Fantastical video blog No Fat Clips has just concluded Floria’s Day, showcasing 3 videos from Italian director Floria Sigismondi. She of muted colours, blown out highlights, unstable camera and obsessive cutting. DeK has hooked up 3 videos I hadn’t encountered before, but left out the more obvious ones, which you should definitely check out for […]

Online music making with open source tools. Hook up some phones and controls and lock yourself in a cage, if you like, as one of the core developers did. Imagine a massively multiplayer music studio, connected worldwide over the Internet. Log in, and everyone sees a set of synths, effects, sequencers, or other custom patches. […]

For custom 3D work or GPU-native processing of images and videos, a working knowledge of coding shaders is essential. Custom shaders are widely supported in tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing (with some work), Java coding, Pd/GEM, Quartz Composer, and even many other video and 3D apps. In Jitter, for instance, you can basically add some custom […]

There’s nothing like the occasional reminder that commercial effects pros get to do stuff we can’t. Today’s example: a real-life Katamari Damacy, starting with a single person (ouch) and rolling through a city, courtesy the Travelers Insurance group. The results are stunningly realistic, particularly at the beginning: there’s a sense of real physicality to it, […]

There’s nothing like the occasional reminder that commercial effects pros get to do stuff we can’t. Today’s example: a real-life Katamari Damacy, starting with a single person (ouch) and rolling through a city, courtesy the Travelers Insurance group. The results are stunningly realistic, particularly at the beginning: there’s a sense of real physicality to it, […]

There’s nothing like the occasional reminder that commercial effects pros get to do stuff we can’t. Today’s example: a real-life Katamari Damacy, starting with a single person (ouch) and rolling through a city, courtesy the Travelers Insurance group. The results are stunningly realistic, particularly at the beginning: there’s a sense of real physicality to it, […]

The Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros are here, and even if you’re a Windows user, these machines deserve a look. See Create Digital Music for the full once-over, but here’s my short list for why the MacBook Pro has appeal for the VJ/visualist/live visuals person, particularly for the intensive requirements of running live visuals in […]

Apple has announced an update for its MacBook Pro line that makes it up to 39% faster than the previous MacBook and seven trillion times faster than our sorry PowerBook G4s. Wait — scratch that last line. I think they said “seven.” But having tested the first MacBook Pro, suffice to say that the Pro […]

I started using Live with version 1, and since that version, Live users have longed for an easy way to customize the color scheme in Ableton Live. It’s a no-brainer: two-dimensional interface, high-contrast UI elements, basic graphics — why not be able to choose the color scheme you want? Ableton’s own themes let you abandon […]

Bless K-mart and their $2.50 contact sheets of faux woodgrain. They can turn your average, ordinary plastic M-Audio USB MIDI keyboard into a retro-styled custom job that just screams, erm, class. Melbourne-and-London-based CDM forum reader soloandata did just that. (Talk about bi-coastal — they have K-marts there?) Kudos: it takes a steady hand to line […]