BVC

I recently had the great opportunity to make a video accompaniment for some music produced by my friends Rarebit. I saw a great opportunity to make something very moving and powerful and try my hand at video production which, for the most part, I had never done to any extent.

I realized that I wanted to work on my own to try and keep my vision for the whole project on target. I thought it would be fun to film the whole thing with my point and shoot camera, a Kodak Easyshare Z915, for several reasons and amongst the most obvious was availability and it generally being the best video recording tool that I currently owned.

To get started on the project I spent a long time listening to the tracks from the second side of the new album, ‘Daizo’, that Justin had sent me and thinking about what I thought the sound looked like and what parts I would like to commit to video and how I would visually assemble it. There were at least three themes that I wanted to work from: the shimmering light on water at night, motion of people in the city, and motion of air. Amidst some basic story-boarding I took my tripod and camera got on my bicycle and filmed as much of what I heard as I could.

When most of the filming was complete I realized I would need an editing suite to get everything put together. I had imagined that I could do it all on my own programmatically, which was beyond extremely naive. I eventually picked up a trial license of Adobe Premiere. Having the trial edition of the software meant that I had exactly 30 days to edit the video from start to finish. Although the album wasn’t to be released until the following year, I had resolved to have the video completed by early December to get it off my hands and out the door.

Next time I try my hand at music videos I will likely try to work more closely with the associated artists. It was nice to have control over everything in production, but one of the best things others can give is feedback, this was afterall, a learning project. I will also get my source video in much higher resolution than was possible with my point-and-shoot.

I used Processing for the majority of the noteworthy vfx in the video and Premiere for the scene transitions and Gaussian blurring. For the most part, the Processing apps I built were essentially generative video filters. There are also two different particle generators. I wanted to make use of my programming ability but I tried to avoid forcing it on stage for the whole show.

I hope you enjoy it. I spent a lot of work on it! I would like to thank my friends who offered me advice, insight, and counsel during the process.

Go show some love to Rarebit and buy the vinyl! -> http://nonprojects.bigcartel.com/product/rarebit-daizo-lp-pre-order

Links:

https://vimeo.com/37920360

http://cargocollective.com/nonfeed/RareBit-Daizo-LP-2-28-12-LP-Digital

For last month’s Onn/Of festival Dumb Eyes produced an interactive video installation that I did all of the software for. It was our most ambitious experiment with the XBox Kinect to date. While our previous experiments used the depth buffer this one used the skeletal tracking abilities of the Kinect to follow the viewers’ hands and allow the guests to manipulate and control the colorful, glowing cube that we placed before them on screen.

The projected portion of the installation consisted of a cube and two videos, one that was played in the background and another that was played on each face of the cube. Both videos were produced by Christian Petersen, the model for the cube was produced by Nick Bartoletti and I engineered the program that placed the cube, the videos and the gave the attendees control over the whole thing. The program was written in C# using Microsoft’s XNA framework and their Kinect toolkit.

Rotational math is something you deal with on a day-to-day basis in graphics programming but three dimensional rotation is a little less familiar to me, so to help get an idea of how the controls should work I wrote a quick sketch in Processing and hashed out some ideas which you may try out below if you have a Java enabled browser. If you have any trouble try downloading Java for your browser via this link: http://www.java.com/en/.

My latest foray into Processing has been to create a projection visual for an upcoming theater performance at Cornish College of the Arts here in lovely, snow-bound Seattle. Because the play consists for the most part of excerpts from journals and writing, I couldn’t help play with the concept of falling letters. In fact, it was so fun that I expanded on the idea to make it interactive!

Click below for a little inspired fun and keep clicking for more…

Come see the performance on the 26th, 27th or 28th. All shows start at 8pm.

Cornish College of The Arts – MCC 204
1000 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA

Adapted from “Mortified” and Developed by Spike Huntington and Sophie Paterson.
More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/events/325021390853395/

As usual, I’ve been working a lot with Dumb Eyes and last week I had a great opportunity to use my Kinect know-how and other programming skills to bring some extra awesome to an already amazing event.

‘Penetration’ is an event that is thrown once a month on Capital Hill in Seattle as a after-party of sorts for the Capital Hill art-walk every second Thursday.  It consists of good company, drinks, a live DJ, video installations and dance. You can read more about Penetration over at Dumb Eyes.

For December’s second Thursday, Penetration was held at The Woods and I was given the chance to share the honor of live VJ with my friend and collaborator Nick Bartoletti with me on my laptop spewing out audio-reactive and Kinect-based video feed, and Nick on his massive array of analog video mixers, cameras and patches.

During the event I hazily took some footage of my workings in an effort to save them for posterity. So here is my first published Kinect video!

I can’t wait to take this Kinect stuff even farther. I’m barely scratching the surface with this stuff here. What I have so far is largely in owance to the MS XNA framework and the MS Kinect library.

Madd props to Christian, Nick, Michael, and Corey for letting me be involved!!!

I’ve been busy playing with some new toys including Supercollider, Unity, Adobe Premiere and ProcessingJS, all of which makes me feel more busy than I heretofore have realized! But it’s important that I give some blog-space to my ‘Transmissions’ show which is going up again in its entirety this Thursday, December 1st at the Design Commission Gallery. The show includes collaborations with Christian Petersen and Amber Cortes.

Come on out! Here’s the flickr from the first show. It’s going to be a lot of fun! Bring the whole family!

I am happy to announce that on November 3rd I will be presenting several works of mine at Design Commission’s gallery Space in the Tashiro Kaplan Building for the Pioneer Square Artwalk.

“Ben Van Citters is presenting his show titled ‘Transmissions’ in the Design Commssion Gallery Space for the November First Thursday Artwalk in Pioneer Square. ‘Transmissions’ consists of several acoustic and visually interactive installations produced in the last six months with Processing, a new media programming language.”

Design Commission is located at:

310 South Washington Street
Seattle, Washington 98104
View Map

http://designcommission.com/

I hope you can make it and I look forward to seeing you there!

This was a project dreamed up and created by Christian Petersen and myself that was shown in Ghost Gallery in Capitol Hill Seattle for most of July 2011. It was part of the Action! Part 2 show.

Although at first the program running the animation started simple, it ended up being fairly complex. The animation shown is reactive to sound and especially reactive to the sound of the triangle shown in the video. We wanted this effect to keep a strong tie between the triangle and the interactive program and also to reduce the effect that background noise might have.
In order to achieve this I created what I’m calling a ‘frequency mask’ although it probably has a more common name amongst audio engineers. The sound produced by hitting the triangle is consistent, meaning that although the volume changes over time the frequencies in the sound stay the same for the most part, so I created a software tool to track the frequencies generated over time so that I might be able to pay attention certain parts of the frequency spectrum and not others.

We went through at least four different combinations of microphones and computers trying to get a good match. Good grief! Well worth the effort, if I don’t say so myself.

I’ve been hard at work!

Hurricane Irene August 17-28th 2011 from Ben Van Citters on Vimeo.

I have to give a good amount of credit to the work leading up to this Hurricane Video to my good friend and former roommate Alex. He has been interested in the weather for a long time and he asked me if there was some way to make animations of the stills from http://www.goes.noaa.gov/ available and so I tinkered around a little bit and quickly got a program together that periodically visits the site and caches the images. Next, I built a program that takes the stills and converts them into movies. Before too long we hit hurricane season and we’ve been enjoying our bird’s eye view of the clouds.

Now for some music:

Fungal Abyss Visuals from Ben Van Citters on Vimeo.

Fungal Abyss is a Seattle band that recently had a residency at The Comet Tavern. They played several Wednesdays in a row at The Comet and Christian and I were lucky enough to get asked to provide visuals for their performance on the 17th of August. This video shows only my contributions (and in fact just shows the reaction of my program to some of their pre-recorded music playing through speakers). The show was lots of fun. This work is also my first attempt to give some control over the visuals to the operator of the software.

Crypts Visuals from Ben Van Citters on Vimeo.

This video shows some work that I’m doing for the band Crypts, another local group. The visuals shown here are prototype work for a concert coming on October 20th at Showbox SODO. I’m really excited for this concert and I have a lot of big ideas I hope I can use.

I have a few things to say about this little app. While I have had a keen interest in interference patterns and moire patterns of all sorts for a long time there is a story behind the genesis of this particular example. On vacation in Florence, Oregon last weekend I stumbled into a local gallery and saw something similar to what I have created here. It was a kinetic sculpture made of wood that moved via pulleys and gears I assume (I couldn’t tell exactly what made it move the way it did). I thought to myself that I should share this artwork with some friends back home and so I got my camera out but was immediately accosted by one of the staff at the gallery who insisted that this particular artist did not want their work filmed or photographed. As a result, I have no record of what the artist’s name or what the name of the piece was and I must say that I was very jarred by the whole experience.

So here is my humble attempt to recreate in a digital medium the unknown kinetic sculpture. Moving the mouse up and down changes the speed of the motion. Enjoy!

Each line is an approximate half of a circle and there are two sets of lines, evenly spaced, that move against one another.

I’ve been pretty busy lately working a new job with Amazon.com and doing some audio-visual stuff for a concert tour with Christian Peterson from the design studio Dumb Eyes and I haven’t had much time to update my site. Today, however, I finally got around to making my hairdryer sim. It’s an idea that I had when I first got started working on my “Grass” program last year.

Both programs make use of a lot of the same code. The grass blades are just slightly altered versions of the hairs in this program.