this is the little video patch i’m working on for the new show.  eventually it will do more fancy stuff like multiple layers, zoom, rotate etc.   the live show will probably involve fewer aliens…. but more robots.

shot some aerial video over hallett cove’s seaside cliffs for the agnes kain clip two days ago. it’s the best weather i’ve taken the camera up in and also the first time i’ve flown it over the water. on the first flight there was a bit of a scary moment where the radio dropped out and the plane headed out, uncontrolled towards the open sea with my camera onboard. luckily control was returned and my camera avoided a bath which it probably wouldn’t have enjoyed. ended up with a lot of good footage which might make it’s way into other projects as well. more filming to be done over the weekend.

photo by J.F. Sebastian

the last year or so i’ve been fooling around with getting a video camera to fly. you might think that’s about as likely as getting a pig to fly… but, if you think that, the variable you’re not taking into account is weight. pigs are heavier than cameras and thus requires more lift to get them airborne. and even if you do get pig airborne, what good’s it going to do? i suppose a whole lot of people who’ve carelessly used the phrase “when pigs might fly” may be forced to commit to verbal contracts they thought at the time they’d be able to disregard as they continue to wallow in their own crapulence. but pigs have already been flown around in planes so their wallowing must have been spoiled years ago! ok, back on track…

i’ve been using a radio controlled foam glider to carry a little HD video camera into the air and so far have had some moderate success. the plane flies well enough but to get usably stable footage is a challenge. the glider gets thrown around easily by the wind and also needs a good deal of space to get up and flying. on top of that, there are shot’s you just can’t get with a plane. from months of scouring forums about aerial photography (or AP as it’s abbreviated by people who’ve got nothing better to do [like me]) i’ve come to the conclusion a much better way to get a camera up into the air is a helicopter. further, an even better way to get a camera up is a tricopter. a tricopter is basically a tricycle with propellers instead of wheels. actually it’s nothing like that but the word “tricopter” is pretty self explanatory. sheesh. i’ve ordered parts to make something like this:

as a cool little demo of why flying cameras are so awesome i was going to embed blur’s clip for beetlebum but EMI in their omnipotence have disabled embedding. just one of the many signs that record companies have lost touch and are crumbling into the void. hooray for the internet. ok, no embeded beetlebum (that sounds like it requires surgery), here’s something else… people get really fancy and beam the video back down to the ground so they can fly from a first person view…

the technology’s just getting smaller and smaller, cheaper and cheaper. won’t be long ’til hovering cameras are the norm and they’ll be used on idol. maybe then they’ll give me a job and i can ‘accidently’ maim the competitors.

and found this:

which is just about perfect. i’m making the birdman’s wings out of bamboo and heshen tonight. then all that’s left to do is jump off the roof to check they work. if they don’t i’ll just have to jump off something higher.

Download: VIZZable Modular VJ plugins for Ableton Live

UPDATE!

These plugins are completely compatible with the amazing V-module suite by Fabrizio Poce. These two projects have now merged to provide a comprehensive suite of video, effects and real-time graphics tools for Live. If you’d like to become involved in testing and developing these plugins please join us in this google group.

late last year i picked up a second hand copy of the playstation2 music software “MTV music generator 2″.  i was surprised by a few of the quirks i discovered, most importantly it’s ability to sample with a singstar mic(!).  couple this with it’s nifty little sample editor that lets you trim, reverse, filter etc. and it’s stepped up to play a significant role in the recording of my next album.  so i thought i’d tell you, the intertron, all about it and it’s glorious quirkiness.

so apparently this game had a usb sampling dongle you could buy to plug in your diskman or walkman or horse or what ever we were using back then.  it was basically a usb audio interface for your playstation, which is pretty cool, but you’re unlikely to have one just lying around.  lucky for us, the software confuses the singstar mic dongle for the sampling kit which turns your ps2 into a sampler sequencer… and a pretty capable one.

from my experimenting, the guitar hero mic doesn’t allow you to sample.  don’t take my word for it, it’s still worth a shot.  according to this anything that uses the AK5370 chipset should work.  also, it’s easy to jam a 3.5mm plug into the singstar mic input and sample from other sources.  casios and playstations together at last!  i had to strip the plug down a bit to make it fit.  sony doesn’t seem to want you to plug anything but a singstar mic into their patented 3.5mm jack.

after a video intro presented by some ridiculous dj, you’re greeted with the sequencer window.  that little video preview window down the bottom right really gets in the way.  there are a couple of different skins which shift the interface around quite significantly and for this i’m using post apocalyptic.

the sequencer window’s pretty familiar.  it’s a vertical scrolling tracker style deal made up of “riffs” which you select from the blocks on the left.  it comes with a stack of preset samples and riffs and some are pretty decent but the fun’s in sampling and programming yourself.

if you select “edit riff” it takes you to the piano roll for that riff.  again, vertical scrolling and pretty familiar.  you select your sample on the left and program away.  you can use multiple samples in each riff but samples and riffs are grouped into rhythm, bass, melody and vocals and  you can’t use a vocal sample in a rhythm riff or a bass sample in a melody riff etc.  you’ve got control over pan and volume envelopes for each note as well as some of the quirkier parameters which i’ll get to briefly. but first… see that lil’ usb icon up there?  sampling!!!

this is where the real fun’s to be had.  grab your singstar mic.  jam it in front of your bass drum, toy piano or gob, hit record, make noise, hit stop.  yay!  the sample editors actually really good.  it’s not super hifi but it does do a few things very well.  you can easily trim your sample down and apply a small arsenal of effects to the entire sample or a selection of it.  you can highpass, low pass and band pass with drawable envelopes,  although i’m a bit suspect of the frequencies it says its cutting.  what it calls 300 hz sounds more like 1khz to me so trial and error is your friend.  you can set a loop point so the sample will repeat as long as it’s told to.  one of the coolest things is you can crank the gain up endlessly and get some great  compression and distortion.  you can also time stretch  which i haven’t played around with too much but i’m sure it’s awesomely crap.  you’re limited to a certain ammount of disk space for samples per song,  i’m not sure how much, but it seems ample for 16+ samples and you can get quite a bit out of very small samples.

for each note in the piano roll you can choose some of the more unusual note parameters.  below the sample you have a series of triggers which, when clicked once go green and repeat the note.  this is awesome for flams and rolls or getting the sample to play in subdivisions smaller than that of the piano roll.  if you click the trigger a second time it then turns grey and the note now plays with reverb.  it also has a check box for “back speakers” which i assume is for a 5.1 set up.

back in the sequencer window and alongside your riffs run blocks that represent tempo and fx.  another cool quirk is tempo and fx automation.  for tempo you can choose a start and end tempo and a ramp curve type.  you can also just plant a new tempo block and jump to the new tempo.  even reason didn’t have that until the latest version. fx are a similar deal. you can run one effect at a time,  you’ve got a a selection of 6 or so reverbs and a few delays and their parameters are automatable in the same way – start value, end value.

there’s a separate jam mode which lets you trigger samples and riffs on the fly but you’ve only got access to the preset loops and it’s just not that great.

running along the right of your track are video riffs.  they’re grouped into objects, lights, effects and cameras.  the objects are basic 3d models like cubes, spheres and atoms, the lights are lights, the cameras are cameras and the effects include feedback, kaleidoscope etc.  and you can link parameters to musical events which should be cool.  it’s just the interface is so clumsy and getting to the parameter you want to is a pain.  i think the video component in the original ‘music’ for ps1 might be better.

According to wikipedia here’s the lineage of music games and their various titles.

Sony Playstation

• 1998 Music: Music Creation for the PlayStation
• 1999 Music 2000 aka MTV Music Generator in North America (CD sampling)

Sony Playstation 2

• 2001 MTV Music Generator 2 (audio sampling)
  
• 2003 Music 3000 aka Funkmaster Flex’s Digital Hitz Factory in North America (audio sampling)
• 2004 MTV Music Generator 3: This Is The Remix (CD sampling)

music 3000 (aka funkmaster flex’s digital hitz factory in north america) also allows for audio sampling and looks like it might have some other pretty cool things going for it like being able to sing phrases into the piano roll.   it’s on the way from ebay so i’ll report back.    i hope you might have some use for these cool little tools.  the ps2 is a fun platform to make music on – much easier to take places than a pc… mayble slighlty more difficult that a laptop.

Zeal – RingTailTiger.mp3 a ringtone sampled and sequenced inside a ps2 just for you.

bob.

i may not have been blogging terribly often the last few weeks but that’s because i was making this!  it’s for james annesley’s virtual proximity – the track’s called suburbia.  dig the album here.

the clip was made using a combination of stop motion animation and projection mapping and i put together a little video describing the process.  dig that below.