Student Originated Studies: Media

For the last 7 days, I have been working pretty constantly on the Trouble With Unicorns. On Thursday of last week, we shot the Meadow pixilation sequence, and on Monday, we shot more stills of our actor who plays Morgan, whose name is Venu Mattraw, walkking through forest. We also shot the pixilation scene that ends the movie, and then drove that night up to Tacoma just in time to shoot some pixilation in the docks industrial area during Magic Hour (more like Magic 25 miutes). Having started on this endavor at about 10am, and getting back at about 11am, I then proceeded to work all night doing fine-cut edits on the assembly edit of the movie that we had previously finished, and also to work more on the Dan rotoscope special effects scene, match-moving the horn to the movement of his head, and also working on the matchmovving composite of the infomercial scenes in Morgan's bedroom. Then after a long day of Critiques, I went to Peter Randlette's house for the final critique of the previous week's Hybrid Music performance. This constituted a full challenge to my abilities of waging the sleep battle. Then I came home and crashed for about 14 hours. That Wednesday afternoon, I worked with my brother on attempting to understand the functioning of a 555 timer IC and attempting to decipher the arcane functionality of that infamous device, the transistor. This learning was for a definite purpose however, as I was attempting to build an Intervalometer to accomplish Time-Lapse photography with my Canon 350d.

On Thursday I wrote my Evaluation for Hybrid Music, and had my evaluation conference. Directly after that I rushed home and started transforming the prototype of the intervalometer device into a physical functioning device: from breadboard to paper-circuit. During this process, Morgan, who had come to my house that morning to borrow the Unicorns drive (which is the main portable harddrive used by us to store media and project files for the unicorns project, and is manufactured by Lacie), in order to start in on some editing while I was busy with New Media duties, contacted me by instant message. I quickly learned that he had plugged the Unicorns drive in, and smoke had come out of it and the smell of burning had permeated the room. Fearing the worst, we put off troubleshooting this catastrophe until...

This last week I focused nearly exclusively on working on my Hybrid Music performance. I had been making it a second priority previously, and so had a lot of work to do to catch up. Fortunately, the visual component of my Hybrid project intersected significantly with my AI project's abstract visualizations.

Accordingly, I thought it might be interesting to make a little post about the process and techniques I used to create the visuals that my SOS: Media classmates saw last week for the initial critique-screening of Lethe, which incidentally are the same techniques I used to create the visuals for my Hybrid performance (minus a couple of things).

This will come eventually, but before I go further, here is an online version of my Hybrid Music music video, which is missing an introduction with live flute performed by Kina Smith, running into a physical feedback loop effects chain, and creating an underlying "undulating wall of sound", which is not present in this version. Imaging rumblings at the end when the sound stops and the visuals keep going.

 To View the Music Video, Go Here: http://academic.evergreen.edu/s/smijed07/Videos/

Currently (Week 9), I am working on Unicorns stuff. We had a pixilation shoot in the sheep meadow behind morgan's house, and have been working on the new edit. I have been working today on the Dan special effects shot, and you can see a TUTORIAL SCREENCAST at the previous page also, detailing a novel technique of rotoscoping, and some various other things. 

Once again, here is a link to the most recent blog post. If you feel that the length is unfair for two weeks, please ask me some clarifying questions or prod me for more explication. 

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Yes there is actually an update for Jed on Week 5. Sorry about forgetting to post a link to it here.

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Note: as usual this is mirrored to my blog, where there exist more posts than what are posted here.  

Let me start out by saying this: I am behind. Very behind. I feel overwhelmed with the amount of work I have on my back, and I need a strong injection of excitement and enthusiasm to facilitate the battle with sleep that I will have to wage in order to be victorious.

This past week was an interesting one. Somehow I managed to read the entire 2000+ page Akira manga during spare time I had. It was an amazing epic journey and a far better way to escape and procrastinate school work than bad TV (though I haven't been down that road in awhile). I couldn't put it down. Well, I read the entire thing on my computer, so I guess I couldn't really "put it down" in the physical sense. Sometimes I feel like everything exciting in my life is mediated by this computer. I spend most of my spare time here, sitting in this chair, interfacing with information.

Of course I start off this post saying I am behind. Then I say "well, ... yeah... I read 2000 pages of manga instead of working." Let me follow that up with some reassuring statements of what I actually did accomplish this last week.

I made some good progress on my Hybrid Music project. In Hybrid everyone in the class is working on a live performance of electro-acoustic music to be performed at a public concert during week 9. I learned how to program the drumKAT midi drum triggering device. I have created a rather decent Kontakt percussion instrument from Buchla 200 samples, and am thinking about how to actually create the rhythmic elements of my project in a live setting. Most likely it will end up being a primary bed of pre-sequenced polyrhythmic drum programming, with an additional flare of articulative live-triggered fills.

My goals for SOS Media during Spring quarter are as follows:
1). Help out with The Trouble With Unicorns, in any faculty I might.
2). Finish writing the AI project, and start getting tangible work done on it (animation).
3). Learn color correction!
4). Do some other small projects that have been sitting around forever!
a). I shot about 40 minutes of footage by means of stealth inside of the "Bodies" exhibit in Seattle when I went. I would enjoy quickly editing this together into a small piece about voyeurism and our fascination with the grotesque (lacking moral judgement)
b). Do some small experiment videos demonstrating technical skills that I have, but that have not been evident in my work so far: rotoscoping for the seperation of objects from their background, for compositing; 3D tracking and 3D object insertion into live action handheld camera footage.

(this will likely be updated)

This weekend I worked with Morgan to complete assembly edits of a couple of the scenes in the "factory" (a.k.a., library building basement), for The Trouble With Unicorns. It went relatively well; we got all of the clips in their general place, synced with off-camera sound and ready to polish and trim. We discovered that some of the shots had no sound, and some of the time, the Tascam flash recorder of audio was not recording when it should have been. No errors that are not work-aroundable, however.

Progress goes on my AI project. I have a lot of work to do on it, and feel epically behind. I am still in the writing stage. I need to start animating, but that can't happen until writing is done, or nearer completion. This Friday from 2-4pm in the MML I will be teaching an After Effects workshop for Mediaworks. That should be a lot of fun, but alot of extra stress this week also.

To make up for the lack of depth in this post, please be entertained by this music video.

Magnetic Sphere (audio by Karri O.) on Vimeo

This project will interrogate the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and self-awareness through the form of an experimental animation detailing the perceptual evolution of an artificial intelligence.
The underlying story of this animation is as follows. At some point in the near future, artificial intelligence research has advanced to the point of creating fairly sophisticated examples of 'mechanized' thinking mechanisms, which exemplify attributes of specialized intelligence, (the ability to perform specific reasoning and problem solving tasks), and relatively weak examples of general artificial intelligence (the capability of reproducing how human minds think). Ever in the grasp of the abundant desire in the sciences to explore and discover new realms, these researchers are interested in bringing examples of artificial general intelligence to the heretofore not achieved holy grail of artificial intelligence research – self-awareness and sapience.
In order to achieve this, they devise a method to achieve this goal. They take the most advanced artificial general intelligence that they have developed, which has about equivalent intelligence to that of a human baby, and “place” it inside of another program layer, which generates environments for the artificial general intelligence to interact with and learn from – to basically develop its own attributes of intelligent behavior.
This experimental animation will mirror this conceptual and situational idea in a specific way. The animation will take two alternating stylistic forms. The first form consists of highly abstract and almost completely non-representational imagery in vertical montage with a Latin-language voiceover mirrored with english subtitles, containing semantic content describing a situation in generic observational 3rd person terms. The language chosen has no relevance other than that it is a language that is very rarely used in modern times, and thus will represent the relationship of the artificial intelligence to the instructions of the “control structure” program – namely, that it cannot understand, or perceive the true nature of what specific mechanism is constructing its reality (at least at the beginning). The structure of the words of the “control structure program” will be highly abstracted from normal construction, and thus appear to come across in a surreal almost randomly generated sort of way, but will retain the essential essence of what they are intended to convey, for the viewer.

http://grace.evergreen.edu/~smijed07/blog/?p=71
a new blog post approaches like blackened sky

Jed Smith – Personal Syllabus, Spring 2007
    an explicative document describing what these 10 weeks will be
        personal accomplishment
        nature of projects
        project progress timeline

what have I not yet accomplished in my independent work, that I intended to coming in in fall quarter?
    unreached goal: computer programming applied to media
        answer: Use Processing or VVVV or Max/Jitter in the production of an aspect of your project.
    portfolio website:
        develop WordPress blog: add pages for:
            example work
                projects
                    video
                        (every project I've done worth sharing, with descriptions of process, techniques, and intended meaning)
                    audio (music)
                        (description of process, technologies, techniques used)
                    design
                        (eg's of graphic design work done [to be expanded])
            resume / skill set
            a narrative of the learning I've done at Evergreen, and how it all links together (draft summative self-evaluation)
    read
        applied media aesthetics – relevant sections
             
        
Week 02 (04-02 to 04-08): re-examination
Re-engage with the work I did in fall quarter
reread journal
review notes on readings
re-examine on a large scale the position of my project.
interrogate Peter Rose and acquire all advice and information and recommendations possible

Week 03 (04-16 to 04-22): towards a certain plan
5pm tuesday: meeting with Julia
show examples of tests from Fall
talk about the extent and type of work that I will be doing this quarter

I was just falling asleep a moment ago when I realized that I hadn't written a blog post yet this week about my progress and activities for SOS: Media. I have a bit of a little exigetic thought process on this topic. It seems that all of my classes this quarter are melding into this one giant tangled delightful hectic challenging boring stimulating mess of learning. At the end of last quarter, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to take New Media in addition to SOS: Media and Hybrid Music. I thought "great! robotics and physical interfacing! the one area i am completely deficient in! with a hefty dose of the media theory with a specific emphasis in technology! the perfect academic learning that i have been missing in SOS Media! it's better to be too busy than not busy enough!" After starting my day with a very sleep-deprived music technology lab-time, a hallucinogenic meeting with my former faculty Ruth Hayes about creating a poster for a series of speakers on the intersection of scientific research and artistic endeavors, (which I haven't really gotten a chance to look into yet), and one test car-ride in preparation for the picking up of experimental filmmaker Peter Rose, I sat down with fading sunlight outside of my covered window, in the comforting darkness of my room, and read Man-Computer Symbiosis and Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and realized that it was all worth while. It seems that the two extra evening and weekend classes are complementing the subjects I'm exploring in sos media nicely. In fact I'm not sure where one class begins and the other ends. Fuzzy boundaries encourage additional exploration. The challenge is finding enough time to do everything I promised myself I would.

There are a number of new blog posts on the Trouble With Unicorns Blog, detailing the set construction and production of the factory scenes we shot at the weekend of Winter W10, and production stills, and a few video blogs. Check it out!

 ~Jed

  my blog also has some newly updated posts, on general and specific things of interest.

Thorsten Fleisch is an experimental media artist from Germany, who has produced some very interesting work in the realm of animation, experimental imaging, and generative audio-visual / mathematical media. I reccomend Gestalt and Energie!. I also reccomend that you visit the FleischArchive, and check out some of the really amazing old animation that is pres

Note: I will be working on two projects during Winter Quarter. The first of my responsibilities is having a large role in production of the Trouble with Unicorns project with Brad Hutchinson and Morgan Dusatko. This will take up the majority of my time this quarter. Having spent so much time during Fall quarter on preproduction and research for my other project, which addresses Artificial Intelligence, I have feelings of responsibility mandating that I continue forward on it as well, as best I might. However, the majority of my time will be occupied with the Unicorns project. I foresee only having 1 to 2 days per week this quarter to work on my AI project.

I have migrated my old Mediaworks blog to a new location, and to the amazing Wordpress CMS system, rather than the old Janky Movable Type system. It will be receiving the bulk of new posts, though I may mirror updates to the old blog as well.

This quarter I will be working on both the Unicorns project with Brad Hutchinson and Morgan Dusatko, as well as my own Artificial Intelligence project. I returned from my Mom's on the 3rd of Jan, and for everyday since then pretty much, I have been working with them on creating an "animatic" of the movie. I will have a rather large role in this project during winter quarter, being heavily involved in the technical production, camera work, editing / post production, and visual effects.

There is a new blog post on the Trouble With Unicorns blog, detailing some technical and informative information regarding the chroma key pixilation shoot that happened at the beginning of the month. 

Video Test embed Post:
Cyclic Punctilious Recompense is the first project I did for the Safe Harbor independent media production group.

The Christina Aguilera Meat Video: a test embedding of video from youtube.com.

Hello everyone. I decided that I'm going to be updating my Blog from Mediaworks with content relating to my indedendent study and project. Expect to find the following there: Thoughts, Rants, Rhetorical Discussions, Notes on Films I Watch, Treatments, Production Schedules, Ideas, and Media relating to my independent project. Meep!

==edit - 2007-01-10==
I have migrated my Mediaworks blog to a new location, and will be continuing to update it from there. It is located at http://grace.evergreen.edu/~smijed07/blog/, and is based on the WordPress Content Management System, rather than the rather attrocious (imo) Movable Type blogging software.