Well after some heavy experimentation yesterday, Mike and I have decided that with the alotted time it will be very difficult to create a smooth + slick music performance. So this morning after a very stressful night I was sitting here thinking what else interested me, by now I’ve done so much research on this subject tehre must be another option! And yes there is, I got back to thinking which aspect of video I enjoyed most about this topic (performance video) and it stemmed from the stuff that we had seen from MOTH back in october..

As you can see we spent the evening projecting our self made visuals from the day! It was so much fun and it’s an entirely unique experience, taking the crowd around the institute projecting anywhere we want! This is a world apart from conventional building projection and from the start i’ve always loved it! So of course I cant do something based around the simple idea of placing meaningless imagery on buildings.. So I researched into Moth’s work further after understanding that they did mainly narrative work! Give this video a look..

Basically, they took a short story and led people round this building (new build) with imagery to give a narrative to the crowd. They wore wireless headphones that talks through the story (as far as i remember) I really like this idea, as it actively engages a crowd in a narrative and also creates a really good mixture of audio and visual elements!

The next step now is to create my own sort of take on this, using thier concept to create a similarly engaged experience for the audience.. So what I was thinking was is taking a very simple fairy-tale like story. The first thing narrative-wise that came to mind was Aesop’s fables, they are stories credited to a ’slave’ (according to wikipedia) back in ancient Greece. They were stories that had a moral lesson at the end, famous ones are the tortoise and the hare so they are pretty well known! I’ve found this fantastic site, that lists a massive volume of his fables.. And each of hte stories have the moral aside them before you read it! Meaning I can choose a moral before the story. Unfortunately I cant really make a story thats ‘venue-specific’ as we are still unsure of where it’s going to be exhibited!

So now its time to start browsing, I’m really happy with this change of direction (well, more comfortable..) Here is the link to this brilliant website.. They are organised into volumes, click on mini Aesop for the link:

I have a serious love affair with ableton.. The ease of use and ability to mix stuff up is unparrelled as far as a live performance package goes..

This is how I started wiht ableton.. I DJ wiht it, its really quick to use and you can use the awesome effects to mash up two tunes! This is a mix that has a really long overlap! I did it a while back and I[ve got a lot more interesting now.. but its good to show where you start!

Its basically a live tool where you guna seemlessly trigger loops.. add effects and take in’s and outs from anything! I used to have this midi controller, he’s basically diced up a song, and assigned parts of it to the pads.. meaning he has got a mashup of a really plain song initially!

Mike and I could do this, he could throw in some pre recorded stuff, then that could be mashed up live by me, then he can throw down some new riffs! Could be really interesting.. Also you can have massive midi potential with ableton.. You can plug the out straight into a bit of a software.. Which is what I did a while back in this demo video..

Very simple stuff, but works!

The thing is, its just taking th same midi signal, HOWEVER, more advanced programs, can READ midi data! So in esseence they can READ midi samples!! How amazing is that? I need to get researching on it..

This is the sort of thing we want to get working tomorrow for a bit of fun..

Not quite that good, but we can have a go at sampling at least!

Tomorrow Mike and I are going to be playing around, ‘jamming’ in ableton, will be really fun to get started, if this takes off we could even have a new duet album coming out.. OH YEAH BABY.

So after a week of basically panicing about what I’m going to do, me and Mike had a sit down about what ideas we had, to see if maybe we could gel them together as we love working togehter so!

I had my ideas of reactive visuals and using midi from Ableton for live ambient sampling.. And Mike wants to do some live sampling from guitar (awesome) with live action looping! Which can create layers so quickly. So the basis of our idea is having me on the laptop taking input from mic, layering it all up and adding samples live to create a bizarre ambient electronic psuedo piece! Mike is feeling really inspired about this alternative genre attack, I am also feeloing really fantastic about it!

Doing prelim research i’ve stumbled on a few videos that I think are useful.

most of the powerful stuff comes from the fancy coding programmes, like processing:

Processing is an open source generative program used in many modern installations.. I’ve talked about it before, it’d be great to start experimenting with it.

VVVV is also on the cards..

Also a bit of Pure Data

Looks like Mike and I are guna have to get our heads down and work on some coding software! These will all be tried and tested, and the best solution will be ironed out!

There are many ways to stay up-to-date with your production company whether or not your pushing out projects left and right. There are effective smaller projects that can be easily completed and able to publish anywhere without too much hassle.

This is a great way to make your company appear as though you are on top of things and working diligently, even if you have other commitments to fulfill outside of your part-time company. Web site’s like Vuvox.com allow you to create crisp and clean looking flash-based photo slideshows. These are great for side projects while working to create a larger project in the company. It shows the public that you are indeed working.

Don’t forget to promote your work updates through social media!

Inspire – Photo slideshow

Here are photos taken from the video “Inspire,” a short piece in a three part series by Change of Scene Productions.

see more of my photos

• Avid is an editing software which we use on our course.
• It’s not ideal as many of us HATE it.
• It often requires you to run through a couple of processes just to perform 1 simple task.
• If Avid was a real person I’d hit them… HARD!
• Everyday is NIHAD (National I Hate Avid Day).
• Mario does not like Avid.

A bit late filling out this post, but better late than never

Our last day of filming was back in Anna Patel’s house for the whole basement scene. We started off with Anna May struggling, then showing appearance of Eduardo, the kidnapper slowly coming into the light if the dark room. I asked if we could fix the lights around, so we would get a lot of shadow while still maintaining a solitary light. After a few experiments, it worked! We continued on, with Eduardo and Anna exchanging dialogue. We got until a scene where Eduardo had to cry, but not a lot, only for a few seconds. Forced crying didn’t work, and neither was waiting him to think of something emotionally heart breaking. In the end, we had to use an onion. Yeah, you read correctly. An ONION.

The suspect of this movie. And the prop.

Now sniffing an onion is suppose to make you cry right? Well, with no time t0 sniff, or let the vapours of the onion fill the small, enclosed space, Ed ended up doing the only solitary thing that some people are capable of. Squirt it in his eye. Yes, it was madness. But it was the only thing capable of tears. (Note to self: Find other ways of making someone cry without going to extreme lengths.)

Moving on from our little scene, we continued with Eduardo making a decision to untie her and leave, letting her see what was in the package herself. I sorted out with Farrah to see what kind of camera angles we could use towards the final build up, and ended up using the first person perspective.

Wrapping up, it’s now time to enter the editing room. Time to cut, slice, dice, severe and plaster our footage into something else. I also need to get music. Luckily, there are a few music sites which give it out free albums under the Creative Commons License, and I don’t have to worry about getting sued.

Getting into creating a midi controller for this performance project to put onto the table!

COuld really add to the experience! Found this brilliant videooo

Put this little setup together..

Video is self explanatory

In its very basic stages, but its a proven and working rig now! Woo!!

Ok so as Future Cinema has mostly rolled to a close until the installation on the 14th Dec, it’s time to start thinking about the performance video unit.

This morning we had a fun little chat with Liam about the fact that he really wants something thats quite physical and very unique each time you do it! He was being very encouraging towards doing something relating to music. This is really cool as I’ve wanted to do something musical for ages! So i’ve been racking my brains about things I migh want to look at, my thought process started with this wicked instrument I saw last night on TV…

Its a monome like interface that works like a sequencer, I really liked the patterns it makes, was a starting point as I am now getting really interested in maybe creating my own instrument.. So I had this cool idea of maybe creating a tabletop surface with some guitar pickups on it and some strings.. THen taking an audio in to ableton creating some wicked ambient effects than taking an audio out from that to modul8 to create reactive visuals being projected onto the surface!

A little tutorial on what modul8 can do with audio in:

This is a very young idea, but its slowly progressing.. Maybe even creating infrared strings that you just wiggle your hand over to make the visuals go crazy!

Got the set up looking like this!

Turned out really good, the crit went very well, couldnt of gone better I dont think, got a brilliant reception and was very ahppy with the results!

Now to take a small rest bite then get back to working on this + performance video!

Big thanks to Mike and Phil for being as obsessed with this project as I am!

After graduating university 21 years ago, I’ve decided to return to school to pursue a Master’s Degree in Media Production at Ryerson University. This blog will detail my trials and tribulations, as well as the cool things I’m learning about traditional and new media. Come along on my journey! Welcome!

Today was the first day of my new TV Production class with  seventh graders. They were so excited, and had such great ideas. Now they’ve gotten me excited all over again.

Filming about Fifth Avenue, Looking North, 1905.

We are trying something new – a live broadcast each Monday during the middle of the day. The students will come in, set up the camera, look over the script, and then go on air at 11 a.m.

They were very particular about being on early enough for the kindergartners to see. They also had great ideas for additional stories they’d like to film and show.

On Friday afternoons  we will begin showing various short films our students have created – possibly called “Friday Films”. This willbe a showcase for the interviews, documentaries and montages our students have created.

Thanks to my wonderful TV Production crew this rotation for getting me excited and motivated again; I love you guys very much!

Photo courtesy of The New York Times photo archive, Credited to Underwood & Underwood . In the Public Domain.

Well today I got the sound off mike.. What can I say, im really impressed!

Added a bit to the video.. delayed booms!

Sounds awesome..

Just about the click this button.. They are low quality passes for the crit tomorrow! not final drafts, but still its going to take all night to render!

5 Passes being displayed on 5 macs.. should look good! Thankfully the deadline for the entire content isnt for a short while, we have so much to show.. I know it’s going to look good!

During the filming of our 72 hours project, Chris had the wicked idea to film a behind the scenes to capture what happens when students are given a short period of time to produce a film.

Check it out!

So for the 100MC we were given 72 hours to either produce a short film, advertisement, radio programme or journalistic article. At first we thought 72 hours isn’t anywhere near enough to plan, film and edit a film. BUT guess what we ended up doing? That’s right…a short film. Here is the finished product!

Added on now is the Legal and Ethical issues, which I found myself repeating the sections a few times. Now that is complete, we need to add the Health & Safety table, and finalize the equipment table. Our shooting shall take place next week.

So far, we’ve reached a point, but haven’t produced much. Script isn’t written, storyboard is half done, and the legal and ethical pages need doing. We set ourselves targets for next lesson to finish our remaining pieces before we start filming next week. A shooting schedule has been made.

Getting down into doing more precise explosions now rather than just placed smoke! As you can see they’ve reduced quite a lot just to concentrate more on the explosions themselves! Smoke is still looking a bit too consistant.. But I think the explosions are starting to look a lot more dynamic!

Still working heavily on it!

Composite is going realllllly well!

Just thrown in some explosions + smoke that Mike has provided! Explosions were tweaked to look a lot better! Used some nice masking techniques!

Progress is speeding up..

Still lots to do

Fully getting work actually done now! The buildings that Phil, Mike and I have made our finally making thier way into the composition!

Basically took a few passes from Maya with the buildings having neutral light (so they can be lit in AE) and a blank alpha tga!

And finall, getting them into the composition! they actually do look quite real! even better in person! Really so so happy with this, thought it wouldnt look so good!

Work perfectly with the lighting, here is a snap from the comp!

It’s going to get more and more dense!

Slowly in the process of making a prototype model for the installation!

I’ve made it specifically so it can be flat packed quickly and put up easily! This is so it doesnt suffer the usual limitations of models, as in not being able to take them places which risks breaking it!

Its come out pretty well, now for a coat of white paint!

Layers Magazine has a tutorials section as well as Layers TV, which has a range of content for the whole of the Adobe suite, including Premiere Pro:

http://www.layersmagazine.com/category/tutorials/premiere-pro

Playing with the big comp so more, got a massive set of lights going over the buildings now! Parented to the sky..

IT looks really cool if you scrub through..

MAKE IT FULL SCREEN TO GET ANY QUALITY AT ALL!

After spending last night waking up all the time from wierd dreams about this project, I had a small ephiphany.

I’ve been worrying loads about making sure the sky is consistant between each frame.. and build crossovers look good and such, and then it hit me, why not just do it as a wide comp and split after the final render? Makes far more sense and it will be far more consistant!

Very exciting! Here is a little screen shot of my overworked imac.. (it doesnt enjoy resolutions of 11404×1080)