Giants of the Hoods Recap

August 30th, 2010

Last weekend was pretty intense as we had three “performances” with the Giants of the Hoods crew here in Helsinki. Thursday in Kallio, Friday in Kontula and Saturday in Tapiola, Espoo. We had some issues, but in the end it all worked out quite well. Here’s a quick recap of the events.

Kallio 26/8/2010

Kallio - Image by Kirsi Tuura

Image by Kirsi Tuura

We couldn’t do a rehearsal on Wednesday so I was a bit worried about how everything would go down on the first night. Everything had worked fine the week before in Tapiola, so I was still quite comfortable… At least I was until Mr. Murphy once again proved that you should really take his law seriously.

Problem #1

No signal to the projector with a long VGA cable, so I had to move all my gear to a different location in the last minute and setup everything again. That left me no time to properly test the motion tracking and everything else.

Problem #2

All of the dozens of WiFi networks on this particular street corner disturbed our wireless network we had set for sending data and pictures. This increased the delay between the tracking and animation to several seconds instead of the normal tenths of a second.  It took me a while to figure out that this was the problem and of course no ethernet cables anywhere. Fortunately, Severi – our technical producer – somehow got a hold of a cable and we finally got the tracking working quite smoothly in the end.

We still had a problem with the communication between my computer and Markku’s laptop, so we couldn’t really update the character as it was planned. Somehow, we still managed to limp through the night and the last hour was actually quite enjoyable.

Emmi Vainio and Kalle Kuisma shot some documentation video.

Giants of the Hoods, Kallio 26/8/10 from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Kontula 27/8/2010

Kontula worked out a lot better technically as we had ironed out all the problems in Kallio. The mood was also quite different as we had a lot of children coming to dance and also because of the commitment of the people that took part in the workshop some weeks ago. It was also the “Night of the Arts” in Helsinki that day and I think it was nice that we did this in the suburbs of East Helsinki and not downtown where everything else happened.

Giants event in Kontula from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Tapiola 28/8/2010

Technically, Tapiola worked the best, but there weren’t that many people around. The cold and windy weather was against us, but we still had fun and it was nice to see some people who had been there the week before also when we did some testing.

No video yet, but i will add it here once it’s online.

Next

We are doing two more shows this week. On Wednesday, we are at the Aalto University Opening after-party in Otaniemi and on Saturday we have the event at the Lasipalatsi square. For more details: http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/

Tags: , ,
Posted in Animation, Art, Performance, Video/VJ | No Comments »

Mortimer

August 6th, 2010

The next cat out of the bag. Mortimer. A performance piece coming to Kiasma Theatre in September.

“Feather light or dead serious?

Ville Walo’s solo performance, Mortimer, is a contemporary circus theatre performance where juggling and electrical sensor technology come together. The focused, subtle performance juggles sound and video projections, brings small fluffy things to life and laughs at mortality. The performance’s soft hint of breath brushes the viewers’ skin.”

Can’t really say much about this yet. You will have to wait until September. All that I’m saying is that I built some custom toys for Ville. Including a real-time projection mapping system and some juggling birds embedded with wireless sensors. The dates and more info here: http://www.kiasma.fi/index.php?id=2639&L=1

Posted in Art, Electronics, Performance | No Comments »

Giants of the Hoods

August 6th, 2010

I have been quite lazy with the website lately, so I decided to write a little bit on some projects that I’ve been working on lately. First up is Giants of the Hoods.

“A van with a mobile interactive media set parks at late evening time in the neighborhoods giving local citizens a chance to participate in a street performance and VJing to momentarily change the nature and purpose of a few chosen public places.

The passersby participate by collectively creating images of representative avatars – Giant characters of their neighborhoods, and by dancing in front of a video camera and computer system to make the Giant follow the movements of the participant. The dance of the Giants is projected in big size on a nearby building…”

So basically what that means is that we will project giant characters onto buildings around different neighbourhoods in Helsinki and Espoo. The passers-by have the chance to come and animate the characters with their own movements and even modify the giants by “donating” a part of their body to it. It has some similarities to the Animoitu liike -workshop from last Fall, but the overall concept and even how it works is quite different from that. Should be interesting.

More info coming soon on the website at http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/. Also check out the videos:

Posted in Animation, Art, Video/VJ | 1 Comment »

My Robot at the Jättömaa Festival – July 2010

August 5th, 2010

I built a little robot for the Jättömaa festival that happened a couple of weeks ago in Kouvola.

It was hanging by its neck from a tree in the festival area. You could power it up by turning the handle on its chest. This would cause it to come back to life and then die again by hanging.

I wanted to play with the idea of life and death of artificial beings – especially when it was the festival crowd that gave the robot its life and then left it to hang to its death. The theme also suited the festival site as it was used as an execution site during the Finnish Civil War.

Jättömaa was a nice small festival with interesting bands and artists, including Joose Keskitalo, Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä Raha, Katja Tukianen, Sara Milazzo (the lovely lady appearing on the video above) and many others. I have some random video clips from the festival that I might edit together in the near future.

Posted in Art, Electronics, Video/VJ | No Comments »

QC Plugins Update

March 12th, 2010

A quick fix for my OSC plugins. There was a stupid bug that affected changing the IP address. Should actually work now

Månsteri OSC Sender Plugin v. 1.3 changes:
- Fixed a bug in setting the IP Address. The IP should actually change now.

Animata OSC Plugin v. 1.3 changes:
- Fixed a bug in setting the IP Address. The IP should actually change now.

Download: http://mansteri.com/software/

Tags: , ,
Posted in Programming | 11 Comments »

Animata OSC Plugin v. 1.2

March 7th, 2010

There is a new version of the Animata OSC plugin available. I’ve had the Z-axis support working for a long time, but I’ve just been too lazy to upload it here. Also added the option to change the IP address and port numbers. Useful when you need to send OSC from QC to a different computer running Animata. You really shouldn’t touch the port, but decided to throw in the option to change it just in case.

Download the plugin here.

Download the example seen on the video.

Version 1.2 Changes
- Added the Z Position port for the Layer patch. That means you can now move layers in Z-axis too. (requires the latest version of Animata 004)
- Added the option to configure the IP address and port number. (Please test this one)

I also updated the VDMX plugins to have the Z Position option.

Please test this and let me know if you run into any problems.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Animation, Programming, Tutorial | 1 Comment »

Product Placement Gets 2nd Place at Live2011.com Grand Prix Student Award

January 13th, 2010

The winners of the Live2001.com Grand Prix National Student Award have been announced. Niklas Gustafsson took the first place with his animation The Third Eye.

The jury awarded my Product Placement with the 2nd place. I was pretty surprised about that. I wasn’t really expecting to be on the top three.

And on the third place, Johannes Neumeier with Digital Captures.

Check out more info (in Finnish) at:
http://turku2011.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=149392&nodeid=14281

Watch all of the seven finalists here. Including a work by my homie Aku.

More about the entire competition: http://www.live2011.com/

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Animation, Art | No Comments »

Music Video Set @ Kauppayhtiö, Fri 20/11/2009

November 20th, 2009

Playing tonight at Cafe Kauppayhtiö. Music video set. Lots of 80′s and 90′s hip hop.

Also some new stuff like this excellent video from Boys Noize:

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Music/DJ, Video/VJ | 2 Comments »

Månsteri QC Plugins Update

November 20th, 2009

I finally installed Snow Leopard this week on my MBP. I had some critical projects going on and couldn’t afford breaking anything.

So the first thing I had to do was to update my Quartz Composer Plugins to support Snow Leopard. There were some issues because QC 4.0 runs in 64bit and my plugins had only been compiled for 32bit. But now they should work. I still need to sort out a few issues (check your console for details), but everything seemed to be working fine when I did some tests. Let me know if you have any problems.

Download here: http://mansteri.com/software/

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Animoitu liike

October 1st, 2009

Animoitu liike (Animated Movement) is an animation/dance workshop that was organized during the Tanssin Aika festival in Jyväskylä, Finland on September 24th to 26th 2009.

Original concept & background graphics: Päivi Hintsanen
Programming and interaction design: Matti Niinimäki
Full credits and other information (in Finnish)

animoitu liike
Photo by: Sirja Moberg

The idea of the workshop/installation was that anyone could participate in the workshop by walking in, drawing their own character and then animating that character just by moving their own body.

This video shot by YLE for Keski-Suomen uutiset illustrates the process. (In Finnish)

The dances were streamed live to the internet. The first video (the last dance we did) has all of the characters on screen at the same time.

You can also browse all the videos over at the bambuser channel http://bambuser.com/channel/animoituliik. Unfortunately due to some technical problems, some of the dances were not recorded. Another issue is the sound. On some of the videos the sound is clipping very badly and on some of them there is no sound at all.

Almost 90 people came and drew their characters, 94 dances were recorded online and probably double that amount came just to see what was going on during the three days this project was running.

The movements of the participants were tracked by a custom built solution based on tBeta and Quartz Composer. The participants wore infrared “beacons” on their ankles and wrists that were being tracked by an infrared camera. The information was then sent over to Animata to animate the characters.

The infrared light can be seen weakly in normal photos as well:
animoitu liike 2
Photo by: Sirja Moberg

Here are some photos from the workshop and behind the scenes. The first photos are from a little workshop that I taught covering the basics of Animata for some of our assistants.

A HUGE THANK YOU to Live Herring and all of the other people who made this possible.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Animation, Art, Electronics, Video/VJ | 1 Comment »