I had some ideas regarding “Mankind’s enduring fear of being alone” and I had a really lovely moment of reflection from a time just before I started working at the space centre, when I was pitching for some funding to make a short film called ‘Resonance’. It reminded me of the moment I knew working at the space centre was a my fate. At the time I had numerous things happening that all seemed to lead me towards the people and place that are now my family and home. So many things, it seems it was unavoidable. I have been thinking about space a lot in my personal work recently and I really love the ideas behind Resonance. They still resonate within me. I’d love to revisit the project one day, and although I could now make the film in half the time it would have taken me back then, I think it needs too much involvement from other highly skilled people, which would cost too much. Nevertheless, I’ve just been looking through the project website I created 6 years ago for it and I’m really excited by it. The treatment is cringe worthy film council tick-box stuff but the imagery is nice to look through. I think Jon Hopkins would work incredibly well for the soundtrack. Or Ben Frost. With Richard’s ‘wine glass orchestra’.

Actually, it really isn’t obvious from the script, but the idea is inspired by the Voyager 1 space craft. I wanted to use a hugely distorted ‘Johnny B. Goode’ sample within the ‘message’ as this appears on the the gold disc, among other eclectic sounds from ‘Murmurs of Earth’.

The website is still online at borgasm. Some things seemed to have got lost, but some things are still there:

I’ve been casually drawing some pictures and writing some thoughts to tease myself into starting work on something, unsure of where I will lead myself.

There’s A Siege of Colour. I’ve considered returning to this big project several times over the past few months but I’ve managed to keep contained for a year or so. It requires at least 6 months worth of my evenings to get it where it needs to go and I’ve really enjoyed the brevity of the last couple of projects, so I’m not sure I’m going to continue just yet. I think I need something really quick and simple. Something that is almost nothing. A sketch perhaps.

I’ve been thinking abut another Music Box Chronicle, but all my ideas have been too big, requiring too much process, too much time.

I’ve been toying with the thought of making something about ‘Space’, or at least exploring some cosmic twinkles that fill most shadows of my mind. Space is a big part of my life, it’s part of my every day and still remains very strong in my heart. It’s hard keeping them as sketches though. I’m used to working on large scale space films that travel the universe at work but without a team and serious render power I have to limit these ideas or lose months of time. I like this though. I like the idea of creating sketches of space. Finding little stories. Enjoying something subtle in the vastness of the cosmos.

Over Christmas I started playing with some ideas. To be honest these were mainly as stereoscopic experiments, but I think they were a little more than that too. I think there might be something small I can make with these, or maybe a few small things. A few well crafted small things would be nice at the moment.

Playing with v.01 exhibition at QUAD Gallery in Derby. Get your 3D specs on and select 3D mode to see the machine in all its cubist mechanical glory.

Robbie Newman, Aron Brown and Jennifer Stewart are playing the machine.

This was filmed on a Fujifilm W1 camera in low light levels, so apologies for the low quality footage. This was actually my first time editing live captured stereoscopic footage together from the W1 and realising just how complex the process is. I didn’t really give much thought to the filming itself as it was filmed in the morning following the closing event and finding food was of a higher priority. It’s basically clawed together from desperate clips basically documenting all the parts of the main exhibit. The cuts are really awkward and the S3D is painful at times, yet this took around 9 hours to put together. To do this I had to figure out how to extract the two video channels (seriously time consuming) from the W1 avi’s and figure out the convoluted workflow from After Effects Pinkau stereoscopic scripts into StereoPhotoMaker and back for alignment. Actually it also took ages to align and replace the audio with the original files and mix them together better as the audio from the camera was pretty bad, and replacing it allowed me to let it flow over and cover up some of the terrible editing.

The main purpose was just to capture the exhibit in a very basic 3D and figure out the live-action stereoscopic workflow. I think it actually has turned out pretty good as long as you watch it at it’s natively low resolution.

Robbie Newman is playing the machine.

Musical fingers and feet from:

Jim Cork from Crash of Rhinos – http://www.crashofrhinos.co.uk/
Rich Collins and Daz Cook from You Slut – http://www.last.fm/music/You+Slut!
Jamie Cattermole from Cheap Jazz – http://cheapjazz.bandcamp.com/

This is a promotional video I made for the v.01 exhibition at QUAD gallery in Derby.

Launch Event at QUAD

Saturday 4th February 6:30pm - late
Join us for the opening of the exhibition, be the first to interact with our audio visual artworks together with live musicians who will create an incredible live soundtrack to the evening.

Reel Music in the cafe bar from 9pm til late
Reel Music DJ’s Wax On and Hudson present an evening of cinematic music enthused with a funky feel to celebrate the opening of v.01

Facebook event here: http://www.facebook.com/events/203855923044282/

More information about the exhibition here: http://www.derbyquad.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/v01#

Robbie brought round a couple o’ macs and lots of boxes with lots of buttons. I bought a massive packet of crisps. Basically a solid day setting up a smaller version of the exhibition to see how everything is working together. We threw as many clips as we could at the system to break it, and worked back from there to find the sweet spot for compression types and file sizes. We’re currently using QuickTime .mov’s with PhotoJPEG compression set to 80%, and for a small selection of clips that require alpha we’re using the Animation codec. The size of files is currently causing a bit of a bottleneck compared to processor speeds but we have a few ideas of how to overcome this.

We’re using the button box and send MIDI messages to Ableton, which in turn sends MIDI messages to Modul8 or VDMX5. We have some issues with restrictions on the number of clips we can play at the same time in Modul8, so we’re testing out a VJ package that I have used in the past called VDMX5, as an alternative. Neither are currently giving us exactly what we need but our knowledge of both packages are limited so Robbie’s going to spend some more time poking around to see if he can figure out a solution.

The techsQUAD team, Robbie, Aron, Oli and Trip, have been busy building ‘The Machine’, which I’m told, showed its first signs of autonomy this morning and has since been learning at a geometric rate. Check out some of the other stuff that techsQUAD have been working on for the exhibition on their project blog: http://techsquadv01.tumblr.com