Tag Archives: video

OpenGL Then and Now

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From the forthcoming festival show: the video for Memorial Discotheque, created using real time OpenGL tools in 2002 and 2012. Surprising to say – mostly the same tool, still working a decade later.

This is a patch in Visual Jockey, with titles added in AFX. The aspect ratio is DV, so it looks squashed horizontally here.

The same section generated in Element 3D, a near real time plug in for AFX. All the 3D was done with this.

Perhaps surprising – most of this scene was done with the same Visual Jockey tool as in 2002. Only the globe is from Element 3D. The same old tool on a hideously more powerful machine.

Again, same patch as 2002. There’s some motion blur added in AFX. Visual Jockey still runs fine on Windows 7, and obviously loves the display cards of ‘the future’.

Some bonus shots from Fold, from around the same time.

Both in Cinema 4D. But the latter escapes the green wash of the Matrix!

One problem with having more realistic joints is the arms wouldn’t bend as far. Had to refine some of the moves to be possible.

Reclusive and Colourful

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Part 1: Colour.

Having complained about the lack of colour sense in most synthetic video I’m doing the required reading. Colour is a rabbit hole, deep and treacherous. I know Johannes Itten, grew up with his Art of Colour in my parents house like the family bible.

He has blue, yellow and red sitting there looking as if they mean business. I don’t know how Itten could run this fallacy so long when ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’ don’t actually make ‘green’. Not using pigments and not in any printing process I’ve used, where yellow, cyan and black are required (and a spot colour more likely). I haven’t yet found where the idea started. I’m halfway through Gage’s Colour And Meaning and he’s not yet decided. He has however dug into an issue that concerns me by blaming Newton solidly for wrapping the rainbow into a circle simply because it recapitulated the octave. And there it is in Itten’s colour wheel, neatly broken into 12 ‘notes’. Newton is looking the cause of centuries of bullshit by that one conceit.

Gage is thankfully free of most philosophical musings although he does jump back and forwards in time to make a point. He turns out to be have been a visitor at my work, but died this year. (Worse still, there was a showing of Ralph Balson’s paintings at my work in the first year I was there and because I am a dumbfuck musician I didn’t know who it was about).

Working at an art college is damn fine for big glossy books about colour theory. But the best book so far turns out to be a very simple and practical one by Hilary Page. She takes you from diagrams of the retinal cells to mixing watercolours in an economy of pages and touches on everything you need to know about the psychology of colour and how to tweak it. This is the text I would force any video artist to read before they start wobbling their rectangles.

Actually it makes me think about interfaces that can get away from Red, Green and Blue faders. Something like Kuler should be the front panel.

Part 2: Reclusive.

A … funny? sobering event – distant family in the USA needed to contact us urgently. Apparently that was difficult and annoying because I’m visible but not easily contactable. By current norms I’m not ‘social’ enough. A recluse.

Vimeo and YouTube and GMail and Windows Live and Linked In (which ended up being the venue) 7 email addresses and a whole host of specialist sites isn’t enough. Being ‘social’ is as programmatic as the days of presenting your visiting card in the drawing room. In lieu of FaceBook I have invites showing up at Linked In that are obviously not about locating next year’s employment damnit.

Look, you spend 20 years with some kind of net address (OK so some of that was fidonet but it still counts) and then you’re not social enough. Screw it. DO I HAVE TO BE ON FACEBOOK?? ADVICE? (If you are one of my creepy stalkers don’t answer that thanks).

YouTube can kiss my ass. UPDATE: Who the hell are IODA?

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Dear TomEllard,

Your video, Dead Eyes Opened Sydney January 2010, may have content that is owned or licensed by IODA.

No action is required on your part; however, if you’re interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
- The YouTube Team

 

Dear YouTube.

The composer of the music, the recording artist, the maker of the video and the person that posted it ARE OBVIOUSLY THE SAME PERSON.

You idiots.

You have a million people uploading shit they stole from where ever. So instead, you send out a pissy insulting form letter to somebody that contributes their own work. A form letter that offers 4 tiny boxes where I am allowed to reply that hey, I have no idea who IODA is, why they should be able to do this, what it has to do with the fact I am promoting my own goddamn work on your site.

And it’s the SECOND time you’ve done this. You haven’t even dealt with my first dispute yet.

I am going to try walking and calming down, but the temptation is to go somewhere else because hey, you really are the exact opposite of everything worthwhile.

Tom Ellard, a person that makes shit that you monetize.

UPDATE:

Through my own efforts I find that IODA is a US based distributor of my music. They have a non exclusive sub-license, which is kind of like having a franchise in that territory. It doesn’t give them any exclusive rights – certainly they don’t own the synchronization rights of my music, and that’s exactly what YouTube’s automated system can’t understand. It’s twigged a match between the soundtrack of these videos and their licensed material. Being automated it starts a process which is inflexible and stupid to any nuances in the situation.

Somebody at IODA has countered my claim that they don’t own my videos: at least that’s the probable reason why the dispute robot has rejected my disputation. But no one has actually emailed another person to ask, hey is this TomEllard account ‘official’?

It is (as always) up to the artist to start fixing the mess that the companies have created ‘on their behalf’. This begins with human communication; I have started that. It involves pressure; I have damaged the videos on YouTube with an annotation and an audio swap. This may help the companies involved to feel a small amount of monetary and PR displeasure, the only sensation that they can feel. I have provided an alternative venue on Vimeo. I always wanted to do that, so this is as good a time as ever.

As soon as somebody notices that their robots have screwed up, I will be happy to put things back as they were. In the meanwhile they can ‘own’ a web page that explains just how dumb they are.

At the heart of Visual Music is…

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Thanks to people for the sympathy for the olds. But they passed on a month or so ago (obits take time to write) and I think they were unhappy waiting for the inevitable. So, better to have moved on. Unfortunately the “Rosabelle believe” signal that was to be sent back has failed to appear, possibly as they are otherwise engaged.

I am now at the end of stage one of the doctorate, and trying to cram paper writing inbetween the job and the other job and preparing for the next shows. I have to admit I’m a bit behind, not too badly considering I’m doing three careers at once. But today I had to admit I didn’t see what was coming. I knew there was something pretty slippery inside the entire notion of visual music, but lord help me I didn’t expect

Annie Besant. You can Google it if you like, won’t take long.

It’s like a onion. You start peeling away, finding little bearded men and their light organs, futurist films and all the usual early 20th century modernist rigmarole. You note that Kandinsky mentions Theosophy. So does Shoenberg. Mondrian. Thomas Wilfred, creator of the Clavilux turns out have started work in a Theosophical think tank. You try find the connections – here is Goethe and his ideas on light – there is white and black that add up to blue or yellow, depending on which way you tilt the prism. How does this idea get to Kandinsky? Well it’s Goethe after all but, now you find frickken Rudolf  Steiner as the middle man, peddling mystical interpretations of Goethe’s higher levels. We haven’t even gone near the lunatic fringe and we’re already deeply embedded in yogis and astral claptrap.

Which is rather bewildering.

Because what I thought I was doing was using a psychological tool to categorise video, simply as a means to performance. No great claims to universal truth here – simply the need for something that puts on a good show. Disclaimers apply. No attempt to make aesthetics into a metric any more than 24 frames a second is the UrSprache.

But it is quite possible that what I am doing is part of an occult history which I think anyone would agree IS COMPLETELY ROCK N ROLL. In the early 20th century they believed in colours. Now here I am, believing in psychometrics. Paging Mr. Foucault, white courtesy telephone. Following my own ‘World’s Fair’ rule (50 percent scholar 50 percent drunken maniac) I really should take this thing and run it as far as I can get away with it.

I wouldn’t have to change a thing. All I do is change the way I speak about it. Chuck a bit of Jung in there. Oops.

Actually Jung is the best guide here. He’d pop out of the coffin and say “look, you’re at the right age for the big one. The big kapow. This is the moment in life where you put together everything you have so far learned, push the red button on the blender and come out with a nervous breakdown and a theory of everything that will leave them guessing for years to come. You’re already a closet Freudian, come over the dark side.”

He’d then pull out a bunch of photographs that I recently scanned that my old man took on a lake near Zurich. That lake. Synchronicity.

I think what I’ll do is hold it on the right side of sanity until I get the floppy hat. Then go apeshit. Over the last few years the siren call to occultism has been growing, and there are few pleasures left to the older man. I will drown in cymatics and entrainment, colours and thought broadcasts, ghosts and video synthesisers. There will be FUN.

No, not THAT far.

(Actually having read back over this entire post I think I might need some sleep.)

Software! Feck! Arse! Part 2.

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(In which your host visits Apple and finds Enlightenment.)

I went to Apple. Despite the presentation, I found out what I needed to know.

Before we go any further they want to dispel some rumours. I am now sure that they are not abandoning the professional market. They are not dumping Logic. The new look of FCPX doesn’t represent a dumbing down of the software. Nor is the retail division taking over the professional division.  That’s all BS.

The pity is that much of the furore could be avoided if they would just stop talking like North Korean Central News. Because Final Cut X does represent a forward looking paradigm. Just hopelessly marketed in Jobspeak and not tested in the real world.

First I was shown the pre-canned demonstration. Yes, I know that Apple is the leader in NLE. Yes I know that Final Cut arrived around the same time as DV. I have seen the car race footage plenty of times. Can we please talk about my particular needs?

Nope. The presentation was going to be made and all bullet points ticked off. Apple are so ‘on message’ that they ran as if I was 200 people. So I just sat back and watched it again, keeping my story lines and compound clips magnetised, taking in the practical needs. Two days later I clicked & suddenly thought WHY THE HELL DIDN’T THEY JUST SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE! Well they did. Just not to me, as much as to their phantom 200 audience. My own subconscious had to translate it.

I’ll give you an exaggerated comparison. Suppose the whole of YouTube was all one videotape. The bit you wanted to watch was 23 hours and 15 minutes ‘down the tape’ and so you fast forwarded to the bit you wanted and played it from there. The next clip was at 7 days, 13 hours and so you fast forwarded to that and so on. Sound stupid? Yes, and yet that’s the way we think when edit on a time line – as if we were using tape. We use timecode and bins because that’s the history.

Instead YouTube has many small clips (< 10min) that we sort by filters and keywords and jump between them making playlists. And that’s more how Final Cut X is supposed to work. Load up your footage and it starts by auto tagging, for example with face recognition, hue etc. You then define the sections that have semantic meaning – the example given was ‘splashing water’. Tag those and they become a new folder. Your project becomes a semantic web.

Bring those clips down into the storyline. Snap clips or side stories to the main storyline. Instead of scrubbing, jump through the timeline by selecting from the metadata over at the left. You’re not cutting a clip so much as you’re arranging a report from a database – which has as much to do with Filemaker as Final Cut. In a world where assets and storage are exponential the idea is not one of cutting but gate keeping.

Now this sounds brilliant in theory, but right now it’s really clumsy. For a start they’re still trying to conform everything into ProRes by background rendering (versus Adobe’s reply where they assemble mixed resolutions of MP4 straight off the camera card). Final Cut X is very much ‘of the moment’ in that it fulfils current engineering challenges – not based around file management in the OS, not bound by physical volumes, non linear, semantic etc.  But the actual file organisation must be rigid for the apparent file organisation to be flexible. Once you’re inside it all seems fine. Outside, in reality, the way that the files are managed is unusable by our systems.

(At some point OSX might become completely free of folders, and group files by searches and tasks. It will then be a super version of Sugar. I don’t know if that is really a great idea, but software companies keep having it.)

They have forgotten that people need familiar metaphors. Pro Tools is a big tape recorder when there’s no actual need to be a tape recorder – but people are happier for that. SONY Vegas has most of the benefits without the drawbacks – it is exceedingly fast, gives real time previews, has a database system, and yet it follows the familiar metaphor. If Apple had made a variant of Vegas the world would sing their praises.

Having completed the demonstration we got into questions. While acknowledging my requests, the reps followed the now familiar reply: each time Apple moves everyone adapts. We will adapt to their ideas, or else.

And that was really the crux of the meeting. They want to play chicken, which works great with individual users. But I can’t steer an entire university, revise IT structures that have taken 2 or more years to put in place. I can’t retrain myself, to then retrain my staff, then have them retrain the students in time for next semester. And why the hell would I want to? It won’t make better art.

FCPX stemmed from bleeding edge engineering, it has met reality, and now needs a rethink about what is needed rather than what is clever. In a few years it will be ready.

Readers Comments MacWorld August 2036

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DoCfan
Shen is way off the mark with the iDocX review. Apple have come up with a new paradigm for medical treatment here and Big Medicine don’t get it because they are stuck in the old ways. So surgery needs precision – iDocX has it in spades! Simplifying the tool set just means rethinking the way you work. So many doctors work solo now, the group features are overrated (more)
262 people liked this

Laughingas
Just because you did the full medical degree doesn’t make you an expert in everything. This is great for people who just operate around the home. I do all the doctoring in my family and the simple interface is going to make appendectomy heaps easier.
31 people liked this

Galen
iQuackX more like.
117 people liked this

Nightingale
The so called ‘medical professionals’ are hating on this just because it look a bit like iNursing Express. So what! That works for more people and the ones that really do the healing. You can leave Comprehensive Medical Procedures 7 installed any it’s not like medicine moves that quickly! Apple have said they are going to bring oncology back on board real soon.
26 people liked this

Todd
Loving the new Psychiatric Magic Wand. Haters gonna hate!
9 people liked this

Galen
Try it on yourself first
76 people liked this

Snips
This is so disappointing. All we wanted was a 256 bit upgrade. I can’t believe I can’t use this with my existing cases.
119 people liked this

Healing Momma
It’s time that hobbyists got a fair deal!!! I am just as good at CANCER as any doctor (that is NO good)  now everybody gets to be a PRACTITIONER so I say GOOD ON APPLE for dropping the price where a MOM can set up too!
2 people liked this

Faustus
This is a serious wall of shit. Can’t collaborate with another surgeon. All the operations have to go in one theatre, no specialised equipment. All the scalpels removed and some crazy gestural selection tool that I can’t use while staunching flow with a sponge. I’m seriously going to have to look elsewhere after 10 years of practice with CMP. This really sucks.
84 people liked this

R.D. Laing.
How does it feel to be a complete Adobe Fainboi?
11 people liked this

Faustus
I don’t work for Adobe. And I know Practioner CS5 has big problems with leaving metal in the cavity. I just don’t have three hands to sponge and suture at the same time.
43 people liked this

Old Fart
You people just should realise that doing it analogue is the only real way.
0 people liked this

Able Baker
Christ everybody getting all worked up. It’s not like this is anything important like film production or something.
5 people liked this

Murmur
Just because it’s not film production doesn’t mean medicine isn’t a real profession, I hate the way people bandy around the word ‘professional’ like its just a sales tool. I spent 6 years becoming a doctor. My parents wanted me to be an experimental musician, but my heart wasn’t in it. Medicine is professional too, it makes people better and (more)
0 people liked this

Get A Real Job
nt
997 people liked this

Coach Handbags
The lady has the predilection for quality? Is Coach only Coach will satisfy the distinguished and illustrious ladyship! Look she is walk down the road with Coach on shoulder and all the traffic is stopped in admire for it. www.coach.sellingdirect.com.ch
1 person liked this

 

Rough Cut

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I envy people that teach medicine. I mean, I know how hard it is and  all those sick people can’t be fun. But at least the company that ‘makes people’ doesn’t often decide to do a complete reboot. Three heads and seven legs, that sort of thing. No, my job is to teach video production and in my business I have to teach something that can at any moment be made more magical.

Just this week Final Cut Pro became ever so more magical. I mean, pink winged unicorns vomiting rainbows magical.

I’ve heard people call it a debacle. Some say catastrophe. I don’t think that’s a nice thing to say; if a company wants to have sexual congress with a dog, then as long as the dog is consenting I’d say well that’s just thinking different.

What’s the problem? Well for a start you know that some naughty software doesn’t allow you to save so that an older version can load it. That’s called ‘backwards compatibility’ and while PhotoShop is good about it, After Effects is very naughty. Apple have come up with something very magical here in that there is no ‘forwards compatibility’. Final Cut can’t load files made by Final Cut. Just stop there for a moment & be impressed.

It will load files made by iMovie and strangely it has iMovie’s interface and key commands and features and … well y’know one would be tempted to say that this just might be based on iMovie. Y’know? Just sayin’.

Something that was previously intended to handle feature films is now optimised for My Family Vacation. I start a new project and it is saved as an Event. Like My Birthday or My Divorce, rather than say Scene 17 of an existing storyboard and script. What used to be the asset browser now has that … that … well you kind of have to see it for yourself. They have a time line with word wrap. Because long horizontal data imagery works just so well in vertical containers.

Where does the footage go when you capture it? In Movies in your user folder, Silly! OK, so suppose my students are working in a group and need to organise multiple access? Or their user folders are on a server? Hello? Apple? Anyone left in the Pro Applications division? Have you really dropped Final Cut Server?

Once I have managed to edit something, and for the most part the editing is as before (although it’s a bit like an episode of Star Trek where the parallel universe is nearly the same as ours but Captain Kirk is secretly evil) then I get to the point where I want to save this thing. But you can’t save or export your project. You can only SHARE your movie on one of the usual clouds.

OK, so Apple have worked out that they can sell a lot of this to the home enthusiasts, fuck the clique that have been buying it so far. You can’t blame them, it’s in Apple’s blood to find the sweet spot where ‘it just works’, and they dropped the ‘Computer’ a while ago. But I can’t teach on this, technically or in practice and I’m now wondering who is going to take up the industry standard, how long that will take and what the hell I can do in the mean time. If it’s choice between Avid and Adobe, then the latter will do.

When combined with the forthcoming Ipad style OSX Lion the future of the media labs is looking a bit ‘finger painting’. Plenty of people like using iMovie on their iPad. It’s a great simple way to knock up a YouTube video. But we don’t all want to work that way, we are not all average and I don’t want to teach average. Not everything is a cat joke destined for YouTube.

I’ll keep the old version running as long as I can.

Doctorate Update <— poem

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Time for a updocdate!

So at the end of year one I had a structure that went like this:

An Artist encodes their personality into the character of the artwork through a process of mimesis. The artwork can then be decoded by a receiver by use of a shared code, which is art culture. What is Art? It is a codec. It is a basis shared between the two people involved in the exchange. A chair is a chair. But a chair made with the intention of being an artwork requires the viewer to draw upon their expectations of what an artwork means. I’m not going very far outside basics here.

If accepted, we could measure the character of the artwork as a representation of the artist’s personality. As a representation, it does not break the rule that only a person can have a personality. So we say the ‘music is sad’, the ‘sky is angry’, knowing that representational language is at work. The measurement is not of the artist’s personality but that which they ‘put’ into the work. Woolly words, need more thought.

There are 5 factors which have been shown over an extended period of time to be useful in describing personality. We can use these to retrieve an artwork that has the matching representation. Performance!

So many problems.

Here’s a critique: in the study of moving image a current discussion is about caricature. This is variously defined but involves a payload: the caricature (carry cart) carries a message, often political. It involves exaggeration of the distinctive features of the subject. The exaggeration can be described as subtracting the difference of the subject to an ideal, then multiplying the difference by a factor. So if somebody has a nose larger than average, portray them with an ever larger nose. Or remove everything but the nose.

In media the politics is usually less important than determining which individual differences are required to convey the person.

plus

equals

In fact you probably recognised the character only when the exaggerated features were presented. The moustache, eyebrows and cigar are more effective than the original person. In animation the skill is in finding just those facets needed and no more. (There is a discussion here about peak stimulus that I won’t get into.)

Ok so then is this a caricature?

I am really not sure; I think not.

Here’s another problem. I am dealing with motion graphics. So far my discussion has been around images, which is definitely the right place to start but we can’t stay there forever. Caricature certainly includes motion. My performance instrument not only shows moving images but moves between them. So it is animation, which is creating a representation of life (anima, animal). That aligns with my argument which is a great relief. But it demands the whole work be considered as the sum of motions (motivations) of a personality. If the segments wiggle, my performance is of a wiggling entity.

Suffice to say I haven’t got an answer just yet. But I think my intuition at the very beginning was correct – the personality of the composer is involved. A VJ selects clips and performs them – it’s her personality that animates the work. I may not have to code this any more than a piano has to write its own melodies.

Worse. The procession of images requires that I account for montage. The Kuleshov Effect:

The preceding image has a defining effect on the next, and so no segment can be viewed in isolation. Show a depressed segment, followed by a neutral segment; the neutral segment takes on the depressed hue. So then, is my machine misrepresenting the emotional contour? Again, no. Paint doesn’t have to change colour to conform to the furniture – it’s the designer that makes the compensation in their viewing…

… BUT …

the device must allow that the clips be seen in context, so that the operator can make that call.

In fact my sin is to be confused between the personality of the elements and that of the operator. If I am confused I had better make sure the examiner isn’t!

The Joan Part 3: Apple Akbar (Update)

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Before we get going, here’s a party trick. Find an article about the societal function of grooming amongst primates. Where ever you see the work monkey, replace it with band. For grooming use remix. The article now about the societal remixing between bands still makes perfect sense. Especially the bit about pulling off the skin for extra salt. I remix, and am remixed and the hidden bonding purpose of the process is getting elephantine. Surely a cup of tea would be an easier way?

OK, so where were we? I was going down to inspect a theatre with 3D Steve on Monday, discovered that Monday is public holiday & realised how when you’re running three jobs you don’t know arse from cake hole. Steve was similarly confused as to how many weeks can fit into a second. Academics, huh. They don’t really work.

I found a moment and loaded up the video for Walrus Guitars into VDMX and tried to play it at 720p. While fully aware that Apple computers are the one God and Steve Jobs is the Prophet PBOH, playback still sucked. Oh it’s pretty good but pretty good isn’t what I need. Normally you can allow the frame rate to wobble in VJ sets – dropped frames are just another effect. But what I need is rock solid video which keeps an external sequencer clocked.

(There was also a complete upgrade of VDMX a month ago and I didn’t notice. Arse. Cake hole. They changed the entire interface, as learning curve is the best part of new media am I right? I am always right.)

OK so how about running the video on QuickTime and sending out MIDI Time Code? Doesn’t seem to be an app for that. There’s a QuickTime player that follows MTC, but as it’s Java based the authors have dumped the Mac for dumping Java. PC version is still available and I’ll follow that up.

Here’s a thought: load the video up in Ableton Live. Set that copy of Live to be a MTC master. Now another machine can run the sequencer and receive MTC. OK cool, so I loaded Walrus Guitars into Live. Played it, that’s looking good. Dragged the video over to the external monitor and all hell broke loose. Black lines strobed through the video eventually leading to both screens having seizures and, as Macintoshes never crash, catatonic at the beach if you know what I mean.

I ‘gift economied’ this image. Because it is art.

Maybe I don’t use the Mac. At least I need to find some other software that plays video on the external screen without done pooh itself. Looks like Soundtrack Pro will take a MTC input.

Maybe I play the video off the DELL laptop instead, 8 cores it should be able to do it.

(Just for shits and giggles I installed OSX 10.6.7 on the DELL, got it it to boot, realised that it was a completely useless achievement and took it off again. I don’t know… Hey – now look – the best selling app on the iPad is something that reproduces your Windows desktop on the iPad screen. If that doesn’t tell you that the rhetoric is indivisible by the reality I dunno what. In the ‘post PC’ era what do people most want? – to use their PC. Case closed.)

OK so, when the temperature next goes above freezing, to do:

  • See if Soundtrack Pro can play a video and send MTC at once. Answer – no, but it will ‘chase’ MTC. What about Logic?
  • Try out the DELL as a MTC slave. But I don’t want to be transporting the DELL. The DELL is too nice.
  • Chip icicles off my bed cover while fighting a sense of impending doom.

UPDATE

Daniel says try Reaper. Will do!

Looks like playback is choppy no matter what I use – except QuickTime player itself. I have a suspicion. Maybe the drive is fragmented? NO! Macintosh Drives are NEVER fragmented. You don’t have to defrag an OSX disc because oh shut up and lets have a look.

Fuck. My test file is in 231 fragments. In fact the whole hard drive looks like Swiss cheese. Bought a copy of iDefrag (which makes OSX cost another 30 bucks people, but hey you do get GarageBand) and I’ll start doing the hard drive version of Aliens 2.

Meanwhile, yeah, I’ll probably need a Firewire 800 external. Or maybe USB3 or whatever stuff the computer people have come up with in the last few weeks. Sigh.

Dreadful old 3D

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Ow. ow ow ow ow. Good God, the Heart of the Party video.

3D animation was once a dog that walked on hind legs. Didn’t matter if it it was done well, just that it could be done at all. My first render – 1987 – was the infamous reflective sphere on a checker board. Fuck you, it was amazing to see that take shape over 6 hours or something.

Not mine. Somebody made this in 2010.

Heart of the Party 1994. Rendered on an Amiga running Imagine. Was it two Amigas? I think so. One went at 24MHz I recall, which makes the average current PC about 92 times faster – wait – with hyper threading about double that.

Oh look, reflective sphere. Pity you didn’t actually have a damn sky so half the thing is pitch black. So make a wedge shaped box and tile the artwork over it. Then roll the ball around. Brilliant. I think I had about a month before a show to do this… oh yeah that’s right – I played the passes onto SuperVHS and then we edited it on Mic Gruchy’s AVID system, which had a 2 Gigabyte hard drive or something. 64 colours on screen all at once. There are analogue tape drop outs all the way through this horror which adds injury to insult to mockery to satire.

Heart of the Party 2003. Somebody has bought a copy of Poser! Even the Poser guy looks crestfallen.

What is this ... skullcap?!

I recall this had a hell of lot of work involved. The background, the lady, the gent and titles were all animated layers that had to be passed through a composite before being placed on the back plane. Oh yeah and those score wheels are all separate cylinders with modeled numbers. It’s not the amount of work it’s the lack of art direction. And really huge cocktail glasses.

Some attempt at a story line, which was a serious waste of time given it was for the Big Day Out. Anyway – nice to see Posette getting a cameo although they’re still using her in Scientific American today, so I’m not that crap.

Got to love the way the textured stars are bleeding down the front of the skirting. And that algorithmic wood grain. Woo-wee that’s a sweetie! By far the worst thing here is the single infinite light source, washing it all out. So OK, maybe multiple lights were computationally expensive, but surely I could have used two lights? And some shadows? Look there’s motion blur, that’s something. Again this is the impossible gig deadline at work, I can’t excuse but I can explain it might take 12 hours a scene.

This is the sort of thing you just walk away from and deny you ever did. Too bad that I have to make another one for this upcoming show.

Top half of Heart of the Party Will Not Die 2011 although this is not quite the finished version. This time I paid money for someone else’s basic model and found it was really horribly basic. I mean my pop bumpers were better in 1994. Spent about a week replacing almost everything or adding detail, laying out the decals and painting the wood. As you can see it’s got more than one light source. Now I have to set up the animated materials to make the lights flash.

It’s funny that there are now pinball games that look as good in real time, it’s just that I can’t freely animate the camera on those. Probably would end up taking just as long.

This is the tragedy of autodidacticism. When I were a lad, I went to university to learn computer art and they gave me punched cards. Art on computers was your own problem. Couple that with having to do it in public and I have a trail of very bad art that I will never live down. Now we have an art college filled with this stuff … but I wonder what some kid out there is now figuring out on their own?

Anyway just had a retrospective video showing confirmed – 8th of March in New York City. So many bad old videos to sort through to find the decent bits, while accepting that I have to show at least something from the 90′s! So get your bus tickets and get along! I better get back to finishing this bloody pinball machine.