Avengers Visual FX

Avengers Visual FX:



I just finished recording 3 hours of training for the Explosive Train sequence so while I finish editing that… check out this amazing demo from ILM on the VFX work for The Avengers. 3 Hours of recorded training is probably 1.5 hours after editing out rendering and bad jokes. Stay tuned, it’s a big series.

BIKE SPIKES

BIKE SPIKES: re-blog from Polkadot

Cari ciclisti, ghiaccio e neve non saranno più un problema per voi!

Ci ha pensato il designer Cesar van Rongen, con Bike Spikes.

Bike Spikes è l’equivalente delle catene da neve per le auto, ma per le biciclette. Si tratta di un involucro di gomma, con punte di ferro incorporate, che ricopre lo pneumatico della bicicletta dando una presa perfetta sui tratti ghiacciati della strada. E’ composto da sei parti flessibili, che possono essere facilmente fissate alle ruote di qualsiasi city bike, grazie a un filo metallico che scorre tra di esse in modo che possano essere fissate attorno alla ruota.

E se il ghiaccio si scioglie, Spikes Bike può essere tolto in un attimo e ripiegato in un piccolo e compatto pacchetto.

Automatically Projection Mapping a 3D, Moving Object: White Kanga Show Stunning Tech

Automatically Projection Mapping a 3D, Moving Object: White Kanga Show Stunning Tech:

Hide’n'Seek – Technology Demo from White Kanga on Vimeo.
Automatically map an object with a projector. Keep the mapping working as the object moves. And, oh yeah, look damned fine while doing it.
That’s the neat trick Poland-based White Kanga have pulled off, powered by TouchDesigner. We’ve been following their work before:
Robotic Mapping Pulls a Model Building, Tron-Like, Into the Virtual
Projection Mapping, with Robotics, Goes Further to Augmenting Reality: MPS Demo [TouchDesigner]
Here, we get to really see it in action. It doesn’t hurt that you get cool graphics visualizing the calibration. It’s an internal tool, but it demonstrates a lot of what’s possible.
I was in Poland for their national day yesterday, but watching this video makes me want to start waving around the white and red flag and cheering on this crew. (Or, if they like, whatever flag/mascot they choose.) Brilliant work.

Apple Introduces Four Television Spots for the iPhone 5

Apple Introduces Four Television Spots for the iPhone 5: With the launch of the iPhone 5, Apple has started running a full slate of television ads promoting the product. Typical with Apple advertising, all the spots focus on the features of the iPhone 5 and iOS, rather than price. They are voiced by Jeff Daniels, currently starring as Will McAvoy on HBO's Newsroom.



One is focused on the new EarPod headphones, while another shows off the new Panorama feature in iOS 6, and a third touts the larger screen of the iPhone 5. The fourth ad shows how the iPhone 5 is the perfect size for "your thumb", a subtle jab at the larger screens of some Android phones that can be difficult to use with one hand.

Apple's Yerba Buena Decoration Shows Stretched iOS Icons, Possibly Hinting at Taller iPhone 5

Apple's Yerba Buena Decoration Shows Stretched iOS Icons, Possibly Hinting at Taller iPhone 5:



Photo by Luis Gutierrez, Developer of Super Apps

Apple has finished decorating the front facade of the Yerba Buena center in preparation for their September 12th media event. Apple is expected to announce the iPhone 5 at that event. At initial glance, the front decoration seems to show no obvious clues as to their announcements.





However, one eagle eyed MacRumors forum visitor believes the facade show stretched iOS icons. Zaym points out that you can see stretched versions of iOS icons including Game Center, iTunes, Music and App Store in the image and provides an example image.





After taking the above image and skewing it and shrinking it, we've verified his findings. Several icons are clearly recognizable in their un-stretched form:








Game Center (upside down above), iTunes and Music icons:








Of course, speculation on the reason for the stretched icons points to the long-running rumors that Apple will be introducing a taller iPhone with a 4" diagonal screen. Our complete iPhone 5 roundup details everything we expect in the new iPhone.





Update: Another take on the icons from roosternugget:

Deadmau5′s New Performance DJ Setup

re-blog from djtechtools.com

Over the weekend at Toronto’s Veld Music Festival, Deadmau5 showed off part of brand new live performance setup (see below for full video) that features a massive touch screen with controls for individual note triggering as well as loop triggering and level/parameter adjustment. While visually very similar to a performance of his at Earl’s Court a year and a half ago (which featured a touchscreen Holodesk), the interface and technology here are clearly different.

Deadmau5 also announced over the weekend that he’ll be cooling down in terms of new high-intensity projects, so it could be a bit before we see more of this interface onstage.

WARNING: Turn down your volume before watching this video, as it has highly distorted sound! 

Touching Beams of Light: An Otherworldly Laser Interaction Prototype

NOW THIS IS SOMETHING NEW! (re-blog from Create Digital Motion)



Touching Beams of Light: An Otherworldly Laser Interaction Prototype:
Laser interaction prototype from jayson on Vimeo.
Interaction design isn’t just input. Output can transform a simple demo into something that seems to bend reality.
Melbourne-based artist Jayson Haebich sends over a laser interaction prototype he’s creating. The results seem like science fiction, as though he’s opening jump gates with his fingers.
It’s almost exclusively for aesthetic effect, but that sense of light, sound, and space coming together and then being gently pulled apart is more than enough. Technical details:

The software used to control the laser was created using OpenFrameworks and C++ by Jayson Haebich and uses an Xbox kinect to do 3d tracking. The software creates the lasers beams by sending vectors to the laser via a DAC. The lasers position is then calibrated to the 3-Dimensional field of data viewed from the kinect, which is used to detect when intersections between users and the laser beams occur. These interactions then trigger effects such as colour changes or causing the beams to move which gives users the feeling of being able to touch the laser beams.

Jason, when you get further with this, you can bet we’ll want to see it.
http://jaysonh.com/laser.html

Pop-Up Video: Tesla, Synesthetic Hallucination, and Augmented Book Science

Pop-Up Video: Tesla, Synesthetic Hallucination, and Augmented Book Science:

Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.


Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.
Digitally-enhanced magician Marco Tempest is back, here with a poignant message about the magic of science – the leaps of faith, and leaps of showmanship, required to turn scientific imagination into reality. Any opportunity to celebrate genius scientist Nikola Tesla, unjustly unsung relative to his extraordinary accomplishments in electricity and thinking, is a good one. Here, too, we find a behind-the-scenes look at how carefully-calibrated projection mapping brings a pop-up book to life. Some of those close-ups in the video at top are unforgiving (it’d work perfectly in a theatrical setting). But the integration of the book, Marco Tempest’s sleight of hand, and digital animation can be spellbinding.
And because Mr. Tempest is of the mind that being more open makes the magic more effective, not less – a bit like science itself – he shares all the how-to details.


Making of "Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light" from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.


Making of “Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light” from Marco Tempest on Vimeo.
Full details, plus the TED version:

Created and Produced by Marco Tempest

Script: David Britland

Art Direction: Kevin Blanc

Motion Design: Alain Renold

Pop-up Design: Peter Dahmen

Music and sound design: Michael Ricar

Custom software development: Enrico Viola

Arduino Tech Wizard: Manuel Rueda Iragorri

Pre-visualization and production mascot: Signe Fleischmann

additional still photography:

Carmen Kam

(Bonus points to anyone who knows to what my headline refers. Or, at least, you’ve established you’re my age.)

Artisan / UVA: Sprint “The Dream”

Artisan / UVA: Sprint “The Dream”:





Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do cell phones dream of interactive on-screen cinema experiences? Artisan (part of UVA) used their in-house content mapping framework, d3, to create a stunning cell phone warning. The making-of that shows off the practical effects they filmed is particularly impressive.
Hat tip to creativeapplications.net.


Team Sprint – Campaign Credits:

Client/Ad or Campaign: Sprint’s “Dream” Cinema PSA for NCM Theaters

Agency: Team Sprint – Leo Burnett & Digitas

Chief Creative Officer: Susan Credle

Creative Directors: Michael Boychuk, Kevin Drew Davis, Mark Moll

EVP, Executive Director of Production: Chris Rossiter

Producer: Bryan Litman, Amanda Riley

Account Team: Vanessa Mackey, Julie Holton and Melissa Wolf

Production Company: Artisan

Director: Artisan and Chris Turner

VFX/SPX: Artisan

Editorial: Trim Edit

Editor: Paul Hardcastle

Director of Photography: James Medcraft

Sound Design: Scanner
Posted on Motionographer

Motionographer Classic Quickie: Inside 1980s ILM

Motionographer Classic Quickie: Inside 1980s ILM:

Motionographer Classic Quickie: Director Gavin Rothery hosts a great review of groundbreaking analog VFX techniques with a series of videos peeking inside 1980s Industrial Light & Magic.
Posted on Motionographer

In Translucent Glass Grids, Nature’s Patterns, Revealed

In Translucent Glass Grids, Nature’s Patterns, Revealed:re-blog from CreateDigitalMotion



Up close, nature’s patterns represent nothing so much as elegant geometry, or even, perhaps, pixels. Rendered as an translucent array, organic patterns become a dance of digital pixels in a work in North Carolina. The creators describe it nicely, so it’s best to reflect on their description – and recall that nature can be an endless source of inspiration.
There’s an extra revelation here, too: low-power displays could be the future. And that’s excellent news for nature.

Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for the newly-built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.

10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.

The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.

An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.

Patterned by Nature was created by

Plebian Design – plebiandesign.com

Hypersonic Design & Engineering – hypersoniced.com

and

Sosolimited – sosolimited.com

Marco Tempest: A Magical Tale

Marco Tempest: A Magical Tale:

Crazy MIDI Controllers: Turntable Rider

Crazy MIDI Controllers: Turntable Rider:

Mapping AV to Architecture, a Touchscreen Project Puts Participants in Control in Chicago [Video]

Mapping AV to Architecture, a Touchscreen Project Puts Participants in Control in Chicago [Video]:



   


Mapping projections to architecture, and connecting music to visual metaphors are nothing new. But many of these projects leave the control to performers; audience members simply stand back and watch. In a project for HP promoting their TouchSmart PCs, interactive artists ceded that control to participants. Instead of the computers being in the hands of the performers, they’re touchable by anyone, for an open, collaborative experience of the work.
The project makes use of a number of ingredients. The HP TouchSmart PC provides a big, touchable display, much larger (though less mobile) than a tablet like the iPad. On the software side, custom interfaces for the participants manipulate sound and visuals built in not one but two visual programming languages: Max/MSP and (Windows-only) TouchDesigner.

The project is the work of two firms, Waveplant and Leviathan. Joel Corelitz writes from the Waveplant side to share the work with CDM readers:

My company (Waveplant) collaborated with Leviathan to create an OSC-controlled projection mapping installation for HP to promote their TouchSmart line of PCs. Participants controlled the sound and visuals via the PCs with custom-created OSC interfaces (in TouchDesigner). Max/MSP was used to drive the audio and the visuals.
I was responsible for all the audio creation as well as the Max/MSP programming, and Leviathan created the visuals and handled the projection mapping.
Just to reiterate – Leviathan is the company that’s responsible (amongst many other things) for the visual component of Amon Tobin’s ISAM tour. My company / personal brand Waveplant was responsible for all the audio in this project as well as the maxMSP programmed back-end that was responsible for the live audio interactivity. Leviathan designed interfaces in Touch Designer that transmit information to Max/MSP. Max/MSP would respond with audio in various ways while sending OSC information back to those interfaces and touch designer which reflected those musical changes visually.
As an artist, I’m really excited about these kinds of marketing efforts. They’re incredible opportunities to push creative boundaries and subvert the more “linear” forms of advertising that we’re used to. What’s also really unique about them is the way they let the art stand on its own while at the same time involving the product in a hands-on (literally) capacity.

Here’s an extended documentary of the project, with requisite shots of Chicago’s famous L train. (For some of you, that should cause a Pavlovian hunger for deep dish pizza.)



More information:

http://www.waveplantstudios.com/HP-Play-Big

http://www.waveplantstudios.com/HP-Hear-There-Everywhere
Agency for this project:

designkitchen

New Music Tech Web Show Takes on VJing, Audiovisual Turntablism

New Music Tech Web Show Takes on VJing, Audiovisual Turntablism:


How do you expose live visual culture to larger audiences? Even as club visuals have become more commonplace, and – evidently – some US$10 million in gear sold last year, the awareness of the medium itself is both limited and, very often, contentious.

Producer and CDM reader Yaniv Fituci sends along one new entry, a show that will look at the meeting place of music and technology. (Hmm… I think I’ve been to that intersection.)

Hosted by G4 celeb Kevin Pereira, the production style definitely isn’t subtle. There appear to be leather-bound ladies around, for one. (If I produced a show in Berlin, leather and bare skin, yes. Ladies – maybe not so much.) And Kevin Pereira seems to be caught in a combination of a motion graphic for Monday Night Football and Lawnmower Man. (“Are you ready for some virtual reality?” Speaking of which, best IMDB tagline ever: “A simple man is turned into a genius through the application of computer science.” Hell, yes!) Can’t someone license the rights to Max Headroom, already?

The format, though, sounds intriguing. The show is done battle-style, judged on Twitter.

And once you get through the title graphics, Mike Relm shows off some video turntablism while doing a pretty nice, concise explanation of the modern live visual set’s evolution. I would have liked to hear some artist names mentioned — Emergency Broadcast Network and Coldcut introduced a lot of the video cut-up and remix techniques you see, and Coldcut the ground-breaking VJAMM software (which itself does get a mention). But it could reach some new audiences, and I’m curious to see how this VJ death match happens.

It’s all definitely focused on club visuals and audiovisual turntable sets, which in a way reveals how big the gulf is between this and the growing practice in generative visuals, projection mapping, and synthesis (even including a resurgence of analog video synthesis).

All of that said, it’s great to see this team take on the topic. More coverage can only be a good thing.

So, if this is a VJ and music tech program for the G4 set, what would you want as Create Digital Motion readers? I think we probably bought ten million dollars in cables last year, at least. (We’ve probably collectively bought $10 mil in those little Apple video dongles, as a community.)

http://entertheplaylist.com/ [Ah, remember those innocent days in the 90s when we all used VJAMM and ArKaos, and there was only one Matrix movie?]

Below, videos with ScreenWerks, Eclectic Method. And Yaniv tells us the next epi will feature controllerism “and bout Ean Golden vs Moldover in a 3-round controllerist battle.”





Bonus: Since my locality is set to Germany, IMDB tells me that, in German, Lawnmower Man is, naturally, “Der Rasenmähermann.” Oh, yes. Now I know what my hardcore deathtronic artist name will be.

Antilop: Coca-Cola’s 125th Anniversary Exhibition’s Future Room

Antilop: Coca-Cola’s 125th Anniversary Exhibition’s Future Room:

Istanbul creative agency Antilop created this audio-visual and interactive installation for Coca-Cola’s 125th Anniversary Exhibition’s Future Room concept for Turkish modern-art museum santralistanbul.

Jonathan Brainin

Jonathan Brainin: Jonathan Brainin's excellent camera an pendulum based feedback experiments /artworks

Pendulum Video (fast shutter speed) from Jonathan

Brainin on Vimeo.

Pendulum Video (Mode Two #1) from Jonathan Brainin on Vimeo.

Pendulum Video (Mode Three #1) from Jonathan Brainin on Vimeo.

Projection Mapping Meets Turntablism: Serato DJing and Live Visual Feedback

Projection Mapping Meets Turntablism: Serato DJing and Live Visual Feedback:re-blog from Create Digital Motion

Projection Mapping Onto Turntables from E.N.S. on Vimeo.

Rooted in pre-digital tradition, the turntables and mixer here get a different kind of digital upgrade: sound-responsive visuals transform the decks.

Built by Austin, Texas-based student Mark Morris, artist E.N.S., and collaborators, this work in progress demonstrates what happens if you point the projector directly at the DJ’s rig. Cleverly, they map the platters themselves as they rotate, as well as add interface elements from the DJ software and responsive audio waveforms. From Mark:

This is a projection mapping project we’ve been working on for about a month as of uploading.

It’s a user interface for Serato Scratch Live that is vinyl rotation-reactive, as well as sound-reactive, and makes it possible to mix using Serato without having to look at your computer screen whatsoever. We have real-time waveforms streaming across our mixers, or our vinyl platters, and we have started to incorporate video effects that are controlled by [Nintendo] Wii remotes. We are also working on controlling effects with motion capturing using a camera.

Much more to come!

The Song from the video was made by one of the creators of all the cool stuff you saw in the video: Mark Morris

Music from E.N.S. is available on Facebook.

Thanks to Francis Preve (Academik Records, Keyboard Magazine), who’s fortunate to have Mark as a student and points this our way.

We’ll have more as they get further along, but this is already looking great.

Update – via comments, here’s another instance of projection mapping onto decks, by MrGeeBee, a Luzern, Switzerland-based developer moonlighting as DJ. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other examples, as well. Heck, I hope there are – go make more, folks.

A Virtual Tiger Stalks Paris, Projection Mapping from a Car; Similar Earlier Work

A Virtual Tiger Stalks Paris, Projection Mapping from a Car; Similar Earlier Work:

Golden Tiger from le3paris on Vimeo.

Here’s guerrilla projection taken to a whole new level: hitting the pavement, doing it from a moving object. Hit the road, jack.

The result: a digital tiger that appears to “run” across the surfaces of Parisian buildings. A reader tells us:

We have seen a tiger on Vimeo projected and prowling around the streets of Paris.

We found out that the french creative studio Le3 has been terrorizing Paris in recent days with its latest art installation, called the “Golden Tiger.” The team is projecting recorded footages of a running tiger onto the streets of Paris from a moving vehicle. The apparent running speed of the beast is controlled by the speed of car, via sensors in its wheels.

It goes to show that street mapping have clearly moved forward.

Moving forward, indeed. And it makes you wonder what other mobile projection ideas might be lurking in the veldt.

More information:

le3paris.com

Credits:

Street Mapping in Paris

from an original idea by

Mehmet AYDOGDU

Julien NONNON

Romain VOLLET

with the participation of

Laurent LE GOFF

Donatien DE LAVENNE

Music by THE AGENCY ‘Watching Us’

(F. Blet / R. Trotel / Y. Mayoux)

Published by Industry of Cool

From the album ‘SOMNOGRAPHE’ © 2011

Tiger in your Tank? [Updated] Unfortunately, it seems this work – has already been done. While unintentional coincidence is certainly easy enough in this field, here it appears the work above was without attribution based on an earlier work. Drawing from earlier ideas is a good thing, but doing it directly and without attribution would tend to be plagiarism. I will investigate to see if there’s something we don’t know here.

http://www.gravitytrap.com/artwork/wildlife [by Karolina Sobecka - and really quite lovely work, too - thanks to arctic sunrise in comments and a discussion thread on creative applications]

Scanimate Effects Excerpt

These experts are talking about early graphics and motion designs that are available back in 60's-70'. One of the animation generator machine that only 8 of them were build and cost 1 mill was "SCANIMATE" I just love to see the development (evolution) of what we have going on today. Back then just a flash of graphic - machine generate was enough to surprise people and become a talk of the town. How about now?