Video Snippets

As Melbourne descends towards it’s version of winter, have been clicking through more online videos than usual. This German hiphop live video impressed with it’s visual flair, emcees projected onto, and standing against a back-lit screen – quite gorgeous sound-responsive work, made using the processing software. Also using processing, is this quite satisfying visualisation of turntable scratching found at createdigitalmusic.com , who also feature an overview of Johnny DeKam’s live video rig for a Thomas Dolby tour.

Steamshift in the UK ( who also maintains a good VJ related blog ), has a nice work in progress of a series of stacked shipping containers animating like an LED meter. Nice to see some lateral approaches to what sound-responsive VJ software can generate.

Nobukazu Takemura has quite a few well-made electronic albums under his Japanese belt. Apparently the music videos from his album Scope, all link together to form an experimental film ( directed by Corey Smith ). 160MB download ( via antville ). More Scope-film info @ archive.org. And a blog recently emerged dedicated to highlighting Japanese TV shows, in all their technicolour perversity.

New tools? Quartonian Mixer gets an update ( still free ). Jack for mac osx just released a new version of their software which allows audio to be routed between applications, and will apparently soon do the same for midi and osc. And there’s been plenty of hype about the ‘Red Camera‘ on the horizon – a camera supposedly capable of recording ‘4520 x 2540 via a sensor large enough to adapt to standard 35mm lenses normally used by film cameras, at a price 10 times cheaper than its comparable 4K competitor Dalsa. Nice to see costs coming down, but it’s still a US$17K camera – am personally more interested in seeing how ingenuity can overcome budget limits, than what someone can make with $300 million. Unlike say, James Cameron who is thinking of a 3D remake of the titanic. Says he in a BBC article – “I won’t make movies for mobile phone screens”. The Eyecandy mailing list is a treasure trove for those who might wish to peruse endless arguments about whether resolution is the most important factor within VJing.

Conspiracy video for the weekend? Try ‘Pentagon Strike‘ which fairly convincingly draws into question the actuality of what happened on the September 11 Pentagon strike. Found via stealth falk-er.

And breathing down my neck : a review / tutorial for using the 3ivx codec to compress movies for online viewing, the VJ Book : Live Cinema Unravelled review, and Sketch Up Pro review ( Pro version of the 3D software that let’s you insert 3D models into Google Earth, with some movie capturing capacity ).

by Sean Healy, May 5, 2006 0 comments

Captain Frodo : Rubberman

frodo
Eye-popping array of solo and group performances to his name already, sword-swallowing rubber jointed contortionist, Captain Frodo, further expands his range during the Melbourne Comedy Festival, his new solo show beautifully combining storytelling, the singing saw and outrageous stunts.

In the Beginning
frodoWhen I first saw Frodo contorting and squeezing his body through the heads of 2 tennis racquets in a Brisbane mall, a few things were obvious – he was a great performer, was insanely flexible and had likely been doing this a while. This was
reaffirmed watching his performances with the wonderfully choreographed quartet ‘The Happy Sideshow’, where he and Space Cowboy lifted a keg of beer by chains through their nipple piercings, lifted tables with their tongues (nailed to the table! ), and generally kept the crowd enraptured for an hour. Frodo was also kind enough to later appear in a short film I made, contorting his limbs into impossible shapes and escaping a straitjacket to answer the mobile phone ringing in his backpocket. frodoAnd to use the old Happy Sideshow catchphrase – ‘it just gets better!’ – his latest show, ‘The Adventures of Captain Frodo – Tales of a Modern Day Showman’, deepens appreciation of Frodo’s tricks and showmanship, includes a singing saw routine, limbs contorted in ways you’ve never seen before, cameo appearances by his Norwegian magican father on the big screen, and colorfully sketches Frodo’s various transformations on his path to the sideshow. Highly recommended.

>How did u make the shift from magic tricks to physical performance?
Performing magic always made me nervous – the audience is always trying to catch you out, and when I was 12 or 13 trying to perform to punk friends in Norway, they were a really hard audience to perform to. Magic is also a bit about pretending, and I wanted to try and do performances that were more ‘real’. I’ve always been very flexible, but I also have a medical condition called Ehler danlos syndrome which in my case makes the ligaments in my joints extremely flexible.

>Have you ever had any injuries during shows? Continue Reading →

by Sean Healy, April 28, 2006 2 Comments

Motor Mouths : Machiney

“The drum machine should be renamed what it is: a rhythm synthesizer. I call that rear view hearing. The drum machine isn’t a drum machine, there’s no drums in it – it’s pulses and signals synthesized into new pulses and new signals. There’s no drums in it. “

– Kodwo Eshun, author of ‘More Brilliant Than The Sun’.

File under boxes that beat, a physical programmable drum machine designed and made by Andy Huntington. No mouse clicks, beats are tapped on various extended nodes, which then mechanically form that rhythm, which is amplified by attaching the node to various pbjects – eg an upside down cup, bottle or metal tin etc. Video will explain it better.

Jazz mutant’s Lemur hardware controller provides a programmable touchscreen, which means you can reconfigure to suit your needs – 16 sliders one time, 8 knobs, triggers and scratch pad the next – in other words, a controller that aims to be as versatile as your software.

Going a step further along the path of customisation is the monome 40h – a reconfigurable grid of sixty-four backlit buttons, with USB 2 and midi /osc functionality. It is also made however, with an open source, hackable firmware and software interface – a philosophy which should see the device used in all manner of ways, and hopefully expanding beyond it’s current limited edition production. See the demo video to see how fun it looks as a step sequencer or remix tool.

Still waiting on that cable-less future. One step closer: this wireless midi controller.

by Sean Healy, April 21, 2006 0 comments

Motor Mouths : Fleshy

Meat vs machines, round thirty-seven, insert coin.

Am making a videoclip in Brisbane* soon for a Kaiju mega monster inspired battle ( eg Godzilla vs King Kong) featuring the talents of beatboxing MC’s Alan Nguyen (Anal Cookie) & Hayato ‘Potato Master’ (who raps in Japanese over crazy beats). Which seems as good an occasion as any to gather in one place, a whole bunch of gobtastic beatboxing related links accumulated in the last few months.

Kid Beyond(.com) – Check his homepage for a crazy video showing how he uses Ableton live software, a midi foot pedal unit and microphone to build up layered loops of beatboxed sounds on the fly. The video cuts nicely between his home studio and and his huge adrenalized live sound.

Jamie Lidell – Live at Royal Festival Hall in 2004(video), whipping it up with a microphone & a table of gear. Feverish beats, vocals and all kinds of sonics channelled thru the mic. Bonus point for his jacket which seems to be made out of VHS tape.

Slayer’s Angel of Death, as beatboxed by Dokaka ( Japan ). Dokaka is also famous for “Katamari on the Rocks”, a beatboxed song for the Katamari computer game, recording ring tones for mobilephone companies & is soon appearing in Bjork’s upcoming Spike Jonze videoclip – ‘Triumph of the heart’ as a ‘hummer at the bar’. Bizzi. And has stacks of mp3s.

*Brisbane is also home to the subtropical heir to the chipcore beatbox throne – Collapsicon (.net), a meat bleep manifesto given human form. No need for game speakers when the boy’s around.

Scrambled hackz – Again if yet unseen, software that can translate vocal input into music videos cut from slices in it’s database. Nutso.

Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box (2002), directed by Joey Garfield

Beatbox videos onYoutube.com? Plenty.

And alas, Japanese (noise?) beatboxer Gulpepesh who graced our shores last year alongside Ove-naxx, appears to be invisible online.

by Sean Healy, April 21, 2006 0 comments