Patricio's Book of Shaders: GLSL in the Classroom

Last week I had a chance to be a special guest for the final presentations in Patricio Gonzalez Vivo's GLSL class at Parsons. One of the big take aways from the class was how versatile the language is, with students presenting projects ranging from web based mapping to 3D Unity worlds, realtime data visualizations in openFrameworks, and of course for live visual performance, all driven using GLSL.

Read More

Behind the Scenes with Brian Randall Projecting Mapping onto Pasty Bodies for Sun Drug's "Wildman" Video

In case you had missed it last week, the newest music video for Sun Drug titled “Wildman” premiered over at the Creators Project. Along with being awesome to watch and listen to, the process behind it has some pretty interesting behind the scene details that co-director Brian Randall shared with us via an excited set of emails and photos.

Read More

VDMX Workshop At Dubspot NYC Featuring Ben Krall On March 29th

VDMX co-creator David Lublin hosts this visual performance workshop with special guest Ben Krall on content creation and performance with VDMX5. Ben will discuss his approach to building the video design for The National's 2013-2014 Trouble Will Find Me international tour and share some of his experiences from video and lighting designs for concert tours, theatrical shows, and architectural / fine art installations. Together Ben and David will discuss approaches to live design, production planning and fabrication, freelancing, and visual art. 

Read More

Mike Latona with Jeff Mills: Shaping Times

Falling into the category of using all the tools at your disposal to make something awesome is this video from Mike Latona and Sean Caruso working with Jeff Mills for some classic techno mayhem in Montréal.

Recently we had the opportunity to take Montréal on an inter-galactic journey alongside techno pioneer Jeff Mills. We transformed the Studio St-Ambroise using over 50 meters of LEDs, a massive video-mapped elephant, moving lights and more, all controlled in real-time using CoGe, VDMX, and the Madlight feature of Madmapper. Our mission during the voyage: to have both the lights and video move harmoniously and seamlessly along with music, while still allowing us to perform with them live. For the lights, Quartz Composer patches with published parameters for each fixture were loaded into CoGe and syphoned to Madlight. Video animations were created in Cinema4D and After Effects and mixed live with VDMX. We also mapped the accelerometers of two Numark Orbit controllers and used audio react on various parameters for both the lights and the video to give them a more organic feel when mixing.

“We're Live” – Blair Neal's TV Face Substitution

This is a long very overdue post on the work of Blair Neal, who after interning with us many many years ago has gone on to be a lead developer at the award winning fakelove creative agency where he makes totally sick interactive installations for some of the worlds top brands. Along with this he somehow still manages to find time to make music videos, live show visuals and share his tools for other artists in the field; no doubt many of you have already probably used his Canon To Syphon app or read his invaluable in depth Guide to Projectors for Interactive Installations or one of his other projects shared online.

Today Blair published a new project he's developing called “We're Live” which involves using real-time face replacement algorithms available in OpenFrameworks to insert his (or any other face) into a live television feed that he's watching at home. It's a crazy amount of fun.

 
 

Along with photos of himself “guest staring” on a variety of popular shows, the blog post includes the technical details and his open sourced, Syphon-enabled face replacing app for download should you want to try this at home with your VJ software of choice.

His blog post also goes into the inspiration and background of the project:

We’re Live allows a user to composite their face (or any face they choose) onto a live television stream. Essentially, anyone you watch on TV can finally look like you….or anyone you want. You could make everyone on TV look like Bill Murray if you really wanted to.

One of television’s greatest powers is in its ability to display very structured and edited views of reality. By watching the fabricated streams of the shows, viewers begin to wish for the interesting, exciting and impossible lives of the characters. They can subconsciously desire the smiles and trouble free lives enabled by buying the products in the advertisements. With this software, viewers can come one step closer to truly seeing themselves on screen.

We’re Live is a project involving live HD cable TV and face substitution software. It is a hardware and software method for doing a real time facial composite/replacement on live television. The original face substitution implementation and cloning shader was created by Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro in 2012. The face tracking algorithm that enables this kind of high quality facial substitution was developed by Jason Saragih.

HERMAN KOLGEN / SEISMIK

Premiered at Mutek Montreal 2 weeks ago, SEISMIK was one from HERMAN KOLGEN we had to get some more details about..

Performance or installation about the vertical layering dislocations

inspired by geodetic phenomenoms, frictionnal slidings, fossil earthquakes and the geologycal modelings, seismik use stress fields to provoque tension between vertical layering dislocations.
using the siesmic data of our planet territories, herman kolgen create, with this new work, nervous stratigraphic audiovisual motifs.

How was it made? Herman Kolgen sent us these images and description of their setup,

We created different app in OpenFrameworks to connect in realtime with the seismik data

and by OSC I control audio+video and my Modular analogue kit
by Syphon the audience can see the net connection and mix with my other clips

If you think this looks cool in your web browser, check the vimeo page for more videos and the Herman Kolgen website for upcoming live shows that might be coming to you later this year!

Behind the scenes of Minuek visuals with MÙM at Looking Outside My Window Festival

From one of our favorite regular guests Minuek comes this stunningly beautiful collaboration with Tupac Martirs and a huge production team to create the visuals for Múm at the Looking Outside My Window Festival.

Below, a few images and some videos from the performance followed by an explanation from Minuek about how the project came to be and his techniques for getting ready for the show.

I was recently invited to perform at Tupac Martirs, Looking Outside My Window Festival in London. The event combine music, art, visuals, performance, dance, cuisine and cinema.

For the Saturday night event I worked alongside lighting director Bambi Buneo first creating visuals for a short set by Bruno Zamborlin and Plaid using Mogees (http://mogees.co.uk/) For this set I ran single Quartz Composer patch that slowly developed for the duration of the set.

The main event of the night was the performance from Múm, All the video had been created created in the 2 weeks before the show after receiving the set list and rendered out in the Hap codec using QTZ Rendang. The benefit of this is the ability to use very high amounts of iteration for building complex scenes. I normally prefer to use as many Quartz patches live as possible. For this show working with a band like Múm required a much more planned process. Working to the setlist I created clips for each track and made heavy use of the Layer Mask.fs effect.

VDMX set up was a 2 channel mixer with 4 Layer on each side. One Layer with the Layer Mask.fs applied to each side and using a Livid Ohm to control all effects and fades live. Other .fs effect used were VVMotion Blur, False Color and Displacement Distortion.

New Free Video Clip Packs from CandyStations

A few months back we did an artist profile on the work of Deborah Johnson, aka CandyStations. It's taken a little time but we've finally gotten her to put together a set of video clips for all of us to add to our VJ loop collections.

In particular these sets include several movies rendered at an extra wide resolution of 3840 x 1080 for display on dual output setups, and the “Flower Drops” clips are all encoded in Hap Alpha making them especially useful as overlays on top of other video layers.

Download the free clip packs here:

or download preview versions of all 22 clips in h264 – sorry no alpha channels with these versions but you can convert them to Hap (or another codec) yourself for a faster download.

Fantasia Drops

Space Nebula

Solar Wind

Stippled Geos

Paper Planes

Ribbons

Flowers

Shape Trip

Variations at 32 x 9 aspect ratio

These clips are totally free to use for non-commercial use. Thanks again to CandyStations!

New free video clips from Minuek

Earlier 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 More