A few months ago I began playing with manually corrupting jpeg files to see what kinds of artefacts I could create. I selected an image, compressed it down to a very small size (so I could easily manipulate large chunks of the data), opened it in a text editor (I like SubEthaEdit and TextMate) and added random text, copied pasted and generally shuffled the data, occasionally saving as new files.
Above is a QuickTime movie which animates through 12 of the resulting jpeg files. Click it to stop if it’s giving you a headache I re-compressed the jpegs just to be sure they wouldn’t crash QuickTime Player. Manually introducing errors and noise into files and then playing them is one of those “make sure you save any important files you have open” situations as things can grind to a halt.
I was playing with these images at Plug N Play at Kent St on Thursday night. I mentioned that I was planning on writing a php script which would similarly screw with jpeg images online and Sean told me about glitchbrowser.com.
From the site:
Computers are not allowed to make mistakes.
The glitch browser represents a deliberate attempt to subvert the
usual course of conformity and signal perfection. Information packets
which are communicated with integrity are intentionally lost in
transit or otherwise misplaced and rearranged. The consequences of
such subversion are seen in the surprisingly beautiful readymade
visual glitches provoked by the glitch browser and displayed through
our forgiving and unsuspecting web browsers.
This work was produced for New Langton Arts Packets programme,
by Dimitre Lima, Tony Scott and Iman Moradi.
Here’s a short excerpt from the video portrait I produced for Boxed as part of the Short & Sweet short theatre festival.
I used the excellent Vidgeo Gogh plugin for Final Cut Pro to generate a number of layers of video with different levels of paint effect and Quartz Composer to composite the layers together in real time with masks.
I am currently working on the design and production for a ‘video portrait’ which will be projected on set as part of the play Boxed directed by Simon Gorman.
The play is part of the Short & Sweet short theatre festival at The Arts Centre
The festival, advertised as ‘The Tropfest of Theatre’ features 10 plays per night all of which are 10 minutes or less in duration. We’re in the first week of the top 30 plays, beginning tonight Wednesday 23rd of November and playing through until Saturday.
“This is brush, a small Max/MSP/Jitter patch that Ive compiled as a standalone application. Its aimed at visualists who are just starting out and looking for software to play with. Programmatically, its very simple. Video from a live camera (or a movie file) is fed back on itself so that light stays on the canvas (screen). Thus, you can paint with the light in the room youre in. Decay (fade time), tolerance (lower luma threshold) and color inversion are adjustable so you can adapt your performance to any lighting conditions.”
This is a great little piece of software, what I would call a Vidget. A small scale application which lets you manipulate digital media in real time for improvised performance. It is very easy to use and entertaining to play with.
Click image to play (28Kb Quartz Composition in QuickTime wrappper, requires MacOS 10.4)
MPEG 4 - h264 version (1.9Mb) Requires Quicktime 7 or alternative player such as VLC. Quartz Composition file (64Kb) - Open in Quartz Composer to see how it works or move to ~/Library/Screen Savers/ to use as a screen saver.
The site is powered by WordPress and makes extensive use of customised templates, css and custom fields. The design is by Nicole Dominic, sliced up and css/xhtml-ised by me.
One of the main functions of the website is to present an easily update-able show-reel of the company’s work (primarily TV ads). Some of the tricks I discovered whilst making the site may be of interest to the videoblogging crew or others wanting to use WordPress as a content management system for video. The next step is going to be working out how to customise the site’s RSS feeds to include this information.
For each of the ads I make a regular post, storing a lot of information in custom fields, such as: the url of a thumbnail image; the url of a poster movie and the url of the movie itself. I store this information here rather than in the actual post text in order to separate content from styling and presentation, allowing me to refer to the same clip in a number of different ways from different areas of the site.
I recently completed work on an experimental internet radio program with Hannah Miller and Kate Eccles. Hannah and Kate are final year Media students at RMIT majoring in Radio and TV production. My role in the production was to take various pieces of audio, video, still images and text, and create an interface which would allow the user to mix and match the elements in an exploratory, non-linear way.
The result of this work is a program called “Inspiration”, which features interviews, live footage, sound recordings and lyrics from Reset://0 a Japanese influenced Melbourne band.
The program was authored in LiveStage Pro and is a Quicktime file that consists of a sprite track, several movie tracks and a text track which features lyrics. The above image shows the partially completed work as I was assigning sounds to various non-square shaped roll-over buttons. The idea was that rather than presenting the user with a list of options, or even a grid of non-labelled options, the work should encourage the user to explore the screen space with the cursor, almost like they are feeling their way in the dark. To give the users some feedback, and a little direction as to where may be a good place to explore, I used Hanna’s fire twirling image as a guide. I placed invisible sprites over the background image which reacted to the “MouseEnter” event, triggering sounds which played in specific movie tracks, and changing the sprite image for the background so that different parts of the fire twirling would be illuminated and hi-lighted.
You can view the completed work in context on the interadio site. Or, to go straight to Inspiration(requires Quicktime, a fairly recent computer and a decent broadband connection - 15Mb)
This is the latest version of my interactive networked video project.
Click on the image to load Vidget 3 in Quicktime Player. (It is quite small but very processor intensive - especially as it first loads)
This version is a mix between the my first vidget which featured a text based interface for mixing up to three video clips on top of eachother, and my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer which let you search for and view images based on a search word.
The interface has been redesigned and now features a grid of 25 draggable images which represent video clips. These may be dragged and dropped onto three coloured ‘layers’. The blue layer is the uppermost with green below and red at the bottom. Each of these layers has a number of ‘graphics modes’. Like Photoshop layers, these may be combined in a number of modes, ranging from fully transparent to fully opaque. Each of these layers also has a number of playback controls which allow the user to play the clip faster or slower, forwards or backwards and step through frame by frame.
To the right of the three colour layers and their controls is a small white text field. This allows the user to search for images from Flickr. The ten most recent pictures tagged with the search word entered are loaded as thumbnails below. These thumbnails may be dragged and dropped onto any of the layers and combined with other moving and still images.
I have resized the output movie area so that everything fits on one screen.
Behind the scenes, the vidget has also been greatly updated. Rather than being limited to a set number of video clips determined at the time of authoring, this version dynamically loads all content including thumbnails. The names of these files are drawn from an XML file. This file may be updated with a simple text editor to add or delete more clips. The movie automatically loads the first 25 thumbnails from the XML list as it initially loads but may load the next 25, and the following 25 via the 1, 2 and 3 buttons at the top right of the controls.
At the moment the whole movie pauses whenever thumbnails are loaded, either via a Flickr search or by skipping to the next 25 thumbnails of video clips. I am working on ways around this.
The LiveStage Pro source files may be downloaded here: vidget3.zip
For the past couple of Thursday nights I have been playing live visuals at a night called ‘Plug & Play’ at a bar called Kent St (located confusingly on Smith St in Collingwood). The night is run by two fine gentlemen named Jean Poole and Future Eater and is a nice relaxed place where each week people come to plug in their audio/video/laptop/playstation/casio devices and play. The venue also has a good broadband connection which allows for international djs/vjs to perform remotely and for me to test my latest vidgets. Version 3 is just about ready for posting here and combines the layering/mixing of clips of the first version with the photo searching and xml reading of the Flickr Viewer.
Here is a screenshot of the new drag and drop interface. The grid of images is loaded dynamically based on an xml file which means I can set the vidget up to play different content without rebuilding the entire project in LiveStage Pro. Almost everything is modular now. The ten thumbnails on the right are the results of a Flickr search for the tag ‘blue’. Each of these thumbnails is draggable to the three clip holders at the top of the screen (red, green, and blue). These refer to the three different layers of video which are output to a screen or projector. Up to three video clips or still images may be mixed/layered together.
After playing with this prototype version at Kent St last week I’m definitely going add some more space for thumbnails as I ran out of content after a while. I am also going to explore some more of the graphics modes for combining the images.
Oh yeah, I’m playing there again this week so if you’re in Melbourne come down. Its free and starts at about 8pm @ Kent St, 201 Smith St Collingwood.
I re-compressed the jpegs just to be sure they wouldn’t crash QuickTime Player. Manually introducing errors and noise into files and then playing them is one of those “make sure you save any important files you have open” situations as things can grind to a halt.
