK VJ of note, who trampled his way through the AV Social at London – an event which featured performances and discussions, but also a fantastic compilation of VJ narrative works, cream of the crop, each complete with a URL to explore. Next stop was the Node 08 festival in Frankfurt, exploring the VVVV software and the gazillions of projects spawned by it. Then the Mapping Festival in Geneva, put together by people connected to the VJ software Modul8, another smorgasbord of sublime AV performances and installations. Dizzy yet? Then the Vision’r festival in Paris, where Toby observed “a strong culture of innovative live performance, which brings visualism and a/v trickery with it, but through a very different lens”, and a new release of Resolume, the long dominant PC VJ software now becoming available natively on OS X as well. Coming soon Visual Berlin and Live Performer’s Meeting in Rome.

Elsewhere in the North, Vague Terrain offer up a fantastic cross-section of VJ + AV related articles in a recent journal, including an interview with VJ Solu ( Finland / Barcelona ). And the consistent DVblog offers up this fascinating performance / video event where the screen is made up of large white cubes which are continually deconstructed during the event, playfully changing the nature of the projections ( Event by myspace.com/pixelbirds )

Video Hardware
The much hyped 4K resolution RED camera gets plenty of mentioned over at the EDIT blog, but the blog is worth checking out for it’s general tips about editing and hardware, software etc. Having a 4000 pixel wide image isn’t necessary for most people though, and some have even been shying away from HD cameras for all the extra headaches and hard drive space the extra image size needs. Seeing the UK’s DFUSE preparing for a performance in Melbourne recently though, opened my eyes to some of the more creative options that HD allows. Even if you still choose to work with smaller resolutions, having that extra width and height to play with can prove useful in all kinds of complicated zooming, panning, tilting and multi-screen scenarios.

Video Software
Yes, a new version of resolume is out ( now for mac + pc), and along with it a new version of the popular freeframe effects, now optimised to take advantage of graphics card acceleration. If needing some clips to play in that, youtube has started including much higher resolution clips and the Google Operating System blog notes a useful hack to access and save these videos as mp4 files ( allowing editing and much easier use for VJing ). On the Quartz Composer front, Machines Don’t Care has been kicking many goals with lots of experiments building all sorts of effects, plugins and real-time graphic mutations – all of which can be then inserted into various OS X VJ software.

Video on the Interwebs
Yes there are over 200 video uploading services now, yes there are a key dozen or so with better options than youtube ( including payment options, higher resolution, better interfaces, browser based remixing, better social functions etc, but no, none of them have a fraction of the eyeballs of youtube. Which makes the recent extension of youtube’s partnership scheme into Australia significant. This means if you have original clips you own the copyright to, you can enter into an agreement to share part of the ad revenue these clips generate on youtube.

Popular photo sharing site flickr recently made a splash too, adding the ability to add video or what they call ‘long photos’ to their site. There’s something appealing about the way they have implemented this, and the outlet for shorter clips amongst the well defined flickr community. After a splash of motion graphics? Try flickr.com/groups/vdmx/ or flickr.com/groups/cdmo/pool.

audio-surf.com – this one intrigues – a music adapting ( PC only ) puzzle racer where you upload your own music to create your own game parameters. “The shape, the speed, and the mood of each ride is determined by the song you choose. Earn points for clustering together blocks of the same color on the highway, and compete with others on the internet for the high score on your favourite songs.

Feed Me?
Brian Kane of the seminal AV act EBN has too many projects and provocations happening now.
UK’s United Visual Artists now have blog, and apparently did a great presentation of works at a recent Melbourne design conference.
Tutorial sites are multiplying fast which is great, found Embryo recently.
Art of title sequences? Sure : www.artofthetitle.com

Aye aye, thanks to a recent nasty spam attack, have had to rebuild the blog, and somewhere between that, the upgrade to wordpress 2.5.1 and the upgrade to Leopard, the RSS feed became broken, and after many attempts to revive it, have resigned myself to a brand new RSS FEED, something preferably avoided, but here we are.

Sooooooo if you were a Mongolian sheep farmer who subscribed to skynoise a long time ago, and no new posts have been popping up in your RSS newsreader for a long time, well they never will unless you change to the above new address. But if indeed, you have found me again, then please, come in, drop me a line in a comments, let me fix you a drink, welcome back, leave your shoes at the door, but come in, come in….