New AV work in progress

Now with 100% more screenshots!!!

Part of the work that I've been doing with John Mackey has involved programmatic music analysis, and one of the things that I started doing was experimenting with some older code to see some of the results I could get out of it.

One of the projects that I settled on first was a failed experiment to transpose my Squiddy type things into 3d. Unfortunately, at the time I wasn't as experienced as I am now at manipulating vfx and using sound to control things and so the experiment didn't leave the "basic shapes" phase.

Now however I have the resources and skills to turn it into an actual work, and I've been able to leverage shaders and physics systems to my advantage to produce a really nice work that I'm really proud of.

The flecks in the "background" that you can see in the screenshots are illuminated by a flickering light at the top right (the light flickers based on a random frequency), they all flow down and to the left, and are destroyed once offscreen. They can also occlude the main subjects.

The subjects themselves are actually a recursion tree, with each step linked to a physics object and mapped to the bins of a Fast Fourier Transform (linear not logarithmic unfortunately ). The result of that mapping is that the 2 spheres that represent each of those physics objects "pop" with the music i,e, they grow larger when their particular frequency is hit. All the subjects are allowed to go offscreen (to some degree) except for the primary subject. All the subjects have an emissive material bound to their wireframe to give them detail up close and have a bit of a glow.

Apart from that, the Depth of Field shaders focus is linked to the head of the primary subject and the aperture is set (small?large its just a number to me) so that there is only a narrow focal area.

Changed major video work

The work that I was previously doing for "Creative Possibilities in Video" was a work inspired by the book Flatland and Don Hertzfeld's "Rejected" animations, however... I'm not doing that anymore.

The reasoning behind this is that in my spare time, I've been making some music videos using software that I've written for a jazz musician called John Mackey. I now feel like these works are becoming some of my stronger works for the year and so rather than continue in an uphill battle pushing a time consuming animation project, I decided to pivot and change the project to be on these works.

A sample of one of these works:

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Unfortunately Vimeo doesn't allow me to upload any more of these yet. So I am going to upload them at a rate of 1-2 per week.

Soon I will also publish a short demonstration of how I have been using this software to create things and some of the common tweaks to the source that I've done during the production of these kind of works.

Also an interview with John Mackey about the other half of these works will follow.