Todays feature comes from the Recipient.cc collective in Italy who a few months ago did this beautiful projection mapping job on the Pirelli Tower in Milan for Adidas Boost.
Along with the video showing the live visual effects on the building in action they've also made a great behind the scenes documenting the process from start to finish.
Read MoreEarlier this week one of our favorite Quartz Composer gurus Minuek shared two new sets of free video loops over on his blog. Aside from being solid clips for VJing, we thought they were particularly noteworthy because they were made using QC compositions and recorded as real-time output,
With the Space World clips i was really trying to make something that looked like it wasn't made in Quartz Composer. I had been discussing QC with someone and they said you can always tell it's made in Quartz so i set out to change that. When i first posted some pictures plenty of people were curious if its was all quartz.
Read MoreOur end of semester & special artist rate sale is over, but I wanted to take a quick break to share some of the things people have sent in to us so far..
Read MoreDeborah Johnson, perhaps better known as CANDYSTATIONS, is a self described “ALL PURPOSE MEDIA ANIMAL. FULL ON SHOW DESIGNER," and there's really no better way to put it. Among the many noteworthy projects of her career, the last few years has included several close collaborations with musician Sufjan Stevens, making music videos, Christmas-themed comedy sketches, in addition to designing and performing the live projected visuals as part of the extravagant setup on the acclaimed Age of Adz tour during 2010-2011. The results of that project, some of which you can see in the trailer and photos below, are a pretty mind blowing combination of skillfully hand crafted images with a special level of pure digital insanity to match the equally intense music, stage and costume designs.
“When I designed the visuals for Sufjan Stevens’ the Age of Adz, Sufjan and I wanted parts of the show to feel very artificial and Tron-like, complementing the awkward, handmade brilliance of artist Royal Robertson and my own designs. I also wanted to be able to ‘play’ visual instruments along with the band. I asked Anton Marini to help me with the Quartz Composer elements for the set. I stipulated the design, motion and provided the graphic elements while we worked together to program the comps. It got a little loopy at times. There’s something called ‘Rainbow Control’ in one of the patches, for instance.”
“I now use VDMX when I am performing. It enables me to both cue and composite pre-rendered compositions while incorporating QC animations and real-time effects. Along with a MIDI controller, I often use audio-input to affect parameters and VDMX’s audio analysis is fantastic. All this allows me to keep an essential ‘live’ element in my visuals while retaining a substantial amount of control and intention. This is important to me as a visual performer – especially when I am working with musicians.”
Age of Adz: Spaceboy
Age of Adz: Vesuvius
Seven Swans
In 2012, international venues Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, the Barbican London and Sydney Opera House commissioned composer Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner (The National), and Sufjan Stevens to create a collaborative song cycle. The musical exploration resulted in eleven intricately layered, metaphorical songs based on our solar system – appropriately entitled Planetarium (all the planets, including the Sun, Moon and even poor Pluto are represented).
A complementary visual element for the live show was desired, so Deborah was charged with designing a set of interpretive, planetary inspired visuals to be projected onto a custom, 16' black orb (of her own design) that hangs ominously above the band.
After a series of "workshop" performances in Europe and Australia, Planetarium had its respective 2013 U.S. premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March and LA Philharmonic's Disney Concert Hall in April. An excerpt of the track titled ‘Saturn’ can be seen to the right, with some production photographs from the shows below (audience shots can be found on her tumblr).
Planetarium - Earth
Planetarium - Jupiter
If you'd like to read more about her creative work there's also an great recent interview with Deborah over on the iLoveQC blog where she talks in detail about her history coming up as a visual artist, along with plenty of actual software discussion for the video nerds in the audience.
Her current production is for the New York-based string quartet ETHEL – entitled Documerica – based on the 1970's NEA archive of the same name. It will debut at BAM's Next Wave this fall.
Download the Glowing Pictures 'Conception' video performance pack in Hap 720p or PhotoJPEG 720p.
There's so much to say about Benton-C Bainbridge and V Owen Bush of Glowing Pictures that I won't even try to scratch the surface here. We've known them personally — and they've been using VIDVOX software — since the very beginning of the company. Both of them have been working with video for longer than we've been on earth, so to call them pioneers in this field is a bit of an understatement. Over the years the two have worked together and separately on hundreds of live performances, installations, architectural spaces, music videos, Visual Performance workshops, and films for both dome and 3D projection, with a high profile client list that has included everyone in town from The Beastie Boys to Lincoln Center.
As always the duo are involved in a number of projects at a time - they've kicked off 2013 with the 'Vision of the Week' series, 52 completely new video paintings and performances, one of which was the inspiration for the set of sample movies they've produced for todays Visual Performance pack download based on the Cell Shading Experiment presets and After Effects tutorials from designer Matt Trunks.
What we're most excited for is their new Visual Performance program being taught out of Dubspot in NYC where DJs and musicians are showing up to learn how to be visual performers. Their website includes some video tutorials on using VDMX alongside Ableton Live and the APC40, so even if you don't live in the area of Dubspot headquarters they have some knowledge to share with you.
V Owen Bush (left) and Benton-C Bainbridge (right)
Photo by Dave Pentecost, East Village Planetarium
If you'd like to see Glowing Pictures live this spring, they're the resident visual designers of the American Museum Of Natural History's monthly One Step Beyond series. The new 2013 season kicks off May 10th with James Blake, and if you miss that, the next OSB is on June 7th. You can also see them performing on May 17th and 18th alongside V Squared Labs at the Electric Daisy Carnival in NYC.
And this post would not be complete without a major shout out to Nalepa and TeamSupreme for usage of the audio track in the above trailer for the 'Conception' clips pack.
Over the last few years one of the more interesting projects we've been following in the hardware side of VJing has been the development of the *spark d-fuser video mixer. Started as a tool for pioneering audio-visual group D-Fuse, it is now available to buy direct, shipped from stock. To celebrate this retail release we're joined by Toby, it's creator, for a special guest tutorial with tips for VDMX users.
Read MoreOver the weekend on Facebook we caught wind of what looks to be a one of a kind collaboration between composer Dan Visconti and visual artist Simon Tarr that premieres this Friday at Carnegie Hall titled 'Glitchscape'. Leading up to the event, Simon has been blogging about his preparations, bouncing between apps like After Effects, Cinema 4D, Quartz Composer and VDMX as he feverishly extracts images that have been in his head for over a decade.
Read MoreIn case you missed it last week, The British Arts Council shared on youtube an in depth interview with live cinema pioneers The Light Surgeons about their current documentary SuperEverything* which took them to Malaysia to collaborate with local musicians and visual artists.
Read MoreJoining us from the road with Deadmau5 for our first post of 2013 is the infamous Momo The Monster--
In addition to his career as a visualist, Momo is known for the Make Space Ship and FiddlyBits apps for iOS and a bunch of other projects you can check out over at the mmmlabs website. You may also recognize his work with The Glitch Mob featured on our homepage.
We've put together a super edit of the videos he's sent us from the road on their non-stop stretch of holiday shows to watch- Then if you're curious for some behind the scenes continue on to the "How to do a Deadmau5 End of Year Show" tutorial.
Welcome to the inaugural post of the Vidvox blog! We never though we'd have a blog, but while we were putting together the tutorials we realized that they were missing something: a place to comment on all the errata that doesn't quite fit neatly into the categories of tutorials. Between this blog and the ever-expanding tutorials, we hope to make this a place where everybody who uses VDMX will be able to find useful tips and interesting techniques to explore.
To help us kick off the new additions to our website, this week we'll be collaborating with master A.V. remixer Jonny from the Eclectic Method on our first series of artist technique tutorials. It's a three part series titled HOW TO DO AN ECLECTIC METHOD REMIX. Part one is available today with the rest coming over the next few days.
So what does an Eclectic Method remix look and sound like exactly?
[ Go check them out on youtube, watch a couple more mixes, we'll wait.. That Bill Murray one is pretty funny.. ]
So if you've enjoyed that and you want to get a sense of how this is accomplished, as promised, there's a brand new tutorial to help get you started. Or if you'd just like to learn more about the Eclectic Method check them out on the facebook and twitter and what the heck even the wikipedia has an entry that you'll want to read.
