Once again its been a big gap between posts, too long, and I’m partially annoyed with myself for letting it slip but also the past month has been insanely busy. So the last time I posted we had just finished the install of Re-Rite Krug for the Philharmonia orchestra, which went well and I’m pretty sure everyone was happy, I think the champagne helped with that too.
Traveling north to Newcastle after Krug I had a few days with no work which well needed, I was a bit fucked after getting back from Russia and going straight into another job. Whilst in the northeast I went and visited the chaps at Nitelites just to catch up as I hadn’t seen anyone in months. I was pretty amused to see a picture of Pimpy and Platty on the door to their office, very fitting.
After catching up with a few people I was back down London for the getout of Re-rite was probably the shortest it has been installed in any one place. It was a good swift get out and a nice opportunity to see my friend the giant again ;).
Straight after the Krug out I was back in the swing of it with stage one, doing some R&D and software on a bridle based flying system, which I’m currently still working on. When I first came back to the hangar after been in Russia I was surprised a the size of the truss which had been rigged up next to one of the aircraft hangars for our R&D. There been allot of progress in a very short space of time
This was only a couple of week ago and an early visualization of the object moving in a software environment following the real bridle. It doesn’t look like much in the photo but was a nice little milestone getting the data back from the motion controllers and visualizing it so accurately.
On the weekend I managed to visit my sister brother in-law and the Kids where I met them at Keilder reservoir for a day out. Mat had just had his sail boat painted and refurbished and he was going out on the water with my nephew. It was quite an eventful launch with Matt worried about getting the paint damages on the boat from it scuffing against the jetty and my sister nearly falling in the water after catching one of the ropes, luckily no one fell in and there was allot of laughing.
The rest of us went for a walk through the forest to Leeplish, which was a good jaunt out, we were pretty hungry once we got there only to find the restaurant had stopped serving at 16:00 and it was now 16:10, after a couple of buns from the shop it was another 5 mile walk back to where the cars were. It must have been pretty wet at Keilder over the past few months as there were loads of trees which had fallen over from what looks like their roots not being able to hold the land.
After the weekend I was down Plymouth for the install of Re-rite but this time, in a tent in the town center. Usually this is installed in a site specific building and a tent threw up new challenges mainly with the street not being level
When in Plymouth I managed to get out for a run, I’ve taken up running again after not doing any for the past few month’s whilst in Russia. Its been a slow start but nice to eventually try and get some level of fitness up. I’m aiming to do a 20k in august somewhere, just for fun, that’s my goal anyway. Whilst out running I ran past the ferry terminal and had forgotten that the last time I was here I was driving an unknown to me overweight Luton van for Seen & Heard back in 2006 or 2007. I was driving from Newcastle to Barcelona getting the ferry from Plymouth to Bilbao and the first I knew was when one of the truck drivers I was chatting to looked at my ticket and noticed I was half a ton overweight! I was pretty pissed off at the company but was younger and greener to do anything, that feels like an eon ago now!
After a couple of days of install I was back at Stage one to do some programming and testing for a couple of days. It was a fast couple of days but now we had the motion controller following a data stream from the currently 2D model. This seems straightforward but took quite a bit of tweaking and the cleverness of car to get the system running smoothly. By now we were inputting joystick commands into the visualizer which was then outputting wire lengths in real-time to position the object in a 2D XY plane. I also needed to read back the ACTUAL wire lengths and do the reverse calculation to work out the XY position from the wire lengths and the winch positions. It was around now when I realised how much mathematics from college and school I had forgotten. S-O-H-C-A-H-T-O-A , its most definitely a case of use it or loose it!!
After a great couple of days doing bridle stuff I was back down to Plymouth again after a phone call asking me to go back and help with the rest of the install. The schedule was, leave stage on at 17:00 drive to Plymouth, arrive just after 22:00, sleep, wake at 08.00 work all day, go for a run, sleep, work Sunday till mid afternoon and drive back north ready for an early start on Monday back at the hangar, Crazy weekend!
On the Monday I received a couple of phone calls, one was to do a projection design for a small section of a dance piece for a good friend on Saturday and the other was to provide a media server and my services for Shindig, a DJ dance event on the Sunday. Naturally I said yes to both. The following evenings of that week were spent doing a combination of planning, chopping and animating content for Molly’s show on Saturday and forming a plan for shindig on Sunday to make sure things went as smoothly as possible from my end.
The daytimes was spent in bridle world, working with Karl integrating my software with his software to make a more user friendly front end. It was one of those weeks where there was allot achieved but not allot to show for it.
We did do some experiments making the 2D bridle follow a path which seemed to work quite well but is still quite a way of implementation as there is so many other basic elements to get rock solid first. This is an early path visualization also displaying the safe zone envelopes to avoid crashing into the winch towers and imminent catastrophe!
After finishing at the hangar on Friday I was straight to Dance City to do some preproduction on Molly’s piece. It had been well over 6 moth since I had seen some people, it was great to catch up and as a team everything just fell into place and pretty much gelled together.We finished at a reasonable time on Friday and were back in at 09:30 on the Saturday, again it was a really good day, everyone was on it and after a several tech run-throughs and a rehearsal it was ShowTime.
This is a preproduction mock up of one of the projection ideas which we used. Each rune symbol faded up on cue as the boxes were stacked, and hats off to the dancers for getting the stack order correct pretty much each run through!
The piece was well received and straight afterwards I was headed down to the Newcastle quayside to do some setup and pre-programming for Shindig.
I had my MA2 wing setup with Catalyst and a load of content; the only thing here was that I had never busked on the MA2, I had programmed cues and cultists for shows but this was a bit different. After a little head scratching and chatting with Andy (LD) and Neil (Dimmers) I had a bit of a plan. I stayed there till around 01:00 setting up color pallets, content pallets and basic FX pallets to mix the content with. I left site happy and was back in at 09:00 on the Sunday back programming and doing some renders of geometric stuff to try and take advantage of the MiStrips. There was a combination of VJ’s from Novak and myself mixing content across the LED screen and the Barco Vidoe fixtures (MiStrip). Given more warning wit this gig I would have liked to have another switched input and run content direct from vvvv combined with catalyst, there was allot of potential here but time was so limited, still it looked the dogs bollocks in the end!!
So , this all only takes us up to the 4th of April and were almost in to June, its just insane how fast the year if going already and how busy things are. Everyone I know seems to be busy with work in these strange incestuous live events / install /arts world we work in. That’s all im witing for now with a goal to catch up with the current time on tis blog within the week. More mini posts rather than the monster here. And without fail, heres a face, seen at my parents house when I went to visit a few weeks back, this was the metal hinge of the fridge door 🙂
