Art for Wasps

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I’d had these freeze-pops in the freezer for ages with no intention of eating them and an empty frame, which I’d been intending for ages to try to make a random, melting painting. With one week to go before moving from Kamloops, I finally got it together to put it all together. At first, some promising patterns and colors started to develop, but the syrupy colored liquid was quickly absorbed into the cardboard, and the final piece ended up looking like lightly-stained paper.
I derived many of the sounds in the soundtrack by playing the free “bees” sound-pack, put out by Tonehammer, and available at: www.tonehammer.com

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Earthdance Party VJ Excerpts

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Here’s a few excerpts from what might be my last VJ gig in the Kamloops area for some time as I’m moving to Vancouver at the end of the month. Anyway, it came together last minute as it was supposed to be an outdoor party, but got changed cause of rain. It turned out to be a nice, little party – cozy, kind of a mini-rave. Thanks to DJ Herbal Vegas and his mates, who were involved in putting the party together.
I came up with a weird screen set-up, using both a large blank, paint canvas next to an extended old-school home-movie type screen. Also had an extra, weak projector, projecting onto a white garage door elsewhere in the room. I couldn’t see the DJs from where I was VJing from, and don’t think I ever did see a VJ list – but I think at least part of the music you’ll hear in this video excerpt came during the set of DJ Kudos.
I’m really enjoying using the Grand VJ software (the new software by the makers of Arkaos). Really like how I can use it to layer effects, triggering the effects from a MIDI keyboard. It seems like some people like the idea of a VJ who creates all their own images – that’s cool for sure, but when I VJ I usually do it for five or six hours, and see that as a good time to jam with other people’s images or just simply experiment. In this clip, you’ll see some BBC Planet Earth lizard footage mixed up with some visual generators, and also from a Doves’ video for “Sky Starts Falling” (directed by Ruben Sutherland), and also a bit of footage from the French nature documentary Microcosmos.

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Kamloops Children’s Museum

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I spent the day putting together a DVD to be played in the about-to-open Kamloops Children’s Museum. Local artist/designer Vaughn Warren and his team have done an amazing job redesigning a few sections of the Kamloops Archives Museum upstairs, including the Secwepemc First Nations section and the Kamloops Victorian section, and in addition creating the new children’s museum in the basement. A puppet theatre has been made in the basement with a background of clouds painted on the walls. They’ve installed a projector mount from the ceiling and I was asked to provide a background visual DVD with a variety of loops, basically a demo of what might be possible or to get some ideas flowing. So, I dug through a lot of the content that comes with the Motion software by Apple (comes with the Final Cut Studio suite) and pulled out loops for things like potential magic shows or outer-space themed puppet shows, as well as lots of clouds.
I dropped by the museum and took a few photos, some around the puppet space, and then a few shots of the museum floor, which doubles as a game-board (for a fur-trading game) and an area map:

kamloops puppet booth

Kamlooops Childrens Museum puppet booth

I also did a set of motion-screensaver type things, animating the museum logo. I really like how it sets up so well for stained-glass-type effects once you start playing with the blend layers. My favorite logo animation is the one where it looks like the logos are spread out like leaves on a tree, and the sun appears to be shining through them.
If you’re passing through Kamloops, be sure to check it out.
My animation skills are pretty minimal, but I did make a simple cloud loop animation which I embedded below. To do this, I created a blue-gradient background in the Motion software, used the bezier tool to draw the hills, give them a radial gradient and a drop-shadow, and then using the bezier-tool, again, drew the clouds. I added a wriggle effect to the clouds to give them the feeling of movement and shifting. Simple stuff, but fun.

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Soul Patch Live at Vaughn 4.0

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This is footage from the birthday party of Vaughn Warren, a Kamloops-area artist, who organized the warehouse parties (amongst tonnes of other stuff) which I VJed at a few years back. He gave me the call to VJ again. Soul Patch, a legendary Kamloops live act, played a reunion show. I love it when I have the chance to VJ for a live act. My VJ booth was located conveniently above the stage, and I pointed my camera at the stage, while effecting it and other footage through my VJ mixer and setup. I loved how it came together at times. I took a few excerpts and taped them together to make this video. In all the multitasking I was doing, I didn’t get around to changing the tape in the camera, so no other footage from the night.
It was an awesome party. Happy birthday, Vaughn!
Check out the flyer, too:

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VJ at Fandango Light Mindz Party

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So, I got a fairly last-minute call to help VJ at the recent Fandango Farms Lightmindz party. That was all the motivation I needed to upgrade from my Arkaos VJ software to the Grand VJ software. I wasn’t the main VJ on this night. That was VJ Elftrance. He did a lot of awesome stuff. Memories already blurry but loved his giant mushrooms, elf animations, and galaxy freak-outs. Joining him from Vancouver was Heidrogen with lighting. I think they’re both connected to Stereoshift, a collective of DJs and visualists who are very active on the coast (Vancouver and Victoria).

Love this new GrandVJ software. I connected in my video camera through Firewire, and then effected the signal. GrandVJ lets you apply several effects at once, which can be triggered from a MIDI keyboard, so it really becomes an FX-keyboard. I would film things around the room or right off my portable DVD player screen and then effect it. Since Elftrance was operating the main visuals for the majority of the night, I could take some time and line up a cool looking effect, and then have him fade the VJ mixer over to what I was doing. I loved the idea that I was creating something out of nothing, in that I didn’t even load any clips into my software, but could simply play off elements in the room.
We had a lot of equipment and software between us. He had two laptops running Resolume and a top-end Edirol mixer, while I had my usual set up of Korg Kaoss Entrancer, Korg Krossfour, portable DVD player, camera feed, and also the new Grand VJ software.
Lots of screens. Lots of fun.
Was a lot of fun.

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I dreamed a bear

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About two weeks before I filmed this, I had a dream of a black bear. In the dream, myself and the bear were in pretty near identical positions. The bear was on the edge of a clearing, upslope from me. I think I was walking near a stream. Suddenly, I saw the bear and for a moment I felt terrified, but quickly calmed down as I realized the bear seemed totally satisfied doing its own thing.
I’ve looked online to see if any particular meaning is attributed to a dream of a black bear. I read a few things, but nothing seemed to relate. I think it may be as simple as the fact that I’d been thinking about living in the Yukon lately.
But, this film is not from the dream. Here we are, on the side of a highway, with lots of cars badly (and dangerously) parked on the side of the highway between Squamish and Whistler. The bear seems to pay no mind, except when it hears a car honk. The funny thing is we drove to Whistler, ate lunch there, walked around, and drove back 3 hours later, and the bear was still there in the same spot, eating. Must have been it’s first meal in a few months.

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Paralympics Opening Ceremonies

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A month before, I watched the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony, and was awestruck by some of the projections, such as the whale swimming along the stadium floor with actual water coming from its blowhole. For a bargain price of $30, I was able to get a seat for the Paralympics Opening Ceremony – I made the mistake of assuming I wouldn’t be able to bring in a camera – I could have get a lot of good footage, but instead all I got was this low-quality iPhone film. There were a lot of awesome projections, some of which I show in the brief clip above. Particularly impressive were these balloon/spheres that drifted across the stadium floor with images being projected onto them.
Using a 3D design program (Kinemac), I wanted to see if I could achieve something similar. This is just a practice test, but the results aren’t bad – five ascending spheres with looping images on them:

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Drink Beer Watch Golf Time Lapse

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We wouldn’t normally watch golf, but we’d heard that some Korean golfers were in contention. Sitting back and watching with a beer, I wanted to do something slightly productive. Normally, I just speed up a time lapse sequence, but in this case I’ve keyframed it so some parts are real-time while other parts are sped-up.
Watching my hand hesitate to pick up the glass and the awkward rhythm, I think close-up shots of certain actions could tell a lot about someone’s character or mood that day.

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Vidtionary Project Presentation

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I’ve posted the occasional video here from vidtionary.com, the online video dictionary I’ve been making. I have also used the exploration of this idea as my graduation project for my Master of Education degree at Thompson Rivers University. I’m happy to say that on February 12th, 2010, I passed the defense. I recorded my presentation that day by screen capture, and here is the recording of the presentation.

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Urban Lights – LACMA, LA

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I visited the Urban Lights installation outside the LACMA museum in Los Angeles. As I walked around it, I had the idea that I could do a mock-up of it in the software Motion. So, that’s what this is – basically, a challenge to myself to create something similar to the Urban Lights within my software. Just took a couple hours – couldn’t really find good-quality images of old lights, but didn’t look very hard either. In no way, did I try to be exact in matching the exact type of light or number, just wanted to very loosely and quickly set up some lights in a similar fashion using a replicator. The actual sculpture has more than 200 lights with 17 different types of light used.

Here’s some raw footage of the actual sculpture site (by Chris Burden, 2008):

There’s a very good multimedia presentation of this sculpture, which I downloaded at this page:
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=161897;type=101

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