toby's blog

after the summer-time street party, a mid-winter gathering at the edible bus stop. again, i’m rather wowed - and warmed and woozy with mulled wine and special soup from the bus stop’s last harvest.

an early saturday start to attend the ‘audience through time’ conference organised by the drama department at queen mary. it was a good effort, and my chairing of the ‘technology and liveness’ panel seemed to go down well — phew. i especially enjoyed martin barker’s talk, which was spot-on topic for me and presented with gusto: motivated by the issue of ‘liveness’ it started by asking how do audiences make sense of and respond to the near-live quality of streamed performances in cinemas, but soon progressed to an empirically backed provocation of a ‘scandal to theory’ that really showed the value of crossing disciplines.

its interesting seeing the different conventions of the disciplines at play, and i still cannot reconcile my love of the debate in drama seminars i have attended with the seeming pointlessness of reading out densely worded performance theory papers verbatim to a darkened hall (ref. my aside about auslander). something to ponder more, for i am one of the organisers of another conference on audience coming this may…

to newcastle to the all-hands meeting of the digital economy programme, aka where my funding comes from. the summer had seen an internship project use the data i had generated in my bbc internship the year before, and from this me and saul got talking about how that could go further. importantly for me, in the demonstration proposal for it, the first bit of writing i’ve been happy with.

it also meant i could get back to the visualisation i’d made for the bbc project, and tie the display of the story-world information to the playing video. and my, how browsers have come on: processing.js, fonts and the canvas element are now happy bedfellows, and will happily alpha-blend over smooth playback of a movie. check it on github

Media consumption is increasingly networked, with richer experiences requiring ever-richer metadata to provide context and so link-ability. However creating meaningful metadata for rich media such as TV programming is fraught with practical and philosophical issues, starting with just who has the time to make it anyway. Through two Media & Arts Technology DTC internship projects – with the BBC (2010) and BT (2011) – two very different sets of metadata have been created that, representing the same TV programme, provide an interesting opportunity to investigate these issues. In one set we have a semantic, authorial representation modelling the content and narrative, in the other a free-text aggregation of mediated conversation about the programme by viewers. As the programme plays, we can compare viewers’ utterances with the TV production’s own modelling of the content.

Our demonstration will be an installation that plays the TV programme – an episode of Doctor Who – with corresponding animation juxtaposing the two sets of metadata. Our research agenda centres around the practical benefit of a mixing the two approaches in creating metadata and exploring the dissonance between the two representations. In short: how much top down do you need to make the bottom up work (or should that be the other way around?); where do attempts to map one to the other fall back to attempts to find some tractability fall back to conclusions that one or the other representation is invalid (and if so, which one – a librarian’s fantasy exposed or interactions ill-suited to being co-opted).

We would gladly host a ‘Heckle at Who’ session, where delegates will watch the TV programme and use their mobile device to contribute to the conversation around the programme. We could even turn this into semantic bingo: can we produce meaning from their utterance derived from the semantic modelling work. This would be well-suited to an evening, social activity.

sane control of the media and scenography needs to be partnered with the animation mechanics to handle it all gracefully. luckily, thats what i do — and what tools like quartz composer enable — and i had the best materials to work with in the form of made-by’s brand video. it’s great. watch it, and you’ll also see how perfect it was to be remade into a never-ending animation with dynamic content interspersed with the hand-animated elements.

best of all, now i have the interface and back-end largely worked out i can concentrate on creating bespoke animation for future gigs: everybody wins.

how did joanna run the screen? with *spark titler v3: no longer a now-and-next titler, more the means for a live brand video. into an animation template go tweets, titles and all sorts of media, and the user is presented with a sane way of wrangling that media and controlling the output.

the app as a whole is mac-native in the best of ways, with the behaviours a naive user might expect. i’m especially proud of the interface, which takes the standard elements and extends them where necessary1, all to be used without fear of killing the output or screwing up the content.

1. suffice to say i now know a lot more about subclassing cocoa views than i used to: say hello SPKTableView and SPKArrayController ↩

thats my laptop, but not my hands. if i can write software to make it more fool-proof for me to drive big, important screens, could that same approach empower organisations to drive their own screens?

if you catch me while i’m thinking about that with a beautifully animated video explaining your work transforming the ethics of the fashion industry and an annual event coming up, am i going to suggest working with me on a journey to find out? of course.

and so at mady-by’s annual event, it was made-by’s joanna who knowing the people, the running order, the messaging, made the screen reflect that.

i’d just rediscovered the ‘re-booted’ america’s cup, when what-are-the-chances I get a phone call to vj at the plymouth event. given i was considering taking a day-trip there any way, certainly worth dusting off the old vj machine. and what a venue to play… glorious weather, fantastic coastline, screen bang on top of a grassy cliff.

providing visuals from 5pm to 11pm was somewhat daunting given i’d pretty much chucked away all my random-gig vj clips a year or three back, they wanted it all america’s cup themed, and oh: 1080P.

well, nothing like a bit of fear to rise to the challenge: rocked it, aided and abetted by
- cuts culled from 200GB of america’s cup footage downloaded from their broadcast server
- a few choice compass rose type animations
- some custom quartz composer patches
- a live stills camera
- the dvi mixer pumping out 1080P into their system, but the laptops only working at the (good chunk lower) actual resolution of the screen.

wish I had got a photo of the big americas-cup cuts glitch mash-up i had going on, but then again, it was all about how it moved with the music.

sometimes the simplest things are the best. got to debut the set made from filming san pedro docks earlier in the year. constant side-scrolling cut-up by the audio transients; motion graphics perfection with the old mirror trick.

and how did those live graphics make it to the screen? i sat down and took the idea of *spark titler from sheep music and remade it as a fully fledged cocoa+quartz composer application. the idea being it can’t muck up: animation designed to gracefully transfer from state to state, participant names pre-filled in a drop-down menu, no mouse cursors on the output, text fields that commit their edits on pressing take… the little details that make-or-break a live application. oh - and it exports its title animations as quicktimes for integration with playback pro.