Collected news, May 2012
These are things that has happened in our network and things I’ve seen in social media the last month.
MaKey
Make your own simple and silly MIDI controllers with this Kickstarter project. There’s still a few days left to sign up. It’s already 1200% financed and the product is prototyped and tested so they just have to pretty much press the start button on the production.
Radek Rembowski
Radek is a Swedish VJ Union member from Malmö. He will do a video mapping installation at Spy bar, Stockholm from May 30th – August 30th. He has just finished installing and will be updating the mapping remotely through out the summer. Radek is a light designer with a laser fetish that has recently moved into the field of video. I have a feeling he might have a pretty different approach to mapping.
Bye-bye video walls
The video walls at the legendary nightclub Berns/2:35.1 will disappear. The monitors are not produced any longer and are very hard to remove, replace and repair and they will now go wherever monitors go when they retire. The downstairs will be remodeled and I’m waiting for confirmation if there will be any kind of video solution in the new interior. I think there are many of us that will remember this place as one of the better places to VJ in Stockholm. The Swedish VJ Union has hosted at least two VJ jams during the life of the 2:35.1 nightclub.
GIF Animations
During May I’ve been thinking about how we could use GIF animations in our visuals. Not many VJ applications supports this old format. I wrote a little bit about it in this blog post.
Obviously we can just convert our GIF anims to Quicktime but I’m looking at finding a better workflow so that we can have people creating GIF loops live and then download and convert them (when necessary) and involve them in our visuals just a few minutes later. I will publish a simple solution for OSX in the beginning of June.
Tamas, the creator of CoGe was fast to publish a guide on how to use animated GIFs in Quartz Composer as well as in CoGe. This is probably the only VJ software on OSX that has native suport for animated GIFs.
InstaCRT
For those who like taking photos with their iPhone and loves old CRT monitors, this is the app! Forget about all other digital hipster photo filter apps, InstaCRT is the one and only anlalog filter. Your photo uploads to a small CRT monitor, placed in a studio in Stockholm. A camera snaps an image of your photo on the CRT monitor and sends it back to your app. And yes, there is a computer involved as well of course. If many people use it at the same time there’s quite a waiting time for getting the image back but it’s totally worth the wait. The app is created by the very GIFted Martin Ström who recently joined the Loopcam team in Berlin.
CoGe updates
Yes I said CoGe again! The application has been updated three times this month: The 1.3 update, the 1.3.0.1 update and finally the 1.3.0.2 update. And they have also updated the design of their web site.
OSCulator
Version 2.12.0.2 was released with a fix for slow OSC input.
Fake Pilot visuals for F.O.O.L.
Fake Pilot (Mattias Lindberg) made live visuals for the EDM act F.O.O.L at the two day Dans Dakar festival in Stockholm. I asked him a few questions:
TMT: – Did you prepare the set in co-operation with F.O.O.L. or did you just improvise?
FP: – No, I improvised for several acts that day. I listened to Spotify the day before and made little setups for each artists/DJ.
TMT: – How was it performing on the giant LED screen?
FP: – It’s only 200×100 pixels which frightned me at first. But it’s the best screen ever. Because the screen is so bright it becomes one with the audience. And VDMX doesn’t crash that often due to the low resolution.
TMT: – Didn’t your head get hot? (he wore a Soviet figther pilot helmet).
FP: – Haha, the Russians knows how to build good stuff, you know. If they could fly MIG 29s with those, I can VJ with it.
Dressed for success
SVJU member Johannes Ferm Winkler colored the fancy dress of Azerbaijan’s Sabina Babayeva in the Euro Vision Song Contest. Read this article that has been translted by Google.
Festivals in June
Live Performer’s Meeting (LPM) in Rome May 31th – June 3rd
For more festivals go to Audiovisual City.
Call for artists
Alpha-Ville Festival, East London U.K.
Norberg festival, Sweden: Call for visual artists
A new call for the Bit to beat festival, Barcelona Spain.
Gener8
Mr. Andy Teasdale has finally made an instruction video for Gener8, which are a set of modules with a different approach for working with Ableton Live. These modules are not found in the public module library but you can join the beta program at the cost of an email address and a dialog. Contact Andy through his blog.
Andy has also updated his public and very useful (at) modules.