Last Friday at MGFest Chicago, I gave a short talk on what real-time can mean for visuals. The crowd had a large contingent of traditional motion graphics designers – my own presentation was followed by a slick demo for using Cinema4D to do those flying logos you see so often – but folks did seem receptive to the idea that real-time visuals open up other possibilities.

Above are some of the slides, which give you an idea of the talk.

And, as I generally like to do…

Creative Commons License
We’ll Do it Live: How Real-Time is Changing Visuals by Peter Kirn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Photo credit: Psymbolic.

All well and good, but next time I may replace the whole presentation with a hands-on demo of Animata. The live animation tool turns people into puppeteers (even Indonesian shadow puppeteers, if you like) and really demonstrates the idea of going form a compose – orchestrate – render model to live performance. It’s the difference between scoring a piano sonata and jamming live.

By the way, if you’re interested in me presenting something like this at your school or work, or hands-on presentations of any of the topics on cdmotion, do get in touch here on the site.

Apologies to the organizers of an event in the summer with the same phrase as its title – I’m also obsessed with Bill O’Reilly.

Photo credits:

“Progress Bar”jacksonmedeiros (slide 3)
“Vintage Score”Christy Hydeck (slide 5)
The Hague Jazz 2008 – Piano HandsHaags Uitburo / Maurice (slide 5)
“Modular Synthesizer”Maschinenraum / Peter Gorges (slide 6)
“Magic Lantern, box label”Anna L Conti (slide 7)
Magic LanternAndrei Niemimäki (slide 8)
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”Paul Randall (slide 9)
“Videoplace,” by Myron Krueger – Dave Pape (slide 10)
SummerLab-Gijòn (Jugando con Opencv)aniara (slide 10)
“Distance Lines”Todd Vanderlin (slide 11)
Image from vintage Fairlight CVI manual (slide 12)
“Equipo de The Light Surgeon”Juan Jiménez (slide 18)
Max/MSP/Jitter Everywhere!Vincent Diamante (slide 25)
Joshua Ott, superDraw (slide 26)
Cimatics 234 VJ Watz @ FuseMarius Watz (slide 27)
I Heart ProcessingNik Rowell (slide 30)

Jaymis Loveday, createdigitalmotion.com, slides 14, 20, 22, 23, 31
Peter Kirn, createdigitalmotion.com, slides 1, 15, 16, 19