Sparrow Song | Drawing with Light

In January I was a contributing digital artist to a production called Sparrow Song. The production focused on the creation of an interactive art-installation / theatrical environment. The production begins with a short performance where audience members are introduced to various interactive elements in the playing space. After the short "play" the audience is invited to explore and play in the art-installation themselves. 

Mad-Mapper is a very powerful tool for quickly mapping spaces, but it's not always the best tool for theatrical play-back. For theatrical productions artists start by creating a series of masks as tools to isolate or highlight scenic elements with projector light. These masks are in many ways analogous to mattes used in photography or video editing. In order to isolate media in the space, each element that had a unique mediated element required its own mask. Further, each projector out-put also needed to be masked in order to avoid spill or bleed between projectors.

One of the effects that I've used in two productions now is where lines appear to draw-in over time in a video. This effect is fairly easy to generate in After Effects, and I wanted to take a quick moment to detail how it actually works. This process can start many ways. For Sparrow song it started by connecting a laptop directly to the projectors being used, and using photoshop to map light directly onto the set. You can see in the photo to the right that each surface that's intended to be a building has some kind of drawn on look. In photoshop each of these buildings exists as an independent layer. This makes it easy to isolate effects or changes to individual buildings in the animation process.

Here's a quick tutorial about how I animated the layers to create the desired effect:

Now that I've done this several times it finally feels like a fairly straightforward process - even if it can be a rather time consuming one.

Here's an example of what the rendered video looks like to the playback system.

Sparrow Song | SL Chalk Drawings from Matthew Ragan on Vimeo.

Making the asset itself is only a part of the process. After you have a video rendered, the next step is to integrate that into your playback system so that it can be controlled during a performance. For Sparrow Song, the playback engine was Isadora, made by Troikatronix. Here's a quick video that covers movie playback in this system.

Here's an album of documentation photos from the closing show.

Tools Used

Digital Drawing Input - Wacom intuos4

Mapping and Artwork - Adobe Photoshop

Animation and Color - Adobe After Effects
Photos - Cannon EOS 7D
Photo Processing - Adobe LightRoom 4
Show Control - Troikatronix's Isadora

Delicious Max 6 Tutorial 23: Live for the Swarm

One of the on-going semester projects that I've committed to is regular (read weekly) online MAX tutorials. I'm currently enrolled in a course that's focused on Media Installations, and while I have taken a semester of programming learning Processing I'm not proficient enough to rely on Processing for creating interactive programs. The Media Installations course has a heavy MAX component to it, but we don't have much direct instruction in class about how to actually using Cycling 74's software. Given this reality, I've leaning on the web to help me learn MAX. 

So far I've bounced between a few different sources for online instruction. I started with Peter Batchelor's set of MaxMSP tutorials which were wonderful. I'm currently about third of the way through his materials, and know enough to feel an itch for more complicated instruction. Thanks to YouTube's recommendation bar I stumbled onto dude837's (Sam Tarakajian) YouTube channel and tutorials. dude837 has great material, it's interesting, fast paced, and funny. While Batchelor's tutorials are great, they do sometimes feel a little slow - don't get me wrong, there are plenty of times when I need a slow tutorial. Using both of these channels as resources has left me with a mixture of general and creative instruction - which has been a nice mix.

This week I'm going to tackle Sam's Delicious Max 6 Tutorial 23: Live for the Swarm. 

Handy things to keep in mind

• http://www.maxobjects.com/ - a database of max objects
• Option Click brings up the Help File
• fsaa - Full Screen Anti-Aliasing
• Freezing Attributes keeps them from changing when you load a patch

Mapping and Melting

This semester I have two courses with conceptual frameworks that overlap. I'm taking a Media Installations course, and a course called New Systems Sculpture. Media Installations is an exploration of a number of different mediated environments, specially art installations in nature. This course deals with the issues of building playback systems that may be interactive, or may be self-contained. New Systems is taught through the art department, and is focused on sculpture and how video plays as an element in the creation of sculptured environments. 

This week in the Media Installations course each person was charged with mapping some environment or object with video. While the wikipedia entry on the subject is woefully lacking, the concept is becoming increasingly mainstream. The idea is to use a projector and to paint surfaces with light in a very precise way. In the case of this course, the challenge was to cover several objects with simultaneous video. 

I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to map, and what I wanted to project, and was especially interested in using a zoetrope kind of effect in the process. I kept thinking back to late nights playing with Yooouuutuuube, and I wanted to create something that was loosely based on the kind of idea. To get started I found a video that I thought might be especially visually interesting for this process. My friend and colleague Mike Caulfield has a tremendously inspiring band called The Russian Apartments. The music he writes is both haunting and inspiring, an electronica ballad and call to action. It's beautiful, and whenever I listen to a track it stays with me throughout the day. Their videos are equally interesting, and Gods, a video from 2011, kept coming back to me. 

To start I took the video and created a composition in AfterEffects with 16 versions of the video playing simultaneously. I then offset each video by 10 frames from the previous. The Effect is a kind of video lag that elongates time for the observer, creating strange transitions in both space and color. I then took this source video and mapped it to individual surfaces, creating a mapped set of objects all playing the same video with the delay. You can see the effect in the video below:

Meanwhile in my sculpture course we were asked to create a video of process art: continuous, no cuts, no edits. I spent a lot of time thinking about what to record, and could not escape some primal urge to record the destruction of some object. In that vein I thought it would be interesting do use a slow drip of acetone on styrofoam. Further, I wanted to light this with a projector. I decided to approach this by using the mapping project that I had already created, and instead to frame the observation of this action from a closer vantage point. Interestingly, Gods has several scenes where textures crumble and melt in a similar way to the acetone effect on the styrofoam. It wasn't until after I was done shooting that I saw this similarity. You can see the process video below:

Tools Used:

Mapping - MadMapper
Media Generation - Adobe After Effects
Projector - InFocus IN2116 DLP Projector

Gelatin Projection

In working with projection mapping I've been interested in experimenting with food and projection. This first experiment is with a milk mixed into gelatin. This resulting surface has a ghostly like quality, and while not ideal, it certainly created an interesting result. 

Media Installations | Simple Sync

Assignment Description

Simple Synch Youtube Rips

Look at the synchronization utility I made in max, and see if you can get at least two computers to synch up some kind of video playback. More computers could be even more interesting.

My Patch

Initially I had a lot of ideas about where to go with this assignment. Unfortunately  I'm brand new to MAX 6, and the learning curve is a little steep. That said, initially I was thinking about a four computer arrangement. These four laptops would be arranged in a "x" formation, with a laptop at each point of the "x." Computers that were across from one another would stream of the video from the built-in cameras to the opposite screen. The resulting experience for the observer would be looking at a screen that was always displaying the viewer's back. This configuration required that the video stream be passed over TCP/IP to the other computer. While this was a great start, ultimately I had to move a different direction - I ended up experiencing a fair amount of difficulty passing a video signal over TCP/IP. I'm sure that this can be done, but I wasn't having any luck and needed to move on. 

---

dude837's Great Video Reverb Tutorial

---

In moving forward, however, I stumbled upon Dude873's video reverb patch. After following along with his tutorial I was able to successfully replicate his patch and the effect that it created. Moving forward I loaded the patch onto two computers and made a few small changes. Specifically, I created a patch that had a udpsend object and a patch that had a udpreceive object. These objects watch the network for an incoming signal to initialize the webcam and to start the effect. The control computer starts and stops the effect on both machines. Hit the video below to see how this works, and download the max patches if you'd like to experiment yourself.

Video




My Video Reverb Patches

     Video Reverb Send Maxpat
     Video Reverb Receive Maxpat