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.
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:
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.
So if you happen to be in Beijing during the next month, go and check it out. Other video works by Audrey Delorme, Erin Corbett, Ivan Rubio, Vincent Drolet, Sadaf Hakimian, Tyson Parks and Robbie Murphy.
I’m not actually Canadian and I didn’t use a single camera to do the animation, but it’s all good.
The new Kauppayhtiö club is officially opening today. Me and Ålari are doing the visuals tonight.
FRI 21/8/
Kauppayhtiö
Cafe: DJ Righteous
Downstairs Club: DJ Hesh (Rollomatik) feat. DJ Micco + Superia United VJ’s
We also built an interactive/generative/audio reactive visual system for the nights that we are not doing live shows. More about that later, but here is a video of some of the content Aku has done for the first two months
Superia United is once again doing the visuals for the Main Hall of Time Tunnel this year. I think that this is the third time in a row. The main hall artists:
Eero Johannes
TV OFF
KA SO RE
Top Billin DJs (Sir Nenis & J-Laini)
DJ Tane-Lee
I bought the Rane TTM 57SL mixer and Serato Video-SL a couple of weeks ago, because I wanted a good setup for AV mixing and scratching. I’ve had the Ms. Pinky vinyls for a long time. They are very nice, but the software just doesn’t cut it for my purposes.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my pink vinyls and the fact that I can do whatever I want with them using the Max/MSP patches. And the newest version of Maxi-Patch even has OSC output so it works very nicely together with VDMX. But I need something more advanced for the audio side and a rock solid system for doing AV.
I have to tell you, the 57 has now become my favourite mixer. The faders are perfect for turntablism, it feels very solid just like the 56 and the software integration works well. The only gripe I have with it, is that it uses some proprietary HID protocol to communicate with Serato Live. So I can’t use the hardware control with any other software. Hoping for a MIDI firmware update. Oh, and the other thing is that it’s only USB1.1. Haven’t had much problems with it, but I would feel more comfortable if it would be USB 2.0.
I have the M-Audio Torq and for DJ-stuff it would have been enough for me, but there was just no way to easily incorporate video for AV-sets. I was surprised how well the Serato Video-SL works. Just throw your video on the deck like you would do with an .mp3 file and you are good to go. Together with 57SL, it’s a system that “just works.” Very important for me since I’m always busy doing stuff on the turntables and want to keep my hands off the laptop as much as possible.
Now mixing videos with audio is cool by itself, but the biggest selling point for me was the Quartz Composer integration. This feature was just added in the latest Video-SL release so hopefully there will be improvements, but what they got going is pretty cool already.
You can load a .qtz file on a deck that is playing audio by dragging it on the corresponding video channel. Your basic QC files work just like that. The only special thing about it is that the patch time of your composition is being controlled by the the song position of the deck where you .qtz file is loaded. So if your composition has any some sort of animation on it (Interpolation, LFOs etc.) you can just start scratching and the animation will follow. If you don’t want this behavior (I usually don’t), just feed system time into any patch that depends on the patch time.
That’s fine for some basic stuff. But I want more control! Fortunately, Serato has included the ability to control .qtz files with all kinds of data from the Scratch Live software – needle velocity, song info etc. – and you also get some data from the hardware controls of the TTM 57SL mixer. However, this stuff is not really documented anywhere (except for a .pdf I found on the Video-SL Beta forum). So I’m gathering all the info that I know over here.
The way this works is the same way you always interact with Quartz Composer files in an external program. You publish inputs with certain names.
This image is from the .pdf I mentioned earlier. I don’t want to post it here since Serato hasn’t released it publicly and they might have a reason for that. You can find it on the forum if you are registered. http://serato.com/forum/discussion/141782 The .zip also includes a bunch of sample compositions that show how the communication works.
There are 27 parameters that you can use to drive your compositions. And the input name always starts with kSSV_SeratoData. Now I could list all of theme here, but it would just make this already too long post even longer. So I’m doing something better.
I created these clips for myself to be able to easily add the Serato input splitters to my compositions without trying to remember the syntax exactly. And since I’m such a nice guy, I’m sharing them with you.
Once downloaded, copy the .qtz files to this location:
~/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Quartz Composer/Clips (where /~ is your Home Folder).
The next time you launch Quartz Composer, search for Serato in the Patch Creator and double-click the clip that you want to use.
Connect the output to whatever you want to control. Remember to also publish the input of the Serato clip you have chosen by right clicking and choosing Published Inputs and the input name. Make sure you don’t change the name.
I think I haven’t tested all of them, but I know that there is at least one problem. The Serato Needle Position is not working at all. I’ve reported this to Serato, but haven’t received an answer yet. This has been fixed in Scratch Live 1.9.1. which is in public beta. You can use the song position also if you need position data. The Needle Position is the position from the beginning of your control vinyl.
Here is an example that I made pretty much the first day I got Video-SL running. It was inspired by the Visual Scratch project. The Needle Velocity controls the Y position and the fader controls the visibility of the line. It’s not perfect, but fun to mess with anyway. Sorry about the crappy scratching. I’m a bit rusty, because I didn’t have turntables in Montreal so I couldn’t practice for 9 months.
Music by the Finnish dubstep-superheroes Demonic 1 & Dr. Coil. The song is called Bottomless Pit and it’s from their Treblescience EP.
If you’ve been reading this blog for the past few days, you might have guessed that I’m working on some Serato + Animata stuff. I should have a video to show later this week. Stay tuned.
I’m doing an Animata workshop at the AVIT-Kezmarok festival in Slovakia on July 23.
Here is the basic outline:
Part 1: Basics of Animata
Introduction to creating real-time animations in Animata. How to use the interface. How to set up different characters and scenes from still images. Creating meshes, joints and skeletons. Simple animations inside Animata.
Part 2: External control of Animata with OSC
The real power of Animata is in the way that it can be controlled with external applications using OSC messages. Examples will be shown on how to use MIDI controllers, sound input and Arduino to control real-time animations. Software examples at least in Max/MSP and Quartz Composer. Examples on how to set up a scene for a live visualist gig.
In my previous post, I promised to do something more exciting with the QC and Animata communication. You can’t get much cooler than Mr. Cool!
This is a modified rig of the Mr. Cool character I used for my Product Placement animation. I used Max/MSP when I did the animation, but QC is just much more fun.
Mouth and body movement controlled by the sound. Arms have a small LFO on them and you can trigger some other movements with the arrow keys.
I started messing with my Animata OSC plugin for Quartz Composer and trying out different kinds of data I could feed from QC to Animata. The Audio Input patch is the obvious choice, so might as well get that over with first.
The first test. Just playing various samples and seeing how the communication works. Not very exciting, since I’m not using any images in Animata.
I will probably post something more interesting tomorrow. The point with this test was more to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. That is to figure out exactly what is the frequency range of the different spectrum bands of the Audio Input patch.
My testing method was not the most accurate, but should be fine for this purpose. I just want to have a rough idea of what is going on. They way I measured this was by generating different frequencies with the Max/MSP cycle~ object and then seeing at what frequency the maximum value jumped from one band to the next one. Here are my results. The frequency is in Hz:
Band 0: 0 – 580
Band 1: 580 – 1000
Band 2: 1000 – 1500
Band 3: 1500 – 2000
Band 4: 2000 – 3200
Band 5: 3200 – 4800
Band 6: 4800 – 6140
Band 7: 6140 – 8230
Band 8: 8230 – 10300
Band 9: 10300 – 12380
Band 10: 12380 – 15110
Band 11: 15110 – 17880
Band 12: 17880 – 20000
There was no point trying to measure Bands 13-15 since they go over 20kHz and my sound card can’t handle that. Actually, in normal use – normal use for me meaning music visualizations – there’s not much point using the bands above 8, since the amplitude at those frequencies is barely noticeable.
Let me know if you are doing something cool with Quartz Composer and Animata.
My workflow in creating ths animation was pretty unorthodox. Almost all of the character animation was recorded real-time with a custom setup involving Max/MSP and Animata. I created a patch in Max to control animation in Animata with the sound of the interviews. I also had some sliders and buttons to trigger things like blinking and arm movements. I used After Effects for compositing and for some additional animation.
