Fun with textures

Thanks to ArtificialEyes great and personal support, I've been making some progress setting up 3L for midi control.

Here are a few short clips that I grabbed last night with my camcorder. 3L does have the ability to capture the output direct to disk, but I was going for some of the blurred and motion effects from the camera itself. The audio is pretty bad due to the tiny mic on my camera. Maybe I'll motivate next time to actually hook up one of my good mics. But the audio isn't essential anyway, just what I happened to be listening to.

I'm running renoise sending midi to a macbook pro, running 3L. Inside 3L, I've set up one object, one light, and one mask generator. A farily simple patch, considering all that 3L can do. But I think it looks pretty good.


3L Textures from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

And another one, same patch, different lighting settings.


More 3L Textures from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

If you watched my video Controlling LED color changers with Wacom tablet you can see the white milk crates that I have my laptops sitting on. They make great interference patterns when the LEDs shine against the wall.

My walls are painted a sort of brownish tan, so I taped some white paper to the wall to capture this.

Setup is wacom tablet driving max/msp, which is converting signal to DMX and sending it to a cluster of LED lights. Video captured on my camcorder. Again, the audio is not really important.


LED Interference patterns from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

When insulting your customers is OK

I've been going back and forth with Michael aka exiledsurfer over email and on the official artificialeyes forum regarding the 3L video software that I've been working with.

When people see it running in my studio, I get comments like "Holy UI insanity".

It is so complex and user hostile, that when I asked how to save a preset on the official forums I got 2 pages of text description, and later a 7 minute video tutorial showing step by step how it's done.

Wall of text crits you for 7000 damage.
You die.

More failed attempts at saving and loading prompted me to post new questions, and emailing Michael personally. Some stuff is working, others not.

Then, Michael asked me to ring him on skype so he could go through it with me. I appreciated the offer, but pretty much blew it off, for a few reasons. I don't have skype set up yet (it's on my list). And, I recently got booked for a show, which I need to prepare new material for.

So, I explained to him that I'd probably just skip the video portion of the show, and focus on the music and lighting effects.

To which, I got this response:

"i want you to have video for the show. call me, dork."

HAHAHAHA

OMG

This is the only time I have ever genuinely laughed from a technical support request. And the first time that a potentially insulting term has been used to effectively connect in a business oriented relationship.

Grats, Exiledsurfer, you just achieved ed's top honor: hero status.

Driving LED units with wacom tablet

Controlling LED color changers with Wacom tablet from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

Dreams

I have wacked out dreams.

Usually describing them as nightmares would be more accurate. I've gotten so used to it, that having a pleasant dream would freak me out.

2/2/97 - Dream

In some kind of light weight motorboat that is not running. It is night time, and Jana and I are in this boat, still on the shore. We push it off into a semi-protected area of a large lake. I was using oars to move us along. The boat was extremely efficient, it seemed to glide over the water with very little force.

I got in the water as Jana paddled around me. I lay back into the the water trusting, but fearing it, and then safely climbed back into the boat.

It is very dark, but there are a few shadows suggesting some light sources. We are back in our bedroom. Jana asks "what's that?". Then her voice changes... Fear and inescapable doom take over. Almost trembling, "AAAAAgh , What is that?"

I can't see anything and I nudge her away from it towards the light switch. "Turn on the lights", I say. She cannot move staring at this thing that I have not yet perceived. I shove her harder. "Turn on the lights!"

The allure of popularity

When I first got involved in the electronic dance music scene around 1992, every event I attended was saturated with music I had never heard before. As I got more educated with the material, I would be able to pick out a few tracks here and there. But, the dj's always pushed new, hard to find, or unreleased material. Being the first to play a great cut for an audience was a sort of honor and privilege.

This was the mentality that inspired me to create custom exclusive tracks for djs. Not only is it hard to find, It's impossible to find. It's a secret weapon that only one person has access to. I thought dj's would be all over this, and soon I'd have so many requests that I couldn't fill them all.

I realize now that nowadays, in most cases, this is completely backwards. They want to play songs that everyone knows. Or, they are pushing some record label's agenda on everyone. "Oh, I know the words! I can sing along! It's my favorite song." - CRAP

It's just another product of the broken failure of mass market pop culture brainwashing. If you want to hear the same thing over and over again, please don't go out any more. Just stay home with your ipod that has 1 track on it. The world will be a better place.

Moving the blog (again)

Hopefully this will be the last time.

I got fed up with coreblog's inability to embed videos, accept comments, and trackbacks.

So. Blogger is my new spot.

Everything on.

I turned on every piece of gear in the studio over the weekend. I was a bit afraid that i'd blow a fuse, but there was sufficient power.

I had to run power from the garage, and the upstairs living room to pull the 240v power that the cyberlights require. Everything else is on a 30 amp circuit.


Full power on studio test from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

Sync testing - Audio, video, sound

Lighting video audio sync testing from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

This is a fairly simple loop test, illustrating the direction I'm going with this performance project.

The music is a sketch that Joshua, Telly and myself were working on Saturday night, which I believe was a branch from a piece that Owen and Joshua originally wrote. It is being played in Renoise with Massive and Circle doing the synthesis.

Midi is transmitted to a macbook pro running 3L with a very simple patch setup. No textures, or effects really, just flat shaded objects and background color changes.

The midi stream is translated to midi over IP on the macbook pro and sent to a macbook running max/msp. A custom max patch converts midi data to DMX, and drives the 16 LED color changers scattered around the room.


A view of the 3L interface while testing from Ed Colmar on Vimeo.

Here is what the 3L interface looks like as the loop plays back. Sorry it's kinda blurry.