*spark

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.

What is AV:in — Introduction To Audiovisual Arts
Audiovisual Culture is rapidly gaining momentum with new technology and information resources quickly aiding the drive. In 2010 more and more people are seeking and acquiring the skills required for audiovisual production and interactive creation. This global movement is spreading into screens, phones and other commercial applications as well as providing a rich source of culture for digital communities inspiring new trends in design and art.
AV:in is a new media course for this market. We have designed AV:in as a comprehensive online educational program for audiovisual studies. It follows a trend of regular workshops and lectures and professional training, which have continued to grow in popularity all around the world on the subject of audiovisual production and performance.

…and it has me in it, as d-fuse we filmed a pro-tip section and my live cinema documentary is part of the curriculum.

http://audiovisualacademy.com/

tresor backstage, 1am, get to the final compile of here+now for the 3am performance. there is never enough time in this world, and for experimental projects on the side doubly so. the dream of just hanging out at a festival…

having spent most of my time since arriving in berlin behind a laptop screen, it was time to unveil effort #1: a dvi mixer project presentation, keynote document with i’s dotted and t’s crossed. more importantly, for the swedes won’t buy a pig in a sack, the presentation was followed by a demo of - and hands on with - the new *spark d-fuser prototype.

pedro recorded the presentation, and i’ve comp’d it together with the slides and a quick top-and-tailing. watch it here: http://vimeo.com/12657671

thanks to prack for the photo, although i do look like a muppet…