Benjamin Van Citters

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…
[processing width=”600″ height=”400″ file=”https://benvancitters.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sprks.jar” method=”onclick”][/processing]

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/