Early on here at Create Digital Music, I discovered that many of you share an interest in visuals as well as music, in VJing, real-time visual performance, interactive art, 3D, video and film, and motion graphics. It’s hard to cover those topics adequately on a music site, though, and even though many of us do both, it’s worth treating these areas as the individual disciplines they are. At long last, I’m proud to announce we can now take the wraps off Create Digital Music’s new sister site:
Create Digital Motion
For those of you who specialize in visuals, we hope CDMotion will become daily reading. For those of you who focus on music but occasionally like to keep tabs on live visuals, just out of curiosity or dabbling, we’ll keep you posted here on CDMusic. And, of course, we expect plenty of crossover, just as we’ve seen already here on CDMusic, whether it’s people making music in live, 3D gaming environments or MIDI controllers that work well with both Ableton Live and VJ applications.
We’ve already given the forums a head start, but for those of you who missed them, you’ll find parallel forums for visual discussion on our new server:
CDM Forums at createdigitalnoise.com
“This is just for VJs, right?” was a comment we got a few times on the forums. But I feel it’s important to take cues from readers, and based on what many of you are doing, a limited focus on “VJing” is too narrow. (Not to mention, many of you don’t even like the term!) Co-editor James Loveday and I both believe, I think, that it’s equally important how you build visual materials for a session, whether that’s going out and shooting time-lapse video or animating in Flash. There’s simply too much crossover to think of VJing as a completely independent discipline, or, likewise, to limit “motion graphics” to pre-rendered work, as much of the market currently does. I believe that interactive and real-time work will become part of digital expression for visuals just as it has for music. Today, the emphasis may be on rendered content — but ten years ago, most people were thinking about music production as being limited to big studios. That doesn’t take away the importance of other techniques any more than laptop music eliminates the need to understand microphones.
Thanks to James Loveday again for all the help moving servers around, importing content, and getting all the technical details right, a job that’s much larger than anyone here probably imagines. And, of course, thanks again to Nathanael Jeanneret for his fantastic graphic design.
Enough talk; head over there and check out our first stories, a feature on building my Shuttle PC (as teased here earlier), news of Flash 9, and of course all the archives of visual stories from Create Digital Music if you feel like digging through some of our old content.