Create Digital Motion is proud to be a sponsor of the 2009 MGFest. It’s a huge festival, now covering multiple US cities, covering all aspects of visual technology – including the stuff we especially like, at the convergence of live visuals, VJing, interactive graphics, and music.

Now’s the time to enter your stuff, as we’d love to see readers’ work in the festival (and will be sure to cover it). But it’s also worth noting how smart the organizers have been about the way they do the call for works – instead of an elaborate, multi-page specification where you’re suppose to talk about how this relates to the theme of “cross-species transubstantiation in a post-urban metastasis,” they’ve kept it simple and focus on the work. And they’ve provided different levels of involvement, as well, rather than gear everything to one pole or another, simplistic reels or elaborate proposals – they cover a spectrum. It’s a smart way to do a call for work and one (ahem, anyone listening?) I hope others try.

But without further ado, let’s get to that call. Note that if you enter by Friday, you save a significant amount of cash on DVD submission! Best of luck.

Send your finest minutes, your dreams realized, your fictions animated, your adventures recorded, your sweat and passion woven into something of beauty, and the Motion Graphics Festival will
take it to audiences across the country. Selections will be screened during the 6th annual Motion Graphics Festival tour in Chicago, Boston, Austin, Atlanta and Washington DC.

[ Easy ]
http://MGFest.com/09/Easy
Simply enter a link to a video you think is really good!

[ Medium ]
http://MGFest.com/09/Medium
Send a DVD of a video you made.
Final Entry Deadline: Friday, November 19 - $35, $15 for students
Late Entry Deadline: Friday, December 21- $85, $35 for students

[ Hard ]
http://MGFest.com/09/Hard
Suggest a presentation topic, performance or installation. Motion Graphics Festival 2009 Tour
In its 6th year, MGFest stands as the premier US event showcasing creative motion picture design. The festival presents a year-long, regionally focused program of events. The 5-city tour focuses on motion design, sound design, and film & video technology by hosting: art showcases, exhibits, workshops, classes, panel discussions, studio tours, theater screenings and industry mixers.

Download the Call For Entry Poster:
http://www.mgfest.com/09/mg09Call_poster.pdf

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

If Minority Report has become the benchmark by which gestural interaction is judged, that was always intentional. The film’s production team wanted to work with the people actually developing science fiction-like technology. And it’s sci-fi like technology.

So, let’s not talk about how cool-looking the clip is above – not that it doesn’t look cool. After all, most of what you actually see on the screen is stuff you can do with your desktop computer and some projectors. So the question is, what benefit do you get from really nailing a gestural input? It’s the input that matters.

Even if you engage exclusively your right brain on this, there’s quite a lot that’s impressive – the properties proponents of this kind of interface have been advocating for many years:

• The interface is 3D. Not to overstate the obvious here, but the ability to intuitively navigate in 3D is no small matter. This sort of interface might not work for detailed 3D modeling, but for quicker, more comfortable 3D navigation, the mouse / mouse wheel has always been woefully inadequate. The mouse is fundamentally designed as a 2D pointing device, which is why it requires awkward conventions like WASD keyboard navigation in 3D games. Joysticks work for spatial navigation (ask your friendly fighter pilot who relies on them in life-or-death situation). But actually moving stuff around in 3D requires something different.
• Gestures are intuitive. We hear a lot about gestures, but these are actual, human gestures – the kinds of motions you’d make to a person, the kinds you’d use when running a dog around an agility course. (And, believe me, if you can keep up with a border collie, you’ve got a good interface!)
• It’s collaborative. Here’s an experiment: share your mouse with a friend. How’d that work out for you?
• It could help navigate information. This to me is actually the least convincing part of the demo – but I think that’s an opportunity. We’ve had a chicken and egg problem: our interface is 2D, so our information is 2D. Sure, there’s the odd exception, like Google Earth – but how much time do you use Google Earth compared to Google Maps? Thought so. Some of the demos here remind me of Apple’s 1990s tag navigation interface for the Web. Others return to the odd, needlessly-3D photo organizing app model that seems to permeate these demos. (And until you can shout “enhance” at your computer like on Star Trek to see some tiny area of an image, I wonder how useful that will be.) I think we have to re-learn how to organize information in three dimensions, having done it in two dimensions for so long.
• It blurs the lines between computing and performance. The reason we focus so much on live performance on this site is that, at its heart, it’s all about real-time communication. If you can make something work live onstage, or live in a club in front of drunken people, you’ve probably mastered it on some important level.

Quartz Composer/VDMX tutorial no 1: The bouncing ball from goto10 on Vimeo.

Trying to learn Apple’s free visual patching tool Quartz Composer, useful for making your own filters and simple generative effects?

Or perhaps you’re learning VDMX, the brilliant, semi-modular Mac-friendly visual tool – which also happens to host Quartz Composer compositions as effects or generative sources?

Well, good news for you: readers have a ton of tutorials for both, thanks to some intrepid readers in comments on that fantastic-looking CONTAKT/Richie Hawtin show.

First up, Joris de Jong aka Hybrid Visuals has started a series of tutorials on VDMX and Quartz Composer – two delicious tastes put together. And he points us at some other useful tutorials, too. Some of my favorites:

Ilias Bergstrom has created a tool for mixing Processing sketches live in performance. (Thanks, Bart!) The resulting tool lets you cross-fade between sketches and easily host a series of sketches in a gig. The process is pretty straightforward:

1. Use the included Foetus library with your sketch to prepare it for use (your sketch needs to use the OPENGL renderer, but I generally find that to be the best route, anyway)

2. Initialize your set for use in the code, setting it up to respond to input if desire (which is the whole fun of it, of course)

3. Put all your sketches together in a folder

4. Configure a text INI file to set up your OpenSoundController, so you can control your sets live with OSC-ready hardware and/or software

5. Play your sketches as “synths,” complete with cross-fading!

Put it all together, and you’ve got one bad Mother (watch your mouth!) The first release came out a bit earlier this fall. It comes with the library and some examples built in Max for control. Everything’s GPL v3 open-sourced.

Onar | 3D blog

processing-mother @ Google Code

Ilias and Beau Lotto have also written an academic paper on the tool.

Of course, once you start down this road, you could naturally come up with a lot of other potential features – and it’d be really, really nice to have this basic playback capability in a full-blown VJ host, so you could go back to some traditional clip mixing.

I haven’t had much chance to play with this, so anxious to hear feedback.

Do you play live with Processing? How do you do it? We’d love to hear how different people are working.

You can go hear Onar3d’s music on Last.fm. Something else to listen to while you code.

Updated: PC only for now, but a Mac version is in the works. (Could also be nice to test this on Linux…)

CONTAKT @ Amsterdam from Ali M. Demirel on Vimeo.

David Lublin at Vidvox points us to this fantastic video from CONTAKT, playing live in Amsterdam with Richie Hawtin:

I’ve started to use Kineme plugins for Quartz Composer in my live set. Here is a good example based on ‘tb soundflower’ composition by alx toneburst. I’ve modified it to my performance and controlled variables live through VDMX. It worked great when Richie was playing with the mixer. Special thanks to alx toneburst and Kineme!

I have to get over how great the projection looks. Yes, event planners / promoters / club owners, this is how it’s supposed to be.

It’s also great to see some really lovely generative work. And you can expect more. The Kineme plug-ins are open-source, donation-based plug-ins for Apple’s lovely Quartz Composer.

kineme.net

There are some great little tools in there, including useful utility stuff – work with the Apple Remote, QuickLook, audio devices, cameras – and visual stuff as well, including OpenGL-based tools and a network camera tool. Anyone else using them? Other QC tips? Seems like we need to do an updated Quartz Composer guide soon. (In the meantime, I remain committed to developing some of the stuff I’m working on on the PC, vvvv, and Processing sides!)

Keith, maker of a wearable wristwatch Theremin, sends his Ars Electronica-winning project Moving Mario. Yes, this is just the sort of thing you might think of, but not actually do. He did it:

It’s a gimmick, of course, but I really like the questions it raises. By making Mario’s virtual space physical, you really have to think about the universe the game creates. And as a person interested in the architecture of virtual spaces, it also makes me wonder what else might be possible. (I’m personally still waiting for Mirror’s Edge to hit the PC, though I’ve heard more motion sickness as the transcendent experience than some sort of new sense of virtual motion.)

What virtual spaces have inspired you – particularly as we look at ways of mapping digital projections back onto physical objects?

Remember, too, the gaming-themed art event Game On (with a call for your visualist works and loops) launches on November 22, Australian time. That gives you a few more days (until about the 19th) to get your work in to curator and CDMotion co-editor Jaymis.

Moving Mario project page [The Demos - a site full of other goodness]

I’ve had my VJX16-4 for around 6 months now. It’s no secret that I think it’s an amazing piece of kit, but it’s a tribute to the vision of those crazy Frenchies that every time I think I’m ready to review the thing, I discover something else exciting and have to spend another couple of weeks exploring the new techniques and possibilities made available to me.

Vixid Advanced: Keying and Titling Transparency with Channel Masks from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Music by Edward Guglielmino.

The above video shows some advanced uses of “Channel Mask” keying. The VJX’s keyer functions allow you to select any of the 4 tracks as a “Key Layer” for Colour-, Chroma- or Lumakeying. Additionally, there are “RGB Mask” functions, which use the Red, Green or Blue channel of a selected layer as an alpha mask for the keyed layer. This allows you to use one layer to individually mask the other three layers, or do titling with detailed transparency as displayed above.

As far as I’m aware, no other mixer has this RGB Mask capability. It’s a deceptively simple thing, but once you spend some time experimenting with it, an ocean of possibilities flood your skull, and you need to go for a quiet lie down somewhere.

I have a project launching soon which uses this technique to pretty exciting effect. In the meantime there’s more technical information at Vixid.Noisepages.

Think A/V artists, visualists, and VJs can’t get work? Don’t tell that to superstar production team Addictive TV. They’ve been proving that you really don’t need a trailer for a film any more – just hire a VJ. It started when they created a web viral for the movie Take the Lead, and they went on to remix the Olympics

Now, the only problem is, I think you might actually need a VJ for the entire film to make a movie based on a computer game that isn’t crap. (Maybe Max Payne will be The One … even if it does come eons after anyone was playing Max Payne.) But for a couple of minutes, they can certainly make Max Payne cool; whether that sustains an entire cinematic evening I leave to Mark Wahlberg and the production team.

Even cooler, however: remixing Kristin Scott-Thomas and the music of Cole Porter (top). Cole, I’m sure, would approve, as would Kristin’s Greatest Fan, Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson. (I wish I could remember some lewd comment he made about Kristin, but then, this is a Family Site.)

Best of all? Watch them both at the same time. (Get someone to hold open your eyelids for a full-blown Clockwork Orange-style viewing party. Thanks, Brian Kane.)

It’s good stuff. And things are beginning to align – MGM is posting full films on YouTube, though not necessarily under a remix-friendly license (the usual copyright protections apply).

But could people soon be grabbing popcorn and really watching live cinema? Could VJs replace trailers with the same, generic booming sound effects and some dude saying meaningless lines like “Sometimes, the only way home is to start over again.”

Yeah. I think so. History is on our side, people.

More on Addictive TV:

Addictive TV @ MySpace

addictive.tv

Create Digital Motion interview: Addictive Remix Olympics Live

On Tuesday I assembled a small posse of visualists at the State Library of Queensland to test the venue for our proposed projection mapping setup at the Game On Launch Party later this month.

As with any tech run, we discovered good and bad news. The good: That venue is just as cool as we had expected. The bad: We didn’t have access to the truss we’ll be mounting our projector on for the launch, so “real” 3D mapping isn’t really an option for this project, as we have contributors from around the world delivering content, and our pre-show setup time is extremely tight.

Fortunately, VVVV ninja Kyle McLean came to the rescue with some quick patching which allowed us to identify the most promising surfaces for “2.5D” mapping.

Projection Mapping Test - Game On from Jaymis on Vimeo.

So we’re not going to be able to unleash the full might of our 3D model on the event, but this does mean that content will be a little easier to produce as we’re back to reasonably boring rectangles. Karl Kwasny has also given us some fantastic custom game character illustrations to work with for our animating and remixing pleasure.

More instructions and links to our models and resources are now online at CDM Labs.

If you haven’t already got in touch with me and you’re now totally inspired and would like to get involved, email gameon@createdigitalmedia.net and I’ll bring you into the loop.

CNN Hologram - Behind the Scenes video

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet on, I imagine, zillions of other blogs, here’s how CNN used “holograms” to “beam in” remote correspondents on Election Night. The short answer: green screens and a whole bunch of computer-controlled cameras, for some real-time “Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” action. It continues CNN’s apparent campaign to be the TV network most like sci fi movies. (Hello, Minority Report-style gestural screens!)

Of course, it’s notable for some other reasons – somewhat silly reasons:

• It’s probably the only time someone intentionally added blue fringing to a chroma key effect. Yep, that’s right: the blue halo around the participants had to be added intentionally to emphasize what they were doing, even though fringing is usually what you try to avoid.
• It’s mixing sci fi metaphors like no tomorrow. Princess Leia? Beam me up? Holograms? What? “Cap’n, Scott here! I cannu keep the Death Star from blowing up! These damn Cylons!”
• It’s probably the most inaccurate use of the word “hologram” ever. It’s a chroma key effect. The whole point is, it’s the first 3D key effect I’ve seen in real-time on TV – as far as I know – but keying sure isn’t that exciting if you’ve been watching the weather in the last half century. So they add the word “hologram.” They might as well have called it the “Holodeck” or “transporters” or just “magic.”

Technologically, though, it is very impressive. The real irony here isn’t that CNN used silly magical terminology and played terrifying drum sounds. (During the course of the evening, they had other sound effects that sounded like Nintendo platformer power-ups and massive explosions, as though Obama had just attacked North Carolina with an alien invasion.)

No, the real irony is that this impressive, expressive technology winds up becoming yet another way of doing boring talking heads. I can’t wait to see what happens when someone comes up with a more interesting use for this stuff. Stay tuned.

Create Digital Emotion, perhaps?

Beam me up, Wolf! CNN debuts election-night ‘hologram’