Another round-up of all things pixelish : software, hardware, VJ toys & interweb distributions.
Video Peoples
Everyone’s favourite acid-rave art casualities Paper Rad have been getting jiggy with motion – with a recent Trash Talking DVD release ( ravetastic qt trailer ) , and via www.wyldfile.org a whole range of animated music videos for artists like Beck. Dirty-flash-a-licious, and found via Jaclyn Campanaro’s Image Journal, who has made a very cute tutorial for making Stop-Motion Video Shorts with Your Digital Camera.
The Psychasthenia Society presents satiric storytelling blended with remixed vintage movie stills, live video, and electronic music. Includes an interesting video trailer.
Also on the performance tip – Furthernoise.org hosted a month of Sunday afternoon live audio visual internet performances throughout June 06 in the online file mixing platform visitorsstudio.org. Click to see the 5 performances.
Melb pixelist Kirsten Bradley, one half of Cicada.tv, now has a blog to document her current phase of “obsessive research on timelapse and organic animation.”
Sydney’s Spanky has started demux – a new audiovisual DVD label and blog.
Japanimation? Try the Optical Sisters, 24 Invaders, the crazed lo-fi pixels of eyehz – www.eyehz.com ( follow the links to their blog updates for especially fun retro-future pixel action ) – or Super Deluxe.
Web Video
The video blogging universe continues to expand – see for example, the followup film by the makers of Shaun of the Dead, detailing with much humour the entire production process – www.comingsoon.net. But the video blog expansion hasn’t been without it’s hiccups – rocketboom.com lost of it’s announcers recently, and journalist videoblogger Josh Wolf has been jailed defending a journalist’s right to protect his sources. He refused to testify before a U.S. grand jury and also refused to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005. He is now in prison.
Second Life, the appropriately named online 3D world, has had it’s fair share of in-game video screenings and lectures, conferences etc – but as it’s population growth continues, the audiovisual experiments flourish – eg Portuguese artist um.mu creating a venue with 3 virtual screens to practice in a simulated space, his actual upcoming audiovisual shows. “When I compose, I stream live straight into SL, audio and video on 3 screens. It’s great having people being able to walk through your studio while you are practicing.”
Software
Lightreading has a useful overview of the top 50 online video storage sites, which includes the likes of jumpcut and their capacity to edit videos online. A nice one-stop glimpse of the alternatives to the crap resolution and uneditable clips offered by youtube.
Likely to impact on these video storage sites is the release of the ‘drag n share’ AllPeers – a free firefox extension which ‘combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse’.
Wikipedia continues to be the best friend of those seeking up to date technical information – egList_of_VJ_Software, and their digital video and VJ entries are very useful also.
For those moving on from stand-alone VJ software, processing and jitter continue to shine. Exhibition of software made with processing. Processing VJ application. Quite awesome rubber screen effect – built with processing – which works within the webpage – click around for extremely fluid image warping.
Jitter glitch patch, VJ sync jitter patch, more jitter patches, VIP mac/PC app which requires max & jitter, and Anti-Keyframe – a jitter based application, which places an emphasis on improvisation – in part by triggering random clips, in part by ‘moving the physical interaction away from the computer and the eyes away from the screen to start focusing on the present’. The interaction can be simplified to fit a standard game-pad.
FLxER : interactive free flash software to mix audio, video and multimedia sources during live performances, with a web-community of more than 4000 people sharing their productions.
FreeJ – free linux VJ tool – tutorial now online – to try Freej without installing it, just use the dynebolic live CD.
On the editing and post-production front : 10 final cut pro tips via dv guru
& an introduction to expressions in After Effects – or how to explore relationships between elements.
Hardware
Video circuit bending : awesome collection of DIY hardware hacks for video, new virtual vinyl product from numark & now online : Radical Software – a collection of video art technology magazines from the 70s.
related posts : july video snippets , may video snippets, live audiovisual round-up (april)