Website spring clean comes early

I have just uploaded the first page of my new website. I went with some snazzy new graphics to change the mood a bit and I will be building custom interfaces for each section to come. Check it out.

One man band in Croatia

I came across this video which I thought was great. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a one man band and seeing this instantly took me back to my childhood and refreshed the emotions one feels, especially as a child, when experiencing something new and highly entertaining such as this. I find the spectacle of such performances captivating, there is some natural fascination with something that seems so complex and yet is being performed by a single person.

This strikes a chord with me and my ideas for performance, and it made me think about the way that mechanical items have their own unique appeal. Also having a sense of humour certainly helps this guy..

Mon£yMan

Illustration by Ben Crossman

The Wrestler – Movie Trailer

The trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming feature The Wrestler hit the internet today. I am really looking forward to this movie and by the trailer alone it looks like it could be something quite special. (Couldn’t get the HD trailer off traileraddicts to embed so Pootube it is, sorry)

Fireworks – After Effects CS4 test

Fireworks – After Effects CS4 test, originally uploaded by ScannerMobs.

I made my first little test video using After Effects. I’m quite happy with the reults and really liking how the software works. Also trying out Flickr’s video hosting service for the first time.. fingers crossed.. Seems ok and I got a pro account so it makes sense to use. Plus it has a cool blogging tool so this message infact was written inside Flickr, not WordPress. Only thing is the video quality isn’t perfect, not as good as Vimeo, but maybe that is just my output settings – something to look into.

Cool music video, interesting use of cardiograph

I found this video on digg and found it very interesting, especially after our sessions with Ollie Glass this week, as it appears to be using some sort of algorithmic conversion of sound into the readout of a cardiograph machine. After seeing the whole thing you will realise that it is all CGI and one can only assume that no cardiograph was used during the making of the video. However, it is a really great idea, particularly the suspense of waiting for the vocals to kick in to effect the needle in the bottom-right seemed to work very well, and it had made me think about the application of doing this using real hardware. Either way, an excelent video and a great idea.

Visit http://www.korb.lt for more info on the creators.

Fish Jam

Submersed Songs | Canções Submersas is a quadrophonic installation piece created by André Perrotta. It uses the movement of 4 live fish to mix music that is user-submitted to the project, creating a varied range of atmospheric sounds that are captured together with the swimming fish for this video. Reasonably listenable, I thought, for a sound installation piece :)

(sorry, no embedded video as the artist has denied this)

Submersed Songs | Canções Submersas from ∆LEX on Vimeo.

hmm.. Build my own ring-flash?

I found a fantastic photography site the other day called Strobist. It is all based around flash photography, and has some great articles on various techniques and uses of equipment, including ‘cookies’ which I’d not heard of before. I found the site initially from searching for a DIY guide to build a ring-flash, which looks pretty amazing!! The guide can be found here and it consists of very cheap items like a couple of tupperware dishes and aluminium foil. However, you do need a flash that can be taken off the camera and fired with a sync cable, and my little sb-400 just doesn’t cut the mustard – no manual controls, and no sync cable available (from what I can see). Pretty gutted, but maybe it will be worth investing in a second hand sb-800 or something and giving it a go.. Just gotta love those things.

The end is nigh

Platial sucks?

I had a little play around with the Platial widget, built into WordPress, as it looked pretty cool. Unfortunately the interface is a little tricky to use, I found that it was impossible to change the location of somewhere, and that you can’t delete them very easily. So now I have a few extra places scattered around, such as ‘Brighton, UK’ which seems to be in the middle of the sea. I doubt I will keep it on here for long, but I may add a few more places of interest. I guess for the course it could be quite cool to use something we could all add places of interest to, especially for exhibitions and that sort of thing, and maybe for those who are new to town.