Uncategorized – Page 5 – Benjamin Van Citters

It’s been a long time since I posted anything. I created this sketch/app to make an appealing backdrop for my facebook page to limited success. I think it looks cool in it’s own right, however.

This is one of the first times I’m making the source code of my work available to others. I have hidden my code for too long; it’s time to share. The code and project is posted on OpenProcessing.org.

To me the most interesting thing about this project are the coded sine waves. Running this at full screen bogs my system down a little and I deduced (rightly or wrongly) that the source of this slowness was in part due to the repeated/nested calls to processing‘s sine wave function. In an effort to speed it up, at the beginning of the program I save a few hundred evaluations of the sine function at evenly space intervals and then, when I need to use the evaluations I just look them up out of an array which is quite fast.

There is, of course, a trade off on memory usage and accuracy which should not be forgotten, but this is lowercase ‘a’ art so I’m not worried about the exact 15th decimal place or too much quantization of the sinusoidal function.

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