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Revisiting Skate Cinema

That’s the trailer for MachoTaildrop above. But what do these films below have in common?

1. Werkmeister Harmonies [2000 – Bela Tarr’s Hungarian feature with only 39 shots]
2. The Holy Mountain [1973 – Jodorowsky’s South American psychedelic epic – due on Blu-ray, April 26 2011]
3. A Zed and Two Naughts [1985 – Peter Greenway – twisted threesome timelapse?]
4. Miami Vice [2006, Michael Mann, 2006. What’s to say?]
5. The Saddest Music In the World [2003 – Guy Maddin’s depression era musical set in Winnipeg]
6. Contempt [1963 – Jean Luc Godard, starring Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang as himself]
7. Brazil [1985 – Terry Gilliam’s tragicomic rabbithole adventure in a world of technocrats]
8. Stardust Memories [1980 / Woody Allen’s black and white pardoy of Fellini’s 8 and 1/2]
9. City of Women [1980 – Fellini’s dreamy exploration of attitudes towards women.]

They’re apparently(and what a great collection!), the favourite films of Corey Adams, who along with Alex Craig, made the enticing skate-feature Machotaildrop. Pitching itself as a blend of Willie Wonka, Wes Anderson, Terry Gilliam and Michel Gondry, their trailer promises a particularly novel and immersive world – with art direction that seems destined for outputting 25 frames a second to that recently bookmarked quirky tumblr blog your cousin makes now that they’ve dropped out of 2nd year visual arts. No word on a DVD release as yet, but turns out they have a range of other shorts and skate-infused odyssey’s available online. More Corey + Alex : vimeo.com/user5048671.

Bonus round: here’s a crazy trio of very whimsical skate videos, found over at Kottke, each with their own quirky home brewed take on weird tricks. And then there’s Killian Martin’s Sublime skateboarding, a possible heir to the street skating flair of Rodney Mullen?

Meanwhile… over in Skateistan..

(Watch Skateistan full size for better effect, and don’t forget to visit skateistan.org/content/donate)

(( Previously… Skateboard Vidi-yo ( & Animal Chin’s Stacy Peralta ) and Skateboarding vs Architecture (one of my favourite interviews ever) ))

by j p, March 22, 2011 0 comments

Outsourcing Memories

Bookmarks are particularly useful when they can be found again. This is part of what makes the social bookmarking service, delicious.com, such a natural extension of memory – there are many, messy pathways to trace back your steps ( find a site by the date you bookmarked it, by tagged topic, by combination of topics, from suggestions by friends etc). If you can even vaguely remember a site previously bookmarked, chances are it can be found again. That plenty of people recognise delicious.com as a great service – and can access each other’s bookmarks / research / interests in a variety of convenient ways, means that people are inevitably distraught that Yahoo are looking to sell delicious and have stopped developing it. Pinboard.in ( lacking the social functions of delicious ) and diigo.com seem to be the 2 highest profile contenders for people to jump ship to so far.

Telephonics
Turns out I can’t find the bookmark I want today though – which is a great photo essay of sorts, looking at all the technologies behind making a mobile phone call, detailing the wider processes and components involved, and displaying photographs of the landscapes where each of these elements have originated from. Something along the lines of sourcemap.org – who believe ‘that people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of’. Or a bit like storyofstuff.com, or the behind the scenes look at the Foxconn plant in Shenzen, China – where the people who assemble iPhones have been committing suicide, or even a href=”http://goo.gl/DeMZK”>’where cellphones go to die’. Or maybe like a collection of photos at chrisjordan.com (as well as industrial waste, he’s also famous for documenting a haunting series of bird skeletons with stomach cavities full of plastic debris). Or like a web-doco version of that Manufactured Landscape documentary by Ed Burtnsky, who manages to capture the alien proportions of our industrial processes and discards.

“Where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy? .. That’s when I became interested in photographing the industry itself, the first point of contact for these materials and where they coalesce and turn into these products that go around the world,” said Ed, a while ago in Wired magazine.

To be sure, to be sure.. it’s a compelling essay. Figured it might’ve been somewhere at everyone’s favourite imaginatively extrapolating about architecture blog, but can’t seem to nail the right keyword for it. Do you remember it?

by j p, March 16, 2011 0 comments

Pad Thai Sci Fi

Ingredients: Bangkok, a city of 10 million with equator-side climate and biodiversity. A dystopian biotech novel set in this city after oil has run out. Add Dental Tourism into the mix and stir lightly.

(Above, sunset Buka Ball near Bangkok's Siam district.)

That Novel

– is The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and it’s quite an engaging ride, vividly portraying what a Thai metropolis would look like through a Mad Max filter. Street ingenuity and cultural traditions mix and match in uniquely Thai ways to deal with the problems of a post peak oil city suffering from biotech plagues. And the problems are many, including – heat (Bangkok is the world’s hottest city according to the World Meteorological Organization), the threat of floods (from monsoons, rising ocean levels, and because the city is built on slowly sinking swamp land), and the need to feed (the novel offers a bleak future where biotech diseases have wiped out most of our biodiversity and provide a small number of disease resistant options to keep us from starving. Most of the book’s conflict and drama centres around battles for control of the city’s food chain). A cheery read then, when en route to Bangkok to have a dentist poke around in your mouth.

Those Teeth

True stories: dentists and surgeons in Bangkok have managed to cultivate a reputation and niche for medical tourism, offering high quality service at super competitive prices. It’s a reputation probably owing in part, to the popularity of gender switching in Bangkok, where billboards show cowboy hat wearing doctors offering their sex change surgical specialties. A taxi driver claims the high degree of microsurgery specialty is from the toughness of Thai women, and severed organs having to be re-stitched onto cheating husbands. Whatever the reasons for the abundant dental infrastructure in Bangkok, it means their dentistry is cheap. A sufficiently mangled mouth in Melbourne, for example, could find it half as expensive to get teeth fixed in Bangkok – even with the price of airfare included.

Of course, to avoid that drowning, dystopian version of Bangkok, probably requires that people aren’t flying halfway across the world to fix their ailments. According to carbonneutral.com, a return trip from Melbourne to Bangkok (16005kms) produces 1.58 tonnes of CO2, and the burden of this can be lifted by paying carbonneutral $24.81 to offset that CO2 in one of their renewable energy projects. Or just buy 20 toothbrushes and floss and give them to your friends.

Bonus Bangas: Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis ( 2004 )

Bonus Bangas II: Comics made by a Bangkok artist, who also does a kind of spoken word with projected comic panels thing..

Bonus Bangas III: May Kaidee’s Cooking School does a pretty rad half-day vegetarian Thai cooking course for cheap. And they have great cookbooks.

Bonus Bangas IV: Turkish Batwoman still eludes me, but while scouting for rooftops, ran into Thai Batgirl on the 23rd floor of a building that had no security on their elevators.

by j p, March 15, 2011 2 Comments

Tokyo’s Inevitable Giant Earthquake: Sixty Seconds That Will Change The World

Today, on Friday March 11th, 2011, 380km north east and offshore from Tokyo, we’ve just witnessed (via Al Jazeera and a steady stream of twitter feed updates), the 7th most powerful earthquake ever measured. The helicopter footage being livestreamed to browsers all over the world shows scenes of unthinkable scale and devastation, comes mere weeks after a tragic earthquake in New Zealand (6.2 on the richter scale and likely 200+ dead), and all the while, I’m getting flashbacks to a television program that aired in the 90s..

On January 17th 1995, just before that evening’s documentary was about to start, an SBS TV presenter addressed the audience, reminding us that SBS TV schedules its programs long in advance, and the coincidence of an earthquake in Japan’s Kobe earlier that morning ‘should make the following viewing all the more sobering’. The Kobe earthquake killed at least 200 people and measured 7.2 on the richter scale, and the program was Sixty Seconds That Will Change The World ( see also Amazon link for the out of print book ).

I was watching this in Newcastle, which six years earlier had suffered an earthquake of 5.6 on the richter scale, the first Australian earthquake in recorded history to claim human lives, killing 13 people. It was also the earthquake that taught me earthquakes don’t only happen where fault-lines exist. Newcastle isn’t on any fault-line, so when the family room I was in at the time started swaying from side to side (think square cross-section becoming a parallelogram), my brain interpreted this surreal transformation as the neighbours reversing their car into our house. Running outside, I found a street full of frantically gesturing people and realised the problem was of greater scope than I’d imagined.

The TV program being screened in 1995 showed Peter Hadfield, a Tokyo-based journalist and former geologist, interviewing Japan’s leading geologists, engineers and economists. To begin, the contemporary significance of Tokyo was laid out for viewers – the huge population, the sheer value of Tokyo real estate, and Tokyo’s status as a financial centre in an increasingly interlinked global economy. Geologists explained how earthquakes happen and described the inevitability of a very big earthquake sometime in the near future, given Tokyo’s position and geological history. To give some perspective – the ‘Great Kant’ earthquake of 1923 devastated Tokyo and killed more than 100,000 people. It measured 7.9 on the Richter scale. Notes wikipedia, “The power and intensity of the earthquake is easy to underestimate, but it managed to move the 93-ton Great Buddha statue at Kamakura which was over 60 km away from the epicenter. The statue slid forward almost two feet.” Today’s offshore earthquake was 8.9 (and making that worse – the richter scale is not linear but logarithmic – ‘an increase of one step corresponds to a 10^1.5 ≈ 32 times increase in the amount of energy released, and an increase of two steps corresponds to a 10³ = 1000 times increase in energy’).

Engineers and politicians acknowledged the inevitability of the coming ‘Great Earthquake’ / ‘The Big One’.. and discussed Tokyo’s state of the art technologies and processes of preparation. Earthquake drills were demonstrated, ultra-sophisticated fire engines were put through their paces. And then a combination of experts described the likely scale and impact of the threatened quake, how this would mean the near redundancy of any preparations (‘Those fire engines will be useless, because in a lot of locations there will be no such thing as roads’), and outlined the ramifications of this for the global economy (A major financial nerve centre being wiped out? Instant global recession).

The takeaway message:

If (and when) Tokyo collapses, we all crash.

As Al Jazeera loops footage of today in the background, it’s hard not to remember just how small we all are.

Crisiwiki maintains a list of ways to stay up to date, donate, or help out.

by j p, March 12, 2011 0 comments

Video Screen Capture Options

Creation of moving imagery is aided greatly by some good old fashioned screen sampling.

UPDATE : The Syphon app (mentioned below) routes video losslessly between video software using the graphics card, and now the Syphon recorder can record the output of these apps. Send feedback, flowers to Vade and Bangnoise.

Free screen capture options:
PC – Camstudio /, Mac – Capture me. And Vade’s free screen capture tool (mac) allows you to ‘capture your entire desktop, or a portion of it, to an image and further process it within Quartz Composer or supported host applications. This can be used to sample other application’s windows as a source input for post processing, texture mapping on to models, etc’. Which means in practice, VJs can use it to grab screen content (eg games, DVDs, web, cams, other software output – whatever you can see on the screen ), and then process this feed in VDMX however they like.

More Broadcasty Tailored Options
Snapz Pro (mac:$69) and Screenflow (mac$99) offer simultaneous camera, microphone and audio capture as well as screencast options such as highlighting the mouse, key commands or certain windows.GrabberRaster (mac) allows sampling of any portion of the Mac screen for use as input for Quartz Composer, or as virtual camera input for QuickTime Pro, Skype, CamCamX or other QuickTime-compatible webcam software. $99 bundled with a bunch of other cam FX.

Sampling VDMX with Syphon and BoinxTV

Boinx TV is a custom video application for live mixing and recording of presentations / tutorials / news stories etc. Syphon (mac) not only samples the screen – but allows real-time sharing of full frame rate video or stills, with other applications. Future versions of Syphon are likely to have built in recording options. For now though, combining Syphon with Boinx, Berlin’s @fALk_g and Leon von Tippelskirch, one of the Boinx developers, came up with an effective way for recording VDMX – and it works in HD!

This could be a great workflow breakthrough for people creating motion graphics or doing compositing or visual effects. Being able to easily improvise with VJ software and midi controllers will never replace some of the detailed micro-level animation and editing done in dedicated editing and compositing software, but it should make it much easier and more fun to create certain kinds of clips for layering / visual effects / remixing and re-use etc. And who knows what kinds of new workflows (playflows?) and processes might follow from there..

Instructions via @fALk_g:

– Install Syphon and Quartz Syphon Plugins (free), and BoinxTV Home Edition ($49) ( see Boinx review)
– Activate Syphon Output in VDMX (beta 8 via vidvox.net)
– Load custom quartz project into BOINX, that can tap into the Syphon source. (download file 82k)
– Hit record. The custom project records with the Apple Intermediate codec (for best balance of quality and performance), but can be adjusted within settings. For best quality and framerate, Falk recommends playing clips from one drive and recording to a separate drive.

Bonus speed gain: Because Syphon is feeding video to Boinx, you can deactivate VDMX Output and use the Boinx 2nd monitor output to view your VDMX mixing – it actually seems to improve performance / frame rate.

The above instructions and file worked fine for me, but I haven’t really tested how far it can be pushed (eg lots of layers and CPU heavy FX in VDMX, while recording HD to a drive). Fun times ahead.

And finally on the screen capture front – a shout out to 9-eyes.com – an incredible collection of unusual moments captured by Google Street View, photographing every road in the world – For The Surrealist Win!

by j p, March 10, 2011 4 Comments