Occasionally, a certain project will catch your eye. When you start watching and listening, you find yourself drifting away for a few minutes. The acoustic and the optic will blend together to one beautiful harmony.

Such a project is Intermittently Intertwined by Bob White. Take a moment out of your day, and watch this in HD with some good speakers.

[youtubeshort]http://youtu.be/acqIfU-UsaI[/youtubeshort]

We were even more amazed when we found out that the video above is actually created in realtime. It's not often someone is equally talented at music, motion design as well as coding. So we had to find out more about the project.

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Bob explains:

The basic rig is:
Ableton > Network Midi > ofApp > Syphon > Resolume > Avermedia GameHD

In Maya I make a series of quick geometric loft animations and export these as alembic files (.abc). Alembic files are point cache animation files that are typically used to transfer dynamic simulations from say Houdini to Maya. Because I wanted the geometric element to "grow", alembic is a good vehicle as I'm animating vertices.

The brilliant ofxalembic addon loads alembic files as meshes in OpenFrameworks. Because my geometry is fairly low poly count, I can run a lot of them at the same time triggered by Midi notes. Surprisingly even with a lot of polys, playback of abc files is very fast.

My ofApp is very much a work in progress and the code is sketchy at best. The app has ~25 slots for abc files per scene. Additionally, I setup 6 scenes that can be switched with OSC messages. Each abc file can be triggered by an incoming Midi note and there are controls to randomize the playing of single abc files (single actions) or triggering sections of an abc file in sequence (sequence of actions).

I recorded a song I wrote in Ableton and setup a number of Network Midi tracks to send data to my ofApp. I then paint notes that drive the animation. The network midi sends trigger data directly to ofApp. Additionally I send minimal OSC messages to change scenes in my app.



I love the Resolume M4L devices and I would use them, but because I've finalised the song mix in the session view I used the showsync.info M4L devices to convert midi notes to OSC. The OSC changes scenes, clears the screen, and moves the camera. Alternatively, if I were working in the session view, perhaps looping or performing live, I would use the Resolume M4L on clip launch to send OSC.

The ofApp has Syphon enabled so I can display it in Resolume. I have some effects on it like Mirror and Edge Detection to sweeten it up. Like I said, next i would love to explore Ableton control more of the params in Resolume. I would also love to make put this whole app in a FFGL plugin that way I wouldn't have to rely on Syphon. So much to learn :)

Alone the animation is kinda static if it were not for the mirror effect. It's refreshing to be able to easily change the character of the animation using Resolume in real time. Having the ability to "paint" the animation, see the layered effects in real time, I think allows for a more immediate process. For me it's important to be able to work fast so not to get caught up in minutia.

Check out more of Bob's work at http://www.bobwhitemedia.com

From the wonderful folks at Urban Projections comes this lovely project using Tagtool, Arena and a cargo bike. What's not to love?

The Light Cycle.

The Light Cycle is a bike with personality. Housing a high power, 6000 ansi lumen projector, sound system, ipad and battery pack, it is a fully mobile, street art device. It aims to provide an innovative means for taking digital art into public spaces and out onto the streets.



Created by Urban Projections, the Light Cycle has been used to illuminate streets with colourful digital artwork and animation. [fold][/fold] The company have been working with young people from various towns and cities, to breathe life back into disused areas, through interactive projection workshops.

“Our aim is to use innovative methods to bring art into public spaces and onto the streets. We love the fact that we can transform unused spaces into places of temporary beauty. It’s always great to see the reactions of unsuspecting passers-by” - Bec Smith, Creative Director, Urban Projections.

The system runs from battery, with a flexible life span of between one to three hours. It can also run directly from mains electricity for the more permanent positions. Artwork is created though a live drawing and animating application on the ipad called Tagtool. A Macbook Pro runs Resolume Arena for more complex visual setups.

“We’ve designed the bike with precision in mind, so that we can also execute mobile mapping projects. The projector has a fully adjustable, tilt and pan mount, as well as four leveling feet around the bike, so that we can ensure stability and accuracy”.

The light cycle was created by Urban Projections and was funded by Nottinghamshire County Councils ‘Nottinghamshire Arts Fund’. It’s journey can be followed on it’s blog: http://www.thelightcycle.com.

The light cycle is available for hire and involvement with creative projects, contact Bec@urbanprojections.com

Urban Projections are an arts organisation based in Mansfield, but whose work spans across the U.K and Europe. They provide innovative performance opportunities, workshops and creative projects to organisations, companies and brands. Their previous work includes collaborations with the BBC, Vauxhall, The Saatchi Gallery and The British Red Cross.

Guest column by Prashant Yashpal from Activ8Media in India....

Kitty Su is a popular nightclub in New Delhi, India. For its first anniversary on 18th August, 2012, they wanted to add a visual experience to their club. They called upon their trusted partner Most Technical India, who in turn called us, Activ8Media, to create a video/projection area for the club.


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The idea was to create a unique visual experience, around the DJ console. At first we thought about putting regular lens projectors to cover the area, but shadows and projection interference is a big problem in night clubs. People standing close to the DJ console always block projection video and the light disturbs the DJ/VJ/Crew. Installing LED panels would not look good at close range, plus the club wanted to maintain its interior design and look.

So we decided to change the cube fabric from the dark brown which adorns the clubs walls to off-white, to give use better color depth.



We finally decided on taking the risk and using Panasonic mirror projectors, generally used for classroom/business environment. The Panasonic PT-CW230 allowed us to mount the projectors at 10 inches from the wall. The challenge was with ultra-short-throw projectors we needed 7 (!) of them to cover the entire wall.

After lots of research and experiments we decided to go with our favorite VJ software Resolume Arena 4, as expected it did the job beautifully. Using a total of 8 outputs from our beastly PC, 7 DVI’s to projectors and 1 for monitor. Giving an output of 4200px X 550px, we fed each projector with 600px X 550px. We know this is not much but the height and width required from each projector didn't require more resolution.

Arena’s advanced output helped tremendously, we could easily slice our input composition inputs into 7 and feed them to individual outputs, then mapping and edge blending each projector carefully. It was like working in After Effects and didn’t take much time at all, compared to a lot of heavy weight media servers.



Also one great thing after slicing and matching inputs to outputs and saving the advanced output settings, we could easily resize our composition without adversely affecting our real output! All mapping and edge blending remained same as before. This was a life saver! As we were trying to figure out the best output resolution once the projectors we installed and on site.



*OH we only had 2 days for setup i.e. we got the console setup and wiring ready on the 16th and show was on the 18th!

All in all, it was a great experience, the client was thrilled! We had used classroom projectors in a club for the first time, the visual effect was simply stunning, without shadows and strange visuals on the crew :). Something we had not done before, Arena proved to be a champion!



Technical Information

PC - 2.9GHz Xenon Quad Core processor, 2x500GB Hard Drive, 1x128mb SSD Drive (for visuals), 12GB Ram, 2xNVS 420 Quadro (we could have gotten better graphic cards, but the budget did not allow).
8xDVI Outputs - 7 for projector, 1 for monitor.
7xPanasonic PT-CW230 projectors.
DVI to HDMI Cables
BCR 2000 Midi Controller
4200px x 576px Advanced output from Arena, for slicing and edge blending

We knew Resolume could be used for creating content. We filled a few hours in the early morning just playing around with lines and solids ourselves.

But we had no idea about how far it could be taken. You took us on trips to strange and awesome places of geometric meditation. Others went to dark and scary lands of broken glitch and thunderstorms. Some of you actually brought back postcards of landscapes filled with wonderful creatures.

It was amazing. Best of all, because the .avc file had to be shared, it was a great learning experience as well. If you want to know how a particular look was achieved, you can just download the comp and see for yourself.

Next time somebody says Resolume does not have enough effects, we can just point him or her to this thread.

But of course you all want to know who won, so here are the winners:

First place:
"Comp Entry" 1 by Liam_Blend


We would play this on any screen, at any party, at any time. It's got everything a clip needs: detail, color, contrast, depth, rhythm and lots of black. We wonder if it makes coffee too.

Second place:
"Sad cosmic" owl by VJ Biolume


Because sad cosmic owl is sad. And cosmic.






Of course there was so much good material to pick from, so here are the honorable mentions:

"2colortech" by dirtyjohnlv


This was our favourite for a big part of the competition. Bold, energetic and full of contrast.

"Cosmic interference" by digital:snot


The first one that made us open the composition and check how it was done. Always a good sign.

"AKIBA NE-ON" by nkgw-a


It's interesting that glitch was considered cutting edge and avantgarde not too long ago, but now it's almost old-school. We like old-school.

"TEST 04" by VJ Granda


VJ ammo that will kill on any screen. Boom! Headshot!

"Mhlzhn21" by mahlzahn


Mahlzahn deserves an honorable mention if only for the fact that about half of the entries in the comp are his.

"Generative visuals" by aleksey notkin


This one made us doubt if it was actually made in Resolume. Even after the comp was uploaded we're still not exactly sure how some of it is done.

"8-bit avatar generator" by cosmowe


If you're over 30, you have a soft spot for anything 8 bit.

"Resolume contest" by Rebeloverlay


Spencer is disqualified because he already is the best selling artist on our label and he gets his arena serials for free anyway.

"Silent Light, Wholly Light" by J Benj


Bart swears that this video is filled with big morphing Darth Vader faces. We don't see it.

"Contest2" by SHQ


We had a few landscape entries, but the paper boat made this one complete.


Congrats to the winners, and a huge "thank you" to everyone who participated. You're amazing people, that's what you are.

Urban Projections are run by multimedia artist & facilitator Bec Smith. As well as facilitating commercial clients and projects, they also spend a large chunk of their time developing creative projects which encourage participation in the arts and promote social change. For a number of years Bec has been working alongside talented graffiti and modern mural painter Peter Barber of Urban Canvas (no ‘urban’ relation intended), developing interesting methods for combining their art-forms.

“Initially this began with incorporating elements of Pete’s drawn work into Resolume, via pre-produced content from After Effects, which were then triggered live. This was great, especially for more complex projection mapped pieces, such as Bloom, but missed the point of why we love to collaborate - we both get a buzz from not knowing how a piece will turn out, from creating something live which lets us both bounce of each other, right there and then in a moment”.



They had been making digital murals with the early, DIY versions of Tagtool and Node kit, dragging it out onto the streets and surprising local folk with dancing characters and shapes on the side of buildings. “It was a little cumbersome though, especially with the amount of hardware needed to run it. In early Autumn of 2012, we heard that Omai were developing an ipad version of the drawing system, so contacted Maki from Tagtool, who was only too happy to supply us with a pre-release Beta version of the app. Amazingly, it lets multiple ipads connect wirelessly and all collaborate into one drawing session. We quickly realised that combined with Airserver and Resolume’s syphon compatibility, we could now pipe Tagtool into Arena, allowing us to mask, crop, map and add pre-produced content with real precision....and all in a really compact package”.

That was the start of a beautiful thing. Without further ado, they set to work combining physically painted artwork with projection and digital drawing, breathing life and movement into still image.

“We tend to approach this technique by having a really simplified guide which Pete uses as his template to paint from, onto the wall. We flash up a basic line drawing and Pete takes it from there. I can then build a multitude of mapped masks and footage with the transparency preserved, to stack image elements on top of each other. I really love the versatility of resolume and tend to use the plug-ins and generators as much as possible to achieve the look, rather than pre-producing footage. This gives us more freedom for collaborating during the performance.

The first in the series of the ‘Stylus’ videos shows the early stages of their adventure with this technique.

“We are so excited by the possibilities that are being presented through the combination of traditional painting techniques with AV manipulation. We are flat out at the moment experimenting with new ideas and working towards some really exciting projects including loads more street artwork with mobile projection bikes, and an event at the Saatchi Gallery, London ”.

For more information, check out http://www.urbanprojections.com & http://www.urbancanvas.co.uk

This particularly tasty morsel of stage design comes from the chefs at Darkroom, and throws projection mapping in to the mix with a rotating LED object. Fingerlicking good.



The accompanying technical description also shows a good workflow for 'traditional' VJ'ing in a world where HD mixers are few and far between:

We used three machines running Resolume Arena. Two machines were used to trigger clips to specific areas of the stage using a HD-resolution custom-made UV map. Clips for specific stage elements were dropped to respective layers that would automatically reposition them to fit the UV map using Resolume's layer properties. VJs were able to trigger selected stage elements or the full stage as one clip. Both machines were running an identical setup with two MIDI controllers for easy switching between VJs.

The third machine, master machine, was used for (a) crossfading between the VJ feeds incoming via 2 DVI inputs on a capture card and for (b) mapping onto the set. The machine had 5 active outputs: Resolume GUI, three projectors (left, right and centre) and the mirrored cube output resized accordingly and sent to a LED pixel mapper.

The side-boxes and side-strips were simply mirrored in Advanced Output. To map the stage side-boxes, which were rendered using an isometric camera, we used a system of rotated and repositioned null-opacity Layers, Layer Routers and Keystone Crop effects to cut the set into smaller easily-mappable slices without affecting the final UV map preview. Using a similar method we also achieved dynamic mapping of selected elements of the stage on other elements (i.e. mapping the content of the mirror cube onto the side-boxes) - essentially switching between different mapping presets via MIDI. This was particularly useful when we had to display logos and text on mirrored parts of the set.

Each of the VJ machines acted as a backup for the other. In the case of both machines crashing, we could trigger full stage UV maps on the master machine. In the case of the master machine crashing, two laptops and a switcher were used to provide a blackout feed to all the projectors (to prevent them from displaying system information) and a pre-recorded LED feed to the mirror cube.

Having previously seen the work of Lucan Visuals in their basement, we knew they were capable of taking it to the big stage.

We had no idea how capable.

Great production design, awesome content and 72K of projector power. Gotta love it.

Eliane and Krista went to see Flying Lotus in Amsterdam. This is what happened.



It is wednesday night november 7th 2012, at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, the lights are still on, the crowd is chatting, all waiting for the great Flying Lotus - aka Steven Ellison - who will step onto the stage within minutes and hypnotize us with his wickedly sick tunes and beats.

Not only his music is mind blowing, he now has a visual show to go with it. Those who have been following Flying Lotus and have seen his video clip of 'Until the quiet comes' know that we're in for a treat tonight…

Standing at the front right side of the stage - still in anticipation of the great Lotus - we drink a beer and the 'video nerd' in us starts talking about the 2 screen stage setup...

We always have the tendency to talk through a whole show and discuss how we would do something like this and how it could have been done differently, and then in our over-enthusiasm we totally forget to follow the show and accidentally ignore the people around us who are now beginning to get slightly annoyed by us.

But thank God the lights dim, the visuals light up and Flying Lotus walks onto the stage. A group of hormonal young girls scream in front of us. Something we would never do, of course.

Within minutes we come to the conclusion that this audio/visual setup has been done very nicely. With beamers everywhere, the projection is seamless and with Flying Lotus standing in between the two large screens, he appears and disappears in the overlapping visuals. We're intrigued, so we shut up and enjoy the show.

The group of hormonal young girls on the other hand, do not shut up, so we switch places, towards the left side of the room.

Unbelievable how much space there is to dance in the front, in the back people are humping each other like animals.
Also something we would never do, of course.

We dance, drink, look and listen, and the 'video nerd' in us is not bugging us anymore.

We want to see every side of the show and every side of Mister Lotus, so we make our way to the front of the stage.

The visuals by Strangeloop and Timeboy are nice. The abstract images on the screen in the back and the more detailed animations on the screen in the front work very well together with the music, perhaps a little bit dense at times but it´s definitely a good show all together. The two-screen setup is simple, but effective. We love it when it it's kept simple, you focus more on the total experience of the show.

After he sends his last beats into the crowd, Mister Flying Lotus himself jumps from stage, into the audience.
We hump him and scream like little hormonal girls.

Lovely.

If Flying Lotus was a planet, we want to live there.











XOXO Eliane and Krista - Resolume Party Reporters - signing off ;)

More info on Flying Lotus, Strangeloop and Timeboy.

More info on Krista and Eliane.

Photos by Henk Treur

And if you, like us, can't enough of this, here's the making of again:

As Described Ltd is a production company from the UK, handling a wide range of projects ranging from small artistic adventures to all out mega festivals to innovative classical music performance.





They had no hesitation in speccing Resolume on the Olympic Torch Relay when they were appointed as VJ’s for Samsung who were one of the offical presenting partners for the 70 day, 8000 mile tour round the UK leading up to the opening ceremony for the Olympics in London.


Jim Horsfield, one of the co-founders and a Director of As Described, has been a resolume user since v1, so when they were approached by the marketing agency representing Samsung to take on the role of VJ’s for the tour it presented them with the perfect opportunity to use Resolume in a different way to the normal club/live gigs that they had used it for in the past.

As VJ’s for the Samsung Olympic Torch Relay, we were presented with a mixture of content that ranged from pre-rendered video, video that was downloaded and updated daily, through to dynamic flash files which had to be updated depending on the location up to 30 times/day. Resolume was perfect for us as there was no downtime once we started each day, we had to be able to manipulate and change the content order and videos, live without breaking the feed to the screens.

The Torch Relay often started at 6am and went through until 8pm, so content had to be played for up to 14 hrs/day, 70 days in a row.



They used 2 x macbook pros with a Blackmagic ATEM mixer feeding into 2 custom LED screens that were built into a truck on either side.

We had a few problems during the first few days, but once these were sorted Resolume ran like clockwork despite the challenging conditions. We had to deal with extreme rain and cold (another typical English summer!) at the start of the tour, but by the end it was reaching nearly 45 degrees Celcius inside the truck.

Adam Seaman, the other co-founder and Director of As Described, even resorted to placing one of the Macbooks inside a fridge as it was so hot. Resolume dropped down to less than 10fps, but it kept going…



Since the Olympic Torch Relay they’ve also used Resolume in more corporate commissions having recently used it to run and control an ‘arts installation’ which they designed and installed for a major brand launch in East London.

Adam Seaman said

We keep finding different uses for Resolume away from the typical live environment, don’t get me wrong, I love using it with our regular music acts that we tour with, but its just so versatile when you look at from a different point of view, it can be used in so many ways.

http://www.asdescribed.net

MidiaDub is a young production company from Brazil, consisting of two really nice gentlemen who are making some big waves. They sent us a video and a few words about one of their projects, and we liked it a lot. Check out http://www.midiadub.com for more of their visual goodness.

The owner of a club from Minas Gerais - Brazil called us to create a permanent new project for its main dancefloor. So we designed a few and he chose this one. It´s made of 70 squares with 10 cm depth covering a 8x3m grid. All done with plaster/drywall.

All the content was produced in After Effects and Cinema 4d based on the technical drawings we sent to him. The consists of tons of loops playing with the square shapes and regular 8x3 loops as a normal dual head screen with a grid mask on top of it.

We used two xga projectors to cover our "screen" and we built a media server based on Resolume Arena (core i7, 8gb ram, ati 6970). With the advanced output we were able to align our geometry perfectly and then just have fun vjing!

Besides that we made a composition intended to be used with the autopilot feature and gave a workshop for the technical crew of the club on how to control Resolume.

For three months now everything is running stable without any issues. Resolume Arena is rock solid!