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of interest…….

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    Technology weekend!

    Following on from my last post, this weekend was spent in the lodge at Saltwell park, Gateshead continuing preparations for Enchanted parks 2011. I was providing support for some of the artists on this years event, as well as being involved in our own installation as Filament, to read the back story follow this link “Enchanted Buttons‘.

    Saturday was spent bringing together the different elements for the install, which finally we had in the same place for the first time. Rigging the buttons to the vvvv patch worked first time and with a little bit of tinkering sending dmx commands to trigger the Swisson worked third time, rather satisfying. A few mods need to be made to make the buttons fit the plinths but everything was coming together, just the LED dimmer for the button lights to install, install the sound card and program the lighting sequences which were looked after by Neil & Steve.

    MultiMinded & Bloom were another project I gave a bit of advice to and provided some equipment to for their piece. Their installation involved timed synchronised video, and lighting comprising of 2 projected screens as well as immersive lighting in the trees, linking the screens together. At-least thats what had been described and I’m hoping to see it when I get home this weekend. After a few exchanges of emails about the best way to realise this I suggested using vvvv or Quartz Composer, a week later I got a mail from Martin Davies of Bloom Studio letting me know the decision to go with vvvv and a link to a video of the patch. I was impressed, good quick work in a short space of time.

    Finally I was lending a hand to Lucy Walters who is doing Fine Art at Newcastle University and presenting a 3 screen synchronised video piece at this years event. We spent the sunday getting the footage from Lucy’s PC onto my Mac mini triple screen playback rig. Something I hadn’t encountered for a while was trouble getting large files (over 3gb) from a PC to a Mac. There was a weirdness in trying to write the file to any mac formatted memory stick/hard drive from the PC ,and the only way to get it over, was on a windows formatted hard drive and read this drive on the mac, now how exciting was that! Anyway, once that was sorted we tested the setup on a triple monitor setup, and then setup Lucy’s custom picture-frame rear projection screens. Everything worked as expected and was automatically played back from a simple custom Quartz patch on startup. Ms Walters looking rather happy, or a little stir crazy with here piece set up in the lodge  🙂

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    Enchanted Parks Gateshead 2011

    Its that time of year again for Newcastle & Gateshead to host a schedule of winter festive activities one of which is Enchanted Parks 2011, a winter walk light trail with light art from a wide selection of artists and designers. This year as part of Filament a creative company I am part of along with Steve Holmes, Neil Colebeck & Dan Addams we have been asked to be part of Enchanted parks 2011 with a design of our own. Last year we presented lighting in Saltwell-park-dene where visitors could interact with he lighting through a series of control on the bridge overlooking the installation, Mr Holmes done a grad job of the interaction programming between the controls and the lighting now this year its my responsibility to do the pre programming whilst Steve is away jet-setting on site visits to Miami and Florida. The idea for the installation was conceived a couple of months back which was the easy part, putting it into practice was another challenge all together, between us we came up with the idea of an interactive piece where visitors were presented with a set of buttons on brightly lit plinths overlooking part of the park. When one of the buttons was pushed part of a song plays, when another of the buttons is pressed another part of the same xmas themed song plays (chosen and edited by Dan).



    One of the buttons, it doesn’t look like much yet!

    For each button push and song segment a light show is triggered designed and programmed by Neil, the kicker comes when each of the four buttons are pressed in the correct order a bigger song and much larger “Wow factor” light-show is triggered as a reward for ‘Breaking the code’. We meet this weekend prior to the full park install on monday to fit up the rig and see if there is anything we have missed to make this work. I have programmed the interaction using vvvv taking care of the logic of the button pushes, light triggering and sound playback, it had been a while since I used vvvv but in still never ceases to amaze me how good it is for creative applications!

    vvvv discretely handling the clever stuff!

    There were allot of interaction problems, re-triggers and feedback loops to overcome whilst programming the patch for this which was addictive’ly challenging and much much trickier than appears on the surface. Now, after spending several hours of tweaking and streamlining the playback and interactivity seems to work a treat.

    Current Buttons Schematic, beauty in simplicity.

    So thats in in a nutshell, if you have read this and I have given the game away then you must have been searching pretty hard to find this post so well done. As I type this I’m chatting to Steve whilst he waits in San Francisco to come come to the delightful weather of Newcastle in December, remember your jeggings Steve.

    Also, this little guy has been helping out within Filament too 😉

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  • Abbey road, Polar bears and Musicians

    06.00 friday morning Steve picked me up from my house along with extra bits of kit for our long early drive to London from Newcastle, we were off to Abbey road studios for rehearsals of BBC Planet Earth Live. Incase you don’t know Planet Earth Live is the live show of the BBC David Attenborough series Planet Earth where George Fenton and the BBC Concert Orchestra play along-with footage cut from the original series. On the way down we listened to a couple of RadioLab podcasts, I cannot recommend this podcast enough, every eppisode is fascinating and if your wondering what its about this is a quite from the website:

    Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we’ll feed it with possibility.

    If you like Science, Philosophy and and amazing stories from people around the world go subscribe now!

    Before we went to Abbey road we had to stop by XLvideo to pick up the Media playback rack which was meant to have been brought up to Newcastle for a small rebuild but during the hectic schedule and logistics of Bluebeard previous to this it ended up somewhere in the XL warehouse. Getting to XL was easy enough after getting over the crazy Uber Roundabout made of roundabouts.

    Undeterred we picked up the rack, and headed over to Abbey Road, it was quite exciting to go to the famous Abbey Road studios with all that history and check the place out. We arrived arround midday and aproaching the studio I was amased to see the wall of the front car-park was covered in what I later realised was fans graffiti/drawings/messages & art. You could spend an entire day reading all of this and comeback to something different as each visitor adds their own thing.

    We got parked easily signed in, loaded our kit in and proceeded to get to work on prepping the playback rack for the gig, Mike turned up shortly after who had been running and calling the show when it was touring the states, before we knew it we had the rack ready, plugged up and the orchestra were tuning up. The score which ran with the visuals was perfect and there was a good atmosphere in the room as this was going to be the first UK showing of the piece. As quick as we had started the rehearsal was over and we were packing down to move out kit into the vocal booth where steve needed to do some updates to the system prior to tomorrows show. Below, Steve (Barco Ninja) Holmes hard at work in the vocal booth.

    The following day we were in the Barbican, with a HUGE screen and 2 Barco HD20’s, the local house crew at the Barbican had a busy schedule and had only had a few hours off when we arrived at 08.00 but were more than happy to get back on it assembling this giant screen.

    The screen went up easily enough, Colin Pink turned up who was doing sound for the show and offered to get in the coffees and morning sandwiches, a very good way to make friends, and the coffee was much appreciated! After a quick coffee, we got the projectors in the booth and began setting up the system. I have never met anyone who hasn’t said that Barco’s are a pain in the ass, and they’re right, they are clunky, the remote interface is slow, but, they do the job and I still cant believe they still have a huge market share here in the UK, give me a Panasonic any day!

    Anyway, rant over, we got setup, had a little fight with the projectors over, resolution & scaling for allot of the morning and then we were into rehersals again. In respect, today was an easy day for me, this was Steve’s baby and he was beavering away, checking over Cues, triggers and settings calling up the relevant rehearsal marks for George the conductor during the afternoon. I was on bitch duty so promptly went out and got some coffee and sandwiches. Again the time vanished, and we were nearly at showtime, it was busy in the foyer so I gave Steve the calming words of, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine as long as you don’t fuck up” which I know he appreciated. Steve had spent practically all afternoon and the show in the roasting tech box with those projectors and did a good job of staying focussed.

    The show went incredibly well, with the added pressure of David Attenborough and many of the BBC cameramen who filmed the footage in the audience. After the last of the audience had left we packed down, managed to get all of the kit in the van with the help of the superb crew at the Barbican, good people to work with. It had been a thirsty successful day, so we couldn’t think of anything better to do other than have some really dirty hotel food and a beer. Actually we could have thought of better places to go but in the town that never sleeps it was the only closest place open after midnight!

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