Naoism - interfearence is a very slickly produced flash interactive video work (Jessica Helfand would label its typographic style a disciple of the ‘cult of the scratchy’ a la Seven). The work has a a simple branching structure presenting the user with a short video loop sourced from US archival footage and two choices, “join the party” or “escape from it all”. Each choice triggers the next loop and two more choices. The sound design is perhaps the best aspect of the work, providing a nice distraction from the stop - start nature of the interactivity. Fragments of voices jumble randomly over a beat as the work waits for the user to make their choice.
Monthly Archive for March, 2005
The Shynola session at ACMI the other night was excellent. All four members of the UK animation crew spoke about and screened a collection of music video clips and short films from their student days through to their most recent video for Beck. I had seen most of the clips beforehand, either on rage or online but it was great to see so many, the session went for almost three hours. Audience members were free to ask questions in between the clips which worked well. Questions ranged from the technical, through to how they work together, how they started, and what they’re up to now.
Some highlights:
“what software and hardware do they use?” - I think the person who asked this was expecting to hear about custom written software and render farms but they actually use fairly standard off the shelf software such as Maya, Photoshop, AfterEffects etc, with no special plugins and regular computers.
Looking at their 3d work with this in mind it is interesting to note their use of very simple wireframe graphics and scenes with fairly low polygon counts, which wouldn’t take too long to render. These elements are often treated as layers and mixed together with other imagery to produce a look that is quite different to the stereotypical, clean 3d look. In clips such as Pyramid Song for Radiohead and Eye For An Eye for UNKLE some of the layers have been intentionally compressed with highly lossy compression to produce an almost painterly effect.
“how they work together / how did they start out?” - they met at uni, shared a house and have been working together ever since. They all work on every project and have similar skills in each area.
I can’t wait to see and hear the SHYNOLA folks speaking at acmi tomorrow night. The UK based animation and illustration collective have produced some of the most amazing beautiful animations in the form of music videos, ads and ‘blipverts’. They are currently working on the feature film “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” with Hammer and Tongs (be sure to check out ‘Tongsville’ too).
Another very handy little Cocoa program I came across recently is CocoaMySQL. Its basically a graphical user interface (GUI) for accessing MySQL databases. I recently installed WordPress (which stores user account information and more in MySQL) locally on my laptop as an experiment and CocoaMySQL helped demystify the installation process completely. Initially I didn’t really know how such a database worked but after examining it using this program it all started to make sense.
I’m a big fan of these applications which make UNIXy command line processes accessible to the lay-person.
OK, since my last post (eep, just before christmas) I’ve:
- started a new job (DVD authoring)
- quit an old job (no more retail!)
- moved house (twice in two weeks)
- started working way too many hours at the new job
Over the last couple of months I’ve found heaps of good information and links (which I’ll start to post now) and the whole online video / videoblogging / podcasting / playlisting thing has developed extremely rapidly and is growing in popularity faster than ever.
Time to start catching up.
del.icio.us is a free social bookmarking site which lets you log in, post a URL, a brief description and use ‘tags’ to organise and categorise your links and browse those submitted by others. It even generates RSS feeds of bookmarks for each user. On its own this is very cool, and a good way to keep track of bookmarks across multiple computers / operating systems / locations.
If you happen to be using Mac OS X, Cocoal.icio.us allows you to access and manage your del.icio.us bookmarks, descriptions and tags without having to use a web browser by talking directly to the del.icio.us API (once you’ve told it your username and password). It also features a built in browser preview window, so you can click on a bookmark and to check that you got the URL right etc.