Probably the most rewarding part of making VJ software is seeing someone do something amazing with your tool. We get a lot of mail and Facebook messages from people showcasing their work. We try to highlight and share this with you via the blog or social media, but quite often we feel it deserves more.

So we figured we'd give it more.

A while back we posted this video, which is basically a rip-off of EyeSupply's Godskitchen promo with some Resolume shots thrown in. Still we think it looks kinda cool.



The idea is that every few months, we make a new video, but this time showcasing the Resolume community, i.e. *your* work! If you have footage of your amazing summer festival gig, or your insane mapping project, send it to us. We'll edit the submissions into a regular video, and promote it via our network. This means that a *lot* of people will get to see your work. Of course you get full credit, so it's a great way to get some exposure. Boast to your friends, potential clients, your parents and your grandma's dog.



Guidelines:
Be clear in who you are. Let us know how you would like to be credited, and which info you want public and which info you want to keep to yourself.
Use a tripod. Those lovely wide stage shots of your gigantic LED wall deserve some time to be admired.
Use a decent camera. It would be a shame if we can't use your latest mapping extravaganza if we can't make out the pixels from the potatoes.
Show the context. Your monitor output is impressive, seeing it behind the DJ in front of a thousand people is overwhelming.
We love to see an interface screen here and there. Nothing says 'done with Resolume' than seeing somebody actually do it with Resolume.
Leave the editing, titling and fancy effects up to us. The more raw material we have to work with, the more impressive we can make the whole.

Tech specs:
Minimum 1280x720 resolution. It's easiest to send your material in Quicktime .movs with h264 compression. We'll handle all the conversion to an editing codec. If you really don't know how to do this, just send it anyway and we'll get back to you. Too big to send via mail? WeTransfer.com allows up to 2GB.

Small print:
By submitting your work to us, you agree to the following:
- Resolume can use the raw material and the finished edit of it for all promotional purposes. You will of course always be credited when your material is used.
- You are in fact the creator of both the subject matter and the material itself. You also have permission from any associated parties to publicly display this material. In other words, nobody is going to come and throw bricks at our windows or subpoenas at our mailbox.

Why are you still reading this? Get your cameras out and start filming!

Everyone loves presents, and BirdMask by ASZYK/Neal Coghlan is a gift that keeps on giving. First watch the video below. Do it now.



From Neal's description:

It's taken a while but finally, here is the first upload of BIRDMASK Visuals. I first started work on these way back at the end of 2010. Like my Tasty Visuals, they started out with some miscellaneous illustration. The elements came together quite nicely and I started to form compositions out of them which became geometric, tribal bird faces. Like with most of my illustrations, I couldn't resist bringing it alive by animating it.

In their earliest form there was a lot less clips and they weren't in HD. A lot of elements didn't fit together well either so mixing between faces wasn't as smooth. In it's current form, the set is made up of 6 different faces, each one with 8 layers and 4 different clips per layer - making a total of 192 clips. These are all loaded into Resolume and triggered using Ableton and an iPad.This video was made by recording a Resolume composition - all the clips being triggered live. This piece wasn't composited using FCP or Premiere! (or After Effects for that matter), it was all done live.

BIRDMASK visuals made their debut in Geneva at Mapping Festival in May 2011 (mappingfestival.ch/2011/types/?artist=1285&lang=en) and since then have been played in clubs across London. The biggest showing was during Channel 4's House Party (channel4.com/programmes/house-party/articles/aszyk) where we performed alongside RnB legends 'Soul II Soul', who played an amazing set, mixing Reggae, House, RnB and Garage.

The set is still evolving and work has begun on a 3D version. I'm hoping to port them into UNITY 3D where I can make them even more reactive...

The track is called 'Elephant & Castle' by ASZYK - soundcloud.com/aszyk/elephant-castle-v1

After enjoying the lovely abstract animation, tight beat sync, lush colours and subtle perspective work, you find there's more. Not one to keep his secrets hidden, Neal shares a how to video of how this set of AV magic is put together. Revealing tricks of the trade, there is magic in this breakdown baby.



Check out more of Neal's work, and then head back to your own studio, and hang your head in shame for not being as good as this guy. I want to have his babies.

A while back, DeadMau5 stirred up some controversy with a ranty post on his blog about the current debate about skillz in DJ'ing.

It's a good read and he hits the nail on the head overall. Let's face it, who cares how many records you can juggle if your show sucks? But we did raise our eyebrows on some other points he brings up. Especially where he says he's constrained to work on a set timeline because the lights and visuals cannot be synced otherwise. In fact, we went so far to scratch our heads.

Syncing your Ableton Live setup via midi over wifi in such big venues is indeed unreliable. But surely there are more ways to sync up lights and visuals, while keeping room for creativity? In fact, we know for certain there are other ways. Eyesupply was doing it every night in stadiums and festivals all over the world. But we bit our lip.

Now finally we can speak freely about project Nimra, which was the SMPTE synchronization specifically built for Armin van Buuren's 'Armin Only' world tour setup. He has released a video on YouTube, showcasing how his CDJ decks are controlling a trusty computer running none other than Resolume Arena on a SMPTE input, powered by Eyesupply.



What's amazing about it? They've created a reliable system which can be built-up and tore down night after night. Sometimes even three to four times in a single night. All the while leaving room for both Armin and the Eyesupply crew to improvise where they feel like it and be tight in sync where they need it. And that's what a live performance is all about.

Austria has a really awesome visual scene. We've been lucky enough to experience the good vibe and great people there a few times. And always the experience was rewarding and enlightening (and also there may have been a schnitzel or two). So we'd like to introduce you to one of the major players in the Vienna scene: Media Apparat.


Birthday Video: Media Apparat 2008-2012

Can you explain a bit about the history of Media Apparat?
Following several workshops in 2008 with bildwerk.tv and first gigs via the eye-con Label (4youreye), the collaborating DJs Matose & Flobert, VJ Sito Sun and Mister Pink founded an event called Media Apparat. VJ-Setups, which enable the audience to sense music in a space-consuming way, were focused.

Due to a lot of positive feedback the event was quickly turned into a collective for trans-medial Arts:
From stage designer to fashion designer, from producer to 3D modeler; many creative individuals encountered at the same place. Colleagueship and networking became our main principals. Countless gigs in clubs all over Europe provided us with the experience to win further commercial contracts.

Our tireless work on different techniques as well as the club-crowd itself made experimental projects possible. Most importantly: We were not afraid that anything might have gone wrong. Things did go wrong in the beginning. Our first mapping show turned out to be a fiasco; nevertheless this is how we managed to land our first major contract: The complete staging and production of the biggest Austrian science award. Through this engagement the Media Apparat became an Enterprise: Media Apparat Company + Network
 
Today, one and a half years later, we work for the biggest event agencies in Austria and have positioned our work as follows: We offer an All-In-One Service for agencies. We own a small film-studio and grow with every project. It is our ambition always to move ahead: To become more efficient, to design more impressively and to reduce mistakes to a minimum.

Eventually nowadays our clients spend enough money for the projects so that we can meet with our main principle which is networking on a trans-medial level. Out of the collective and networks therefore arose: Media Apparat Frameworks.


Biggest Austrian congress for Startups
 
What about the tech? What sort of gear do you lug with you for a show?
We are now in the fortunate position to being able to work without limits to our equipment. Every project has its proper profile of requirements. We have worked with several media servers, yet we mainly count on instruments that we are familiar with: A self-arranged computer with a 16 Gigabyte Ram, i7 CPU, ASUS EAH6970 graphic board, SSD as our work disc and if necessary Matrox-boards. For software we exclusively use Resolume Arena and as a plugin for mapping we use IRMapio. For backups, or if we deal with a high number of signals, we synchronize two systems, that’s it!
Controller: Launch-Pad + VCM-600
 
Is working commercially very different from a VJ gig?
One leads to the other. In the Club one gets the opportunity to learn about techniques, to test them, to experiment. What we learn there forms the basis for our commercial work. 


Latest Mapping Show
 
How does Resolume fit into all this?
Resolume is a Live-System. On stage things don’t always go smoothly; often we must improvise. It enables us to react faster to external sources of error. I don’t know any other software with which I can map and arrange complex Setups with screens and projectors so fast as with Resolume.
 
What's your favorite show of the last four years?
Without a question: Amon Tobin- isam
 
And what about the future? Where is Media Apparat headed?
More and more we receive international enquiries, for which we are very pleased as in Austria complex shows usually are not within the budget. We continue to develop ourselves permanently. Elements like the stage-interaction between audience and artists are very promising for the future. The markets where we operate are subject to constant changes to which we try to adapt to. We increasingly rely on solid knowledge about classic live-direction and on existing systems (for example the Congress-technique). We try to develop those techniques without loosing our traditional playground – the stage-management of shows. We enjoy our diversified work a lot, it’s a lot of fun.  The journey is the reward. We are looking forward to further projects. What they’ll look like, time will show.


Vienna Awards for Fashion and Lifestyle

Check out the site for more visual goodness:
Media Apparat

From the creator of the popular “Touch Resolume” controller comes a new and creative art installation called Exquisite Motion Corpse. A fun and interactive work based on the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse. This four-channel video installation features a life-size tower of screens controlled with an iPad running TouchOSC. Users can swap out body segments that are synchronized with loop-based music and sounds.



The backbone of the installation is a Mac Pro is running Resolume 4 Avenue. Resolume controls the timing and playback of the video clips and does all the heavy lifting need to make this installation work. Instead of having to program a unique video application using Max/MSP and jitter, the creators of Exquisite Motion Corpse were able to use audio/video playback functions built into Resolume to do everything they needed. Be sure to check the how-it-works section on the projects' website for more techy goodness.

At the Ann Arbor Film Festival their installation was running 10-13 hours a day without crashing, clocking over 21,000+ measures on the BPM counter! A stress test of Resolume’s stability in a performance environment.



Now the project is being ported into an iOS application called “Bodies and Beats.” This will be the first audio-visual mashup app seen for the iPad and iPhone! Check out their Kickstarter campaign and help make this app a reality.

A while back Ben Peoples from Trinculo’s Attic contacted us about a project he did, using Resolume as a playback device. The write-up offers a great insight into the actual real-world experience of creating physical installations. And it made us giggle. Maybe it will make you giggle too.

We were contacted about doing an “Elevator-controlled video switcher”. Here’s the initial inquiry: “we have an elevator at an event… we want to play one file when it’s going up and then a second when it’s going down…”

Of course, the first question is: Can someone push a button? No. Can we hook into the elevator controls? No. Not even a little? No. They had three ceiling-mounted video screens, and it was up to us to find a way to sense when the elevator was moving, and in which direction, and then trigger the appropriate video.
The end result looked like this:



We built a standalone video player that hooked into custom built position sensors to tell us where the elevator was. When the elevator went up, it played one video file, when it went down, it played another, and it had splash screens at each floor while idle. Our logic allowed us to tweak the configuration on-site, and we even added functionality on the fly.

The final effect was pretty magical: as the elevator started to move up, the first video played. 5 seconds after it arrived at the second floor, the video crossfaded to a splash screen. As soon as the elevator started its trip down, the second video played, and again 5 seconds after arrival, the video crossfaded to the splash screen. Nobody had to remember to do anything: the elevator’s own movement was triggering the video.

The Event

The event had folks sitting in one session, then being moved to a second session that was one floor up. This elevator was the way they got up and then back down for the main keynote in another room on the first floor. When you got in the elevator, there was a logo on the screens. As the elevator started to rise, the logo crossfaded to a video about “Up into the wild blue yonder.” A few seconds after arriving at the second floor, the screens switched back to the logo, flipped upside-down: the elevator was a “feed through” type, so people getting on at the second floor were coming from the opposite direction. While the screens were flat, we wanted the audience to have a similar experience in both directions. The ride down had a video of a ceiling fan (which worked nicely with the natural airflow through the elevator.) Overall, it was a nice effect, and made an otherwise boring 25-second elevator ride into a far more themed environment.

Making it Work

We walked into the event with two different plans fully implemented, as well as a few backup plans if parts of either of those failed.

The first plan (Plan A) was to use an accelerometer to measure the movement of the elevator directly, and then plot out our position as best we could. This worked! After several hours of testing and tweaking, it was doing pretty well. And then it missed. For no reason at all, it didn’t see us stop at the 2nd floor, decided it was a false trigger, and got lost until we went back to the first floor. End of the world? No. But we needed this to be 100%, or as close to that as we could get in the real world.

So we went to Plan B. Plan B’s first incarnation used line-follower IR reflectance sensors to see targets attached to the wall. On the first floor, we placed targets on the wall where one sensor saw white and the other saw black. On the second floor we did the same, but we flipped the targets so the sensors would see the opposite colors. Quite happily, this worked. The only time we saw a failure was when the elevator operator stopped the elevator after it started moving and then restarted it; the elevator moved much more slowly, and it caused a false trigger. This wouldn’t happen during the event, so we felt we were safe.

To actually playback the video, we used a program called Resolume. Resolume is Video Jockey (VJ) software, and we chose it because it could handle cross fading between streams at random, and it could operate blind: full screen on the primary display, using a keyboard input to switch video.

We set up Resolume to accept keys 1 through 6 as switching between streams 1 through 6 (which is its default mode), and used a Pololu Wixel in HID Keyboard mode. We could have used the ATmega16u2 on the Arduino to do this, but we needed to be able to load code through the 16u2, and we already had the libraries to make the Wixel an HID device. The Wixel accepted digital high/low signals on 6 of its pins to trigger 1 through 6. So when pin 0 went high, the Wixel pressed 1 on the keyboard. Releasing the pin or driving it low caused the Wixel to release the key. We also used an onboard LED to indicate that it was pressing keys, to aid in debugging.

Trinculo’s Attic founder and book author Ben Peoples has worked with Disney Creative Entertainment, Cirque du Soleil, Paramount Theme Parks and Busch Gardens Williamsburg.

For more mathy geekness, data diagrams, production haphazards and full source code, check out the original blog post on the Trinculo's Attic website: http://www.trinculosattic.com/2012/05/show-business-has-its-ups-and-downs/

Using the unique features of Resolume, FFGL plugins, and the three-dimensional input capability of the Kinect, Tim Thompson has created the Space Palette. It's an instrument that lets you perform visuals and music controlled directly from the motion of your hands, using no pre-recorded media.

In the current Space Palette, each of four large holes lets you play four different sounds and draw four different types of graphics, all simultaneously using any number of hands or objects. The smaller holes act as buttons that let you change sounds and colors, turn on looping, control musical keys and scales, etc. Although originally and still primarily designed as a "casual instrument" installation for events like Burning Man, Tim occasionally does performances - here are some recent ones:



The software behind the Space Palette has two parts. The first part is a standalone program (called MultiMultiTouchTouch or MMTT) that lets you use the Kinect to define any number of three-dimensional multitouch surfaces in mid-air; it can be trained within a minute on any flat frame with holes. Each hole essentially becomes a multitouch mousepad with depth, in which any number of hands (or objects) can be used simultaneously.

The output of MMTT is TUIO, a standard for conveying multitouch information over OSC. TUIO fortunately includes a way of describing three-dimensional cursors, and MMTT and the Space Palette make good use of it. The source code for MMTT has been made freely available to the Kinect hacker community.

The second part of the Space Palette is an FFGL plugin that Tim wrote called Space Manifold, which runs inside Resolume. This plugin takes the TUIO output of MMTT, and directly generates both visuals and music. Both types of output are controlled directly by your hands; there are no pre-recorded clips. The visuals are generated using OpenGL, and musical notes are generated by sending MIDI over to soft synthesizers.

Tim currently uses Plogue Bidule as a VST host, and Alchemy for most of the sounds. The visuals done by the Space Manifold plugin are further enhanced by a chain of 13 other FFGL plugins that are provided with Resolume. These effects are selectively enabled and disabled under the control of the Manifold plugin (more details below).

Both MMTT and the Space Manifold plugin use browser-based interfaces for control. This means that any browser (including one on a different computer or tablet) can be used to control them.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Space Manifold FFGL plugin is that it makes excellent use of Resolume's ability to be controlled by OSC. When Manifold decides it wants to enable or disable some of the other effects (due to gestures detected within the Space Palette), it sends OSC messages to Resolume to do so. This demonstrates that an FFGL plugin can actually control its own host, in ways not anticipated by the FFGL standard. Resolume itself doesn't even realize that the OSC it is receiving is coming from one of the FFGL plugins that it is hosting!

Additional design intent and technical details can be found in these slides from a talk, Tim Thompson's Home Page and the Space Palette page. Tim has plans for providing a Python-based interface for FFGL plugins, making it easier to create and change behaviours (both musical and visual) on the fly, without restarting the FFGL host. Anyone interested in that avenue of exploration is encouraged to contact Tim via me@timthompson.com

The following info arrived on our virtual doorstep a while back, and our hearts simply melted:

Cyber-Hermits, Guilt, & How We Built Our New Live Show:
Musicians, programmers, mappers, visual artists, and all of you other wonderful creative people of the internet, I have a confession to make. Over the last few years I have been silently climbing in your forums and snatching your knowledge up, trying to collect and hoard all of the pieces we needed to make our new live projection mapped show possible.

[fold][/fold]
Fortunately, we were able to make it happen with the power of the almighty internet, the passionate communities of creative/supportive people that it connects, and your free web-wisdom.

Here’s the thing that has been bugging me though: I visit a bunch of sites on a daily basis (I owe a lot especially to the forums/blogs at Resolume, Create Digital Music & Motion, Kineme, and 1024 Architecture) but I hardly ever leave a comment, ask a question, or share anything in return. Shame on me.

In an attempt to shed some of the guilt that comes with being a thieving, greedy, info hoarding, good-for-nothin’ cyber-hermit, I decided to give a little back and put together a geek-tasticly detailed overview of how we ended up connecting and operating our new show.

Here’s a picture of our video pipeline to give you a taste:


And you can read the original Google Doc in it’s full glory here.

Though we love playing with technology, the most important part of this project from the beginning was to create a show that visually enhanced the music in a way that created a seamless and intensified emotional experience for our audience without feeling forced (i.e., projection mapped visuals for the sake of projection mapped visuals). We wanted to make something really unique, impactful, and interesting to experience. I think we've done a pretty good job so far, but it'll get better as we continue to learn and create.

Okay, so now that I’ve fully confessed and made a small payment on my debt… I beg you, please have mercy on me and don’t take my internet connection away. I promise to be a contributing member of the interweb from here on out!

Forever yours,
Brett

Check out Brett and Courtney's website for soothing tunes and great videos. And a cat. And a robot. http://www.kidmeetscougar.com/

When our friends from Moederschip mentioned that their new footage pack FingerPaint was inspired by the artist Len Lye, we started talking about the pioneers of our field. You cannot help but be amazed by what some of these boys and girls were doing over half a century ago. With all the amazing technology we have at our fingertips these days, some of the work they did still blows ours out of the water. Moederschip was so kind to enlighten us on a few classics, so read on and get edumacated.

Early abstract film

Throughout history, many artists have been aiming for a synergy between visuals and sound. Abstract film and music visualisation are closely related and their history often overlaps. Early projection techniques like the Magic lantern (around 1650) were often accompanied by music and storytelling, though those were not abstract works.

The Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo came up with a system to connect music and luminosity around 1590. This was only a concept, instruments to play it followed. Around 1730, the french monk Louis Bertrand Castel developed a more direct connection between both media: the Ocular Harpsichord (Color organ), an instrument that played notes and colours with the touch of a key. In a way the Ocular Harpsichord was much alike the lcd-projectors we use today: (60) small coloured glass panes (pixels) were covered by tiny curtains and opened briefly with the touch of the organ keys. A later version projected the colours with 500 candles in front of a small audience. The idea of visualising music (colour music) was developed further in the years and many translations of musical pieces were made. These pure visualisations of music found their way into our modern DMX controlled lights.

The invention of the motion picture film camera in 1888 and the film projector changed the landscape of music visualisation dramatically. The first abstract movies were directly painted on film by the Italian Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna between 1911 and 1912. Unfortunately, these works are all lost, just like the abstract work made by the German Hans Stoltenberg in the same period. Through a series of prominent artists and their works we show you an impression of the first abstract experiments up to the first computer animations in art.

A very important film in the history of abstract film, called “Rhythmus 21”, was made in 1921 by the German dadaist painter and self proclaimed “first abstract film maker” Hans Richter:

Although the film was created without music, it has been accompanied by many soundtracks.

Around the same time the German film director Walther Ruttmann created his first of many abstract films “Lichtspiel Opus I”:

Lichtspiel Opus I was accompanied by a soundtrack written for the film and sometimes by a live cello performance done by Ruttmann himself. The film was created using “classic” animation techniques.

Two other interesting works in this period we have to mention are Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling (1921) and (though not truly abstract) Anemic Cinema by Marcel Duchamp (1926).

Mary Ellen Bute started creating abstract film around 1933. The following video was created in 1938 and shows a great example of the elegant music visualisation in her work:


The work of the New Zealand-born artist Len Lye is truly dynamic and rhythmic, matching the music with fluid motion and vivid colours. Len Lye used mixed techniques directly on film rolls, a beautiful example is “A Colour Box” (1935):


Norman McLaren,a Scottish-born Canadian animator created many abstract experimental film in the same period, a good and minimal example is “Dots” (around 1940):


The introduction of computer animations changed the field of abstract film for good. A great piece (in fact a showreel, not a single work) is “Catalog” (1960) by the American animator John Whitney:


In additon to these works listed, the contribution of many other artists have made the field of abstract film and visual music what it is today and still creative people and technology expand it further.

So who, what and why is Lucan Visuals?

Lucan Visuals is a 3d Projection mapping collective based in Cape Town, South Africa. It was founded by three like minded friends, all of whom have a background in the animation and VFX industry. We have always found projection mapping to be an exciting and intriguing medium with infinite possibilities and we wanted to explore it further. After many hours of researching the possibilities and brainstorming our ideas we started piecing together what is now Lucan Visuals.
By utilizing what we have learned as VFX artists, we aim to add something unique and innovative to our work.

How did you approach your projection mapping project? What software did you use to create the visuals, and how did you go about it?

It started with some initial concept set sketches which were then modeled in Autodesk Maya, after some refinement and tweaking we decided on the final set. Through a process of trial and error, our mock up set was then cut from polystyrene according to our measurements. We used a combination of Maya and After Effects to create the visuals.


Any major stupid mistakes that you can laugh about now, but made you feel like an idiot then?

We patiently awaited our order of 30 sheets of 4.5 x 4.5 meter cardboard, for the building of our set. After it having to be airlifted onto our driveway we quickly realised our weekend job turned into a, well, not a weekend job. We traced our set blueprints onto the sheets and then carefully started cutting and folding the cardboard. After what felt like 4 years of building, our cardboard set was finally complete. We were overly excited and rushed into painting the set. The next day we applied our first layer of white paint, being a water based paint our glorious set warped, buckled and collapsed in on itself. Needless to say, we were no artisans of set building.

What about the tech? What sort of gear do yo have in that basement?

In the basement we have a leaking kayak, a finless surfboard and some old wine.
For the tech we used a SIM2 ProC4 4500lm projector and an Asus i5 notebook.


How does Resolume fit into all this?

We needed something that would allow us to focus on the creative side of things rather than going back and forth with tricky software. After doing extensive research on which software would best serve our needs, it became clear that Resolume 4 was exactly what we needed. It is user friendly and has a large community and support base, which appealed to us and any technical difficulties we experienced were swiftly dealt with.

And what about the future? Where is Lucan Visuals headed?

We set our sights on raising the bar with each project we take on. Generating quality designs and innovative solutions that explore the potential and push the boundaries of projection mapping. Seeing other people getting excited about this as much as we are is a great reward in itself.

Hopefully we make enough money along the way to fix our leaking kayak...