Kieran Nolan » Video

Video Circuit Bending Workshop

kieran — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:21:23 +0000

So the annual Darklight festival happened again in Dublin, one of the events I attended there was a video circuit bending workshop by Karl Klomp organised by DATA. Over two days participants found out about uncovering visual glitches in video effects hardware and then hardwiring and controlling these. Apart from distorting the inputted video we were also shown methods of hacking these machines text / graphics chip (the part that generates teletext text or channel information) and how to sync this up to an external audio source, making an audio visualiser.

It was a lot of use for my work, I found out a bit more about how all the components work and how to read the circuit board, also picked up some handy soldering tips. The piece of video hardware I had to play with was a Vanguard VA-445 A/V Edit System, now with 4 externally housed switches added to trigger off video glitches. Here's a good interview about Mr Klomps work from makezine and some youtube footage of another video bending workshop.

Mobile TV, Toon Boom & Machinima @ Darklight

kieran — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:44:16 +0000

I caught a few of the presentations at Friday's session of the Darklight 2007 symposium. First up was a talk from reps of 02, Eircom, Babelgum and RTÉ about the future of television and how mobile-tv and tv-on-demand rewrite the rules of the normal linear broadcast model. For example the primetime slots for mobile tv are commuting hours and work breaktimes.

Next up was a workshop by Brown Bag where they described their experiences using the animation toolset 'Toon Boom Studio' to create a new children's tv series 'Wobbly Land'. It seems to have a steep learning curve, particularly if you are used to Flash (no tweening!) but they had great technical support from Toon Boom's creators, including 2 weeks of training. TB also created custom effects plugins for Brown Bag, that helped give the show it's unique (and very non-generic vector animation) look.

The last workshop I attended was 'Machinima FilmMaking' (the art of making movies inside video game engines) by Friedrich Kirschner, the developer of Movie Sandbox, a heavy modification of the game Unreal Tournament 2004 that turns it into a Machinima application. The game world becomes your stage and the characters your actors, who you can direct as you please, either 'live' or through pre-defined scripts.

Some cool input methods were shown, one involved controlling your 'actor' like a virtual puppet using the strings on a usb golf controller. Another made use of the Xbox 360's Guitar Hero controller so your machinima actor can jam on some chords.

Also demoed was an innovative supporting technology called Milkscanner, a low budget but highly effective method of scanning 3d objects using a webcam, lego, a bowl and some milk(!). A (small plastic) elephant was gradually submerged in milk, each stage captured by the webcam and then the software assembled each 'slice' into a 3d wireframe suitable for import into Movie Sandbox. Great stuff, innovative and nutricious!

Good Copy Bad Copy

kieran — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 23:02:36 +0000

This great documentary by ROSFORTH examines sampling culture, digital distribution, how copyright laws are struggling to remain effective and how they must evolve.

“Everyone has been bombarded with media. We’ve almost been forced to use it as an art form. It’s like anything. If people were handing out paint for free on the streets, I’m sure there would be a lot more painters right now.” Gregg Gillis - DJ (Girl Talk)

Check out www.goodcopybadcopy.net for more information and to download it for free (in the true spirit of this film's file sharing message).