Vortex Vectors and Logo Design
0May 15, 2012
in Vortex
Designing an icon based logo to work with the industrial look of the vortex.
Spatial 3D Sound
0Sound wizard Rene Rodigast (Fraunhofer) is interested in working on the project… Doing a 3D fulldome sound mix. There are only a couple of places in the world where the technology exists to play 3D sound in a dome, but this is something I feel incredibly drawn to. I’ll have to save some quids to go and visit Rene in Germany.
Music machine Flavio Martines has sent a whole bunch of stems to begin the process of spatial sound mixing. These are also being fed into the animation machine to control some of the visual elements.
I’m beginning to think more in terms of 3D sounds. I’ve removed the armillary object for the time being after watching a few experiments in the dome… It didn’t work as I was expecting it to. I’ve also added an outer ring element to the vortex I’m calling the accretion disc. This has formed from specific sounds within the music that I think will work well when moving around and into the dome using 3D sound techniques.
I have reduced most of the camera movements to a comfortable extreme. They’re still extreme, but not *too* painful.
The accretion disc:
The now removed armillary:
Enter the Vortex
0May 5, 2012
Initial Render Tests:
Music by Flavio Martines:
Sketchbook Concept Artwork:
Concept Artwork:
Entertainment for the Space Age
0May 4, 2012
in Fulldome
If I could go back to any point in time and space to experience any moment of history of my choosing… Other than Pat Sharpe’s ‘Fun House‘, I would go and see the Vortex Concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in California 1959.
The Vortex Concerts were described by Junius Adams as “Entertainment for the Space Age”. It was perhaps the first of its kind, a dome based audio visual 360 degree immersive environment. It made audiences feel “engulfed and overwhelmed by the patterns of sound and light”.
The Vortex IV program notes stated:
Vortex is a new form of theater based on the combination of electronics, optics and architecture. Its purpose is to reach an audience as a pure theater appealing directly to the senses. The elements of Vortex are sound, light, color, and movement in their most comprehensive theatrical expression. These audio-visual combinations are presented in a circular, domed theater equipped with special projectors and sound systems. In Vortex there is no separation of audience and stage or screen; the entire domed area becomes a living theater of sound and light.
It’s like the roller coaster ride in Cinerama, only in the abstract
One of the lucky spectators comments of the show. Sounds like the description of an acid trip.
Jordan Belson created the visual aspects of the shows. I’m a huge fan of his flat screen work, but I’ve not yet been able to find any imagery from the vortex shows. I can only imaging it would have been similar to his other work, which seems to be dominated by circles and abstract astronomical phenomena.
Images from Music of the Spheres artwork, 1977
© Jordan Belson, courtesy Center for Visual Music
Cover, Vortex III program, January 1958
Collection Center for Visual Music
One thing that really stands out to me about the Vortex concerts is the equal emphasis on sound as visual. Audio is something that commonly gets much less attention in many fulldome productions and indeed facilities. The diagram below shows the layout of the audio speaker system during the concerts at the Morrison Planetarium. Each of the white circles represents one speaker station comprised of one bass and two treble speakers, which were arranged in a ring behind the 60ft dome. The audio could be channelled to each or any speaker remotely. There are also two sub-woofers around the perimeter and two subsidiary speakers in the centre of the dome that had a separate sound input.
You can purchase a stereos version of the Vortex Concerts audio from here. To be honest, it’s quite terrifying in places… I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have been bombarded with these sounds and the psychotropic visuals of Jordan Belson… I wish I could have been there.
During the past two IPS Conferences, I have been to see talks from Rene Rodigast from the Fraunhofer institute in Germany. Fraunhofer is a research organisation that has produced some key technologies for the age of digital media, the mp3 codec is one such technology they have been involved in. Well, Rene is one of the audio wizards that works there and his research is genuinely mind blowing. I was really surprised to see him present his work to only a handful of people in a huge lecture theatre at the last IPS in Alexandria. I’ve recently been to Fraunhofer FIRST in Berlin to do some stereoscopic fulldome testing… It really is an incredible place. I met up with a Rene who is working on some immense spatial sound synthesis using multi-speaker arrays. He can literally place a sound anywhere in 3d space in a dome. He also spends time drilling holes in different material dome floors to alleviate the inherent resonance issues caused by projecting sounds in a dome. … I’m losing my point here… I guess I’m fascinated that 40 speaker arrays were used in the 50′s to create immersive sound yet 5.1 surround is still the predominant sound system in digital domes. The visual aspect of fulldome has been developed to such a high degree but the audio development hasn’t really surfaced properly as yet. Maybe there are more places adopting a spatial sound approach, maybe there is a need for creative tools before any such system can be taken advantage of?
Dome Sickness
0Motion sickness or kinetosis, also known as travel sickness, is a condition in which a disagreement exists between visually perceived movement and the vestibular system’s sense of movement. Depending on the cause it can also be referred to as seasickness, car sickness, simulation sickness or airsickness. Pure optokinetic motion sickness is caused solely by visual stimuli, or what is seen. The optokinetic system is the reflex that allow the eyes to move when an object moves. Many people suffer when what they view is rotating or swaying, even if they are standing still.
This is one of the effects that can be produced very easily in fulldome. When immersed in an environment and that environment rotates it can be very hard not to believe that your body isn’t rotating, and often during extreme examples of these shots people will hold on to their seats to prevent themselves falling over. I personally enjoy the effect when used in moderation and I know that many others do as well. It is also a very undesirable effect to some, as it can produce a feeling of nausea. The effect is similar to that of a roller-coaster, albeit not as extreme. I guess I also draw similarities to negative parallax stereoscopy, whilst some people enjoy stuff poking them in the face, others find it harder to accommodate their focal distance to extreme convergence and are left with brain-shear. These type of effects should probably be used in moderation for a general audience, but when the motivation is correct, it can be used very effectively.
It can be very hard to explain the motivation behind wanting to make someone feel sick. It would be similar to wanting an audience to feel fear (eg. Alien), or disgust (eg. A Clockwork Orange), or sickness itself (eg. Irreversible). These are all quite extreme examples, but there are subtler motivations for using optokinetic motion sickness for creative purposes; Creating a sensation of floating in space, to heighten a sense of danger, to create the sensation of a roller-coaster ride.
Aha-Erlebnis
0April 22, 2012
in Astrographia
I’ve been thinking about creating a number of simple sketches based on the Eureka moments throughout history. I don’t want to create some kind of documentary about them but I want to use historical examples to drive the creative process of animation and sound design. Kind of like a reference point from which to draw ideas. I posted one of my initial tests last week. I like the idea of creating a visual interpretation of the thought process from the moments before, up to and following a Eureka moment. I want to select some of the astronomical discoveries that interest me, from the grand to the subtle, and try and build the audio/visual mindscape of the person or people involved. When Einstein had his flash of insight for his theory of relativity he described it as “the happiest thought of my life.” The moment itself remained vivid in his memory for decades; experiments regarding the Eureka effect have shown that the amount of effort required to understand something can strengthen it within memory.
I’ve been asking some friends about what they think a Eureka moment looks like to them, how it moves, how it changes over time, how it sounds etc. I am amazed how varied the responses have been and also by how certain aspects are starting to emerge as similar. Puzzles, grids, lines, connections, growing, colour, light, and chaos are common elements. Visually these elements take on varied forms and structures.
Last Thursday I took my findings and ideas to the board of aural crescents at the Lunar workshop in Derby. Over thrice baked beans on home-made toast we discussed some ideas for developing audio driven animations and concepts for driving the generation of such audio. Some fascinating ideas were presented including the use of non Pythagorean scale a la Robert Schneider and recording the resonant frequencies of Keplar’s study a la Alvin Lucier. The ideas began to build and burst into resonating peaks drawing close to something like an epiphany.
Here are a few of the things that we watched and discussed:
Non Pythagorean Scale – Robert Schneider
I am Sitting in a Room – Alvin Lucier
The sounds of the Northern Lights
Tonight I created a quick audio sketch of the kind of thing we discussed albeit very rough and broad stroked:
The idea for these is to create several quick sketches. Nothing too grand or complex.
What to Make?
0After 5 years working in the fulldome industry I have been absorbing all there is to know about fulldome production. I have experimented with all kinds of things in fulldome, trying to develop my own understanding of the domographic language and trying to understand how its principles of image making differ from those of traditional flat screen image making. I have worked on several commercial productions and have seen/experienced many fulldome films and even a couple of fulldome games. Being a film-maker by passion, I also continue making films in my personal time and occasionally my professional and personal endeavours influence and inspire each other. Recently though I have been considering making a fulldome film as a personal project… I’m not sure why I haven’t already, I guess I haven’t felt ready to undertake such a mammoth task. I also feel like I haven’t possessed enough wisdom to really produce something worth while, I don’t want to commit several weeks or even months to a project that I wouldn’t enjoy the outcome. I love working alone, but when you’re talking about the huge undertaking of 4k fulldome it can seem a little daunting. The reason I have been considering it is due to several coincidences. I’m sure I’ve mentioned them before on here but after several softly aligned moments of reflection I had a moment of clarity. It all sounds very spiritual and maybe that’s not a bad thing. The point is that I feel I need to make something hemispherical.
The question now, is ‘what to make?’
Astrographica
1April 16, 2012
in Sketchbook, Thoughts
Schwarzschild metric just moments before it’s conception. Unformed and chaotic, the ergosphere appears as a tangible solid, free from its mathematical abstraction.
Some ideas I’m developing visually.
3D Painting
0April 11, 2012
Work in progress 3d portrait of Nihon looking a bit older than she really should. Slightly more complex method to creating this image compared to the 3d painting of Asimov. I’m actually modelling the head rather than painting the zdepth. The pipeline is Photoshop-3dsMax-Mudbox-3dsMax-AfterEffects. I’m going to experiment further with multiple layers from the painting to produce multiple layers in depth, rather than one continuous 3d surface.
