video from highcliffe

find the video here

V-Drums & Visions Video

A video of the projection onto the house:

Vidvox user forums

I’ve signed up to the Vidvox forums (makers of VDMX visual software), to get advice and benefit from the great community they have there. I’ve already chatted to some users on the south coast of the UK to see if we can get together and have some sort of video jam.

Another useful part of the forums is the area where people post their setups for VDMX, so its possible to see how others use the different functionality and how they lay it out. I’ve already gleamed some very useful tips from it.

V-Drums & Visions

Last night we had a go at projecting onto the back of the house for a bit of an experiment, using the V-Drums with VDMX. We synch’d the V-drums up to the visuals by running them through Ableton Live via MIDI and then sent that signal into VDMX. The MIDI was then synch’d to various parameters on the twelvefold tile plugin – a kalaidoscope effect.  You can see below a couple of images.

Projecting onto the whole house

mapping more accurately to the kitchen

This image shows the projector on the entire house, there’s no real mapping going on, other than moving and zooming the projector into the right place roughly. I did this just to see how bright the projector would be on a white building at night. This shot was taken at around 10pm. I found that at this time of year the projector was reasonabley visable from about 8:30pm. The best time was at about 10pm though when the sky was entirely dark.

I then moved the projector and zoomed in to map the image to just one section of the house, the image is brighter and clearer this way, but isn’t quite as imposing and impressive. Although the image looked better mapped to a single surface, It was to test what it would look like one the house is mapped out and only certain surfaces receive projection.

Bowser Video

This is one of our latest tracks called “Bowser” (yes named after the bad guy in Super Mario Brothers). We started work on it recently, in this YouTube video you can see Chris jamming along with the track to find a good percussion rhythm. This is a typical part of the process for most of our songwriting sessions.

Visions of Grandeur EMP

First of all I’d like to start by defining what Visions of Grandeur actually means to me, below are the dictionary definitions of the words:

vi⋅sion

1.     the act or power of sensing with the eyes; sight.
2.     the act or power of anticipating that which will or may come to be: prophetic vision; the vision of an entrepreneur.
3.     an experience in which a personage, thing, or event appears vividly or credibly to the mind, although not actually present, often under the influence of a divine or other agency: a heavenly messenger appearing in a vision. Compare hallucination (def. 1).
4.     something seen or otherwise perceived during such an experience: The vision revealed its message.
5.     a vivid, imaginative conception or anticipation: visions of wealth and glory.
6.     something seen; an object of sight.
7.     a scene, person, etc., of extraordinary beauty: The sky was a vision of red and pink.
8.     computer vision.

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Origin:
1250–1300; ME < L vīsiōn- (s. of vīsiō) a seeing, view, equiv. to vīs(us), ptp. of vidēre to see + -iōn- -ion

Related forms:

vi⋅sion⋅less, adjective

Synonyms:
2. perception, discernment. 4. apparition, phantasm, chimera.

gran⋅deur

/ˈgrændʒər, -dʒʊər/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [gran-jer, -joor] Show IPA
–noun
1.     the quality or state of being impressive or awesome: the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains.
2.     the quality or state of being lofty or elevated in conception or treatment: the grandeur of a prose style.
3.     the quality or state of being exalted in some deliberate way: the grandeur of a royal court.
4.     an instance of something that is grand: the grandeurs of Rembrandt’s paintings.
Origin:
1490–1500; < F, OF, equiv. to grand- grand + -eur -or 1

Synonyms:
3. stateliness, majesty; pomp, splendor.

I think this sums up what I’m trying to achieve, when I think of grandeur, I think of the way I feel about a musical performance or opera. I want my performances under VoG to be like these, for people to be in awe of the sight of them. For people to feel the passion I have for what I do, and for it to leave a permanent impression on them,  a simple projection screen really won’t suffice as its more like watching TV than being part of a performance. I want it to be more like a visit to a monument or stately building. Therefore using these items to project upon is the logical way to go.

AntiVJ

This is a really inspiring video by AntiVJ, a group of visual artists. This took place in Brussels. This is what I would design as a Vision of Grandeur. Its what I would like to achieve by the end of this project.

AntiVJ + Créa Composite / Nuit Blanche 08 / Bruxelles
Uploaded by lego_man. – Discover more animation and arts videos.

Blu MUTO wall animation

A great and very clever animationby BLU. Bring new meaning to grafiti.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

this must’ve taken them absolute ages to make… Respect!

I’ve been looking into products that will assist me with remote recording, I should be able to turn my laptop into a mobile sound recording system with the addition of a couple of parts, shown below

http://www.absolutemusic.co.uk/shop/view_product.php?product=maumobilepreusb

A USB soundcard would be powered from the laptop itself, so no need for an external power supply. This would give me the pre-amps and recording quality required for the microphone below. A great bit of kit by Rode, an Australian mic company. The mic actually has two heads to record in stereo, this would be very useful for location recording of things like the sea of atmospheric sounds.
http://www.absolutemusic.co.uk/shop/view_product.php?product=rodnt4

Test Shots

Today I made some test shots against the wall in my office to see if the concept of taking an image from the same position as the camera works. I have mixed results, while re-projecting the same image onto the wall does work, it still needs some alignment and resizing to get it spot on:

Being able to easily put the image of the wall back onto itself shows the ability to “map” visuals to objects through alignment.