This gallery contains 20 photos.
A Korean friend happens to live down the hill from this impressive off-the-beaten track garden of sculptures. Located on the hill above a small town in Gimpo and in sight of North Korea, the garden’s leaflet states that the works … Continue reading
Tried to fill the screen of my video camera with as many screens as I could fit in. Managed to squeeze in 12 screens – an old rear-projection TV, another cathode-ray TV, three computers, an extra monitor connected to a computer, a portable DVD player, an iphone, an ipod video, a mini-TV and two projectors projecting onto screens. Filmed from three cameras. Plus, a few extra DVD players were needed to feed signals.
Our household happened to have a lot more electronics than the average one, but what with the proliferation of new TVs, mobile phones, MP3 players, and digital cameras – I’m sure many North American households have their own fair share of screens.
As to why I selected certain images to be on the screens, I’ll leave that to the viewer’s imagination … but I will say more of my energy simply went into setting up the room, and we were in the process of moving out, so there wasn’t time to really work develop the images or create the kind of dialogue between the screens that would have been worth exploring.
The process of moving reveals an ongoing war of attrition fought by objects. I filled this box with stuff I don’t need for at least 6 months. The question is how much longer than 6 months could I go without these things?
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
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:
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.
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:
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.