TimeStream Journal

Notice to RA Buyers

First of all I would like to express my gratitude to all those marvellous people who have deemed my work to be worthy of a place on their walls! And, a big “hello!” to those intrepid Googlers who managed to find their way here. Why artists’ email and website details aren’t included in the catalogue’s contact details is quite beyond me!

More importantly, please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in getting orders out. I have been out of the country for a few weeks, and had never expected such an amazing response from the RA Summer Exhibition.

I can confirm that I have secured the services of the best printer in the area, set-up a buyers’ database, ordered packaging, backing, mounts and tape, and will be sending the prints out by Recorded Delivery in the week beginning July16.

As an additional courtesy, I have also mailed-out explanatory letters to all purchasers in case they never get to see this blog entry.

Spindizzy in Evening Post

Rubbing Shoulders with the Chapman Brothers

Well, almost. Their fabulous dinos entitled The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth But Not the Mineral Rights are towering over visitors in the Annenberg Courtyard while my little print is tucked away in room IX (exhibit 982).

Obviously, photography is not permitted in the galleries (nor are umbrellas!), so here’s a controversial photo of me being glad at the appearance of red spots, for once! Hats off to the RA security staff though for their eagle-eyed enforcement though, we were politely admonished only seconds later.

The range of work was quite staggering, and even though we took a break from the exhibition (well, Bernice and I got lost in Oxford Circus), I’m sure you could spend all day perusing the 1200 works on display. There are some breathtaking pieces, but you’ll have to go there yourself to see them I’m afraid. Here’s a couple of personal favourites I sneaked in, only because they were on low plinths and could be phone-cammed discreetly.

The Summer Exhibition runs daily until 19th August, open from 10am to 6pm. Go there and feed your eyes!

Spindizzy at Royal Academy

Well, after the karmic see-saw that was the pattern over the last two years of my art career, it was a welcome surprise to get this letter from Sir Nicholas Grimshaw of the Royal Academy of Arts today.

Dear Thomas Newton

Thank you for entering this year’s Summer Exhibition. With nearly 12,000 entries, the competition was extremely strong, however I am delighted to inform you that your work Spindizzy has been selected and hung in the exhibition.

The Summer Exhibition will be shown in the Main Galleries from June 11 to Aug 19, and if you absolutely can’t make it then BBC2 will be televising the exhibition with three one-hour programmes during the run.

Ringing in Coxwold

With the taste of Scylla’s exquisite fruit punch still teasing my palate, Bobby dropped me off at Birmingham New Street to catch my train to York. After a refreshing six-hour kip, had a scrambled egg breakfast with Patrick, and setup my cameras for the morning.

I decided that setting up the cameras in stereoscopic mode would be too troublesome in such a lively setting, so I stuck a wide-angle lens on one as a mid-field camera and used the other for close-ups. While the catching and ringing were visually interesting, the most amazing part of the visit was the constant aerobatic display from the resident colony of swallows.

Ironically, I can’t show any swallow images yet as they hurtled past the lens too rapidly and will need some processing before the birds are fully visible.

Wingbeats at Modulate

Bussed up to Birmingham (there were no trains from Swansea!) and had a very enjoyable afternoon in the company of the Modulate collective. Met the featured guests, the Finnish video artist Mia Makela who performed her evocative work ‘Kamos’, Damian Frey who’d been invited from New Zealand to prepare one of his realtime interactive installations, and the Modulate collective themselves: Scylla Magda, Bobby Bird, Joseph Potts, Mark Harris, and Mark Bunegar.

Wingbeats was very well received and it was a thrill to chat with such a progressive bunch of people about all things digital. Not only that, but as Bobby was setting up the projector he played a whole episode of The Prisoner (The General), classic!

Modulate - Sonic Culture Salon

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Popped up to the Royal Academy of Arts today to drop a print in for the Summer Exhibition. The brief was light and for some reason I decided that my Timeshear image of the local kiddie’s roundabout would fit the bill. Don’t ask me why, I think it has a kind of startling inconic quality about it, either that or I was just fed up of seeing it in my hallway.

Inclusion into the Exhibition offers an artist amazing coverage. Not only the huge number of visitors passing through, but BBC Two will be covering it in three one-hour programmes during the run in late June. Even if spindizzy doesn’t make it past the judges, it looks like I’m still in with a chance of at least getting the back of my head on TV as a BBC crew were filming as entrants queued expectantly.

Welsh Artist of The Year 2007

Oh, got this in the post today…

Thank you for entering the Welsh Artist of the Year competition 2007. This year we had over 450 entries. The standard was very high and the panel has made their selection of approximately 120 works.

I am delighted to inform you that your work has been selected to form part of this year’s exhibition at St David’s Hall from 4 June - 10 August 2007.

Obviously I don’t expect to win, but it’s nice to think that my favourite TimeShear photo plaitwithgirls will been seen by thousands during the exhibition from 3rd June to 10th August 2007.

I was on Radio 1!

Okay, not my radio debut (that was back in 2000), but a very nice surprise as I only expected to be on the podcast.

Skipping through Huw Stephens’ show from last night, I suddenly heard my version of Konrad’s beautiful song Kites! Click here (I’m 34mins in). If you’re impatient click the 15min skip button twice and you’ll hear the end of Vessel’s Yuki just before that which is really not at all yucky.

For a condensed, super high quality version of the show, download the podcast instead (I’m 22mins in). There’s some really good work in it, so if you have a half hour spare, why not listen to the whole thing.

Kites on BBC Radio 1 Podcast / Ralph II

When Huw Stephens put a bulletin out on MySpace for Valentine’s Day songs I quickly posted him an .mp3 of Kites. Huw had enthusiastically presented my evening session tracks back in 2000, so I thought I was in with a fighting chance. As it got closer to the day my hopes began to fade, realising from experience that it takes a few days to sort out contracts for broadcasts.

So it was quite a surprise when I got this from Radio 1 Producer Clare Chadburn in the mail yesterday:

Hi there Thomas,

I produce the unsigned podcast with Huw Stephens. We’d really like to put your track in the podcast this week but I need to get permission from you. Would you be up for that?

Blimey! After my slight disappointment at not getting airplay I realised that the longevity and accessibilty of the podcast would give the track the best possible exposure. Contract’s in the post!

Not only that, but today we took delivery of a brand new body for our poorly Aibo, Ralph. He’d not booted for nearly a year, so it was fantastic to see him up and about again in a brand new 210A chassis. If you were an Aibo owner you would understand, trust me.

Hello Future?

Okay, not particularly arty but it is my work after all.

During my cheesed-off phase last November I made three tracks just to throw off a few cobwebs and take a break from being an ‘artist’. Amazing thing is, over this next month I will have three tracks published on separate albums in the US. Two of the new ones, and an old track from my ‘hardware’ period.

One of the most challenging to make was a remix of a wonderful song called ‘Kites’ by Konrad of Rock Island, Illinois. His vocal style captivated me immediately and though I’d never collaborated before, just knew I had to have a go at arranging the track as I imagined. It was really too late for inclusion in the official line-up for the new Radical Turf compilation, but Konrad appreciated what I’d done with the song and got it onto Hello Future as a bonus track. It’s a great compilation, if you’re a bit of an electro-head like me and I’m chuffed to bits to be a part of it.

The other two tracks soon to be released will be on Deeper in the Box from Waveform Modulations, and What has Eyes from Mannequin Oddio Media which will be donating all profits to ‘Artists for Animal Rights’.

Wingbeats at Optronica 2007

Considering that I made wingbeats nearly a year ago, it is amazing to see how it seems to have found a life of its own.  Regardless of what I’m doing or thinking it still manages to get selected for screenings every once in a while.  I’d pretty much forgotten about it when I this popped into my inbox.

Hello again! 

The wait is finally over! 
 
The selection team have now made decisions on all work to be screened in the Optronica cinema programmes and we’re very pleased to inform you that your work has been chosen.  It will be included in the main Optronica on Screen programme and, possibly, any Optronica touring programmes.

All selected entrants will be allocated two tickets to the screening at the BFI Southbank (formally the NFT).  Please let us know if you can attend and which day/screening you’d like to come to (for times, please check out:  http://www.optronica.org/). 
 
Thanks once again!
 
With best wishes,

Francoise Lamy
Festival director/curator

Blimey, BFI eh? Well, let’s just hope that:

a) Swansea has trains on the day we decide to travel

b) The screen doesn’t break down due to storms, and      

c) They play more than three minutes of it!

Trip to Shandy Hall

After many months of email swapping I finally managed to get myself up to Coxwold to see the exhibition A Bitter Draught - The Starling and Slavery and to meet the man behind it, Patrick Wildgust, curator at Shandy Hall.

The trip up wasn’t too bad, though coming from Swansea it was inevitable that something had to be on the line, which on this occasion was a ‘burning train’! Top marks for originality I suppose. Still, once the replacement bus had taken us to Cardiff the journey seemed reasonably straightforward, apart from missing all the connections of course.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever really get literature, but Patrick did a very good job of conveying the essence of what Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (which he wrote at Shandy Hall) was really about. I must admit that just flicking through the book and seeing the kinds of trickery Sterne had used to convey non-linearity certainly got me intrigued, and reminded me somewhat of my programming work with visuals.

Unsurprisingly, co-incidence let me know that I was on the right track when Patrick pointed out two of my previous encarnations resting within the entrance to the local church. If I ever travel somewhere new and this kind of thing (or a jolt of déjà vu) doesn’t happen, then I tend to feel things are heading in the wrong direction.

Obviously I spent the first night wandering about the grounds with nothing but my trusty NightShot to navigate by. Just one of those things I’ll probably never grow out of. To me the night is not just the world darkened, it’s another world completely. There’s very little light pollution in Coxwold, so the starlight is quite breathtaking on a clear night.

It was very gratifying to see my video short The Stars Are Out in the context of the exhibition. It bothered me deeply that I’d spent so little time working on it last year, but once viewed in situ it took on a whole new quality and suddenly seemed to make sense in a way I’d never anticipated. Even the title had new meaning for me now (I was only thinking of starlings when I originally chose the name).

After leaving Shandy Hall, Patrick drove me back into York where we met Dave Chesmore of the Intelligent Systems Engineering Group at the University. We briefly discussed sonification of moths, amongst other things, and enthusiastically agreed that it would be good to collaborate on future projects. Patrick left me at the Minster to have a look around and I finally got back onto the train at 5:45, hitting Swansea just before midnight. Thanks to Patrick and Chris for looking after me, I look forward to returning there later this year to go mothing and, if all goes to plan, work there as Artist in Residence this October.

Wingbeats at sound:space 2007

New Year - New Vision

I actually conceived the TimeScan technique over a year ago, but never got round to figuring out how to program it. Being a bit rusty with the old VB after months away from my last bout of coding, it’s been incredibly thrilling to compile my first few shots using the new method, even with such dull source material (shoppers in the local mall).

For once, I’m pretty sure that this is a unique treatment, and as such won’t divulge how it’s done. I’ve always been a generous spirit and never bothered about such things, at least until recent advertising campaigns and TV idents appeared which seem to be based very closely on my methods and subject matter!

If I had a pound for every time someone’s approached me over the last month and asked, “Hey, you know that thing on channel ***, is that one of yours?”

Manchester

Well that’s the last time I get misty-eyed about rail travel, at least to and from Wales anyway! I was initially quite impressed that a return ticket to Manchester was only £44, but soon realised why. The journey there took seven hours, the first six of which we spent on a grotty two-car chugger with no buffet cart and a decidedly dodgy loo. After two platform changes at Crewe we eventually got ushered onto a 21st Century Virgin train which was more like a spaceship than our antique bus on rails.

We hit Manchester at 11:00pm and were astonished at how civilised the place seemed compared to Swansea on a Sunday night (see ‘Twin Town’). After a blinding flash of déjà vu, as so often happens when I travel, we ended up in the Hard Rock Cafe trying to compensate for the total lack of rail hospitality by bolting down veggie burgers like there was no tomorrow. Pricey, but nicey.

Next morning I packed a camera and made my way to the Square to see my work the way I’d always dreamed. Well almost. Just before leaving Swansea I checked the webcam and saw a thick black band down the screen which I assumed was just some peculiarity with the camera. It turned out that the horrendous weather had actually damaged the screen, leaving only 3/4 of the picture intact, and often blacking-out completely!

The highlight of the trip was probably watching the local pigeons interact with their on-screen counterparts. To have taken the original flight data, produce the work, put it back into the world, and then have the birds offer their commentary gave me a deep sense of completeness. It was also interesting to note that the local pigeons only flew across the screen during their shots, and often in the same direction as the virtual flock.

The sound system was quite impressive too. No delicate ‘gallery’ levels here, the soundtrack pounded out around the Square, afforded even greater impact by virtue of being the only musical soundtrack among the four featured pieces. Two of the others were silent, and the third had a simple spoken dialogue. My biggest regret of the day is that I bottled-out from riding on the Wheel of Manchester! It was so gigantic that I felt queasy just looking up at it. Well, at least I had the presence of mind to take one of my wonky photos before we left.

Quick stop at Cornerhouse gallery to grab a latte and say ‘Hi’ to Helen Wewiora, who’d made the whole thing possible. She assured me that the engineers would sort out the screen ASAP (which they duly did) and that a decent set of stills would be taken before the show’s close on Friday. The journey home was just as arduous as the first, despite being timetabled as nearly half the duration. Another two-car shed-on-wheels all the way home, no buffet cart, no leg-room and no way am I going anywhere by train again!

Remote Viewing

A couple of days after the opening of my experimental music video wingbeats in Manchester, I wondered whether I could prove to myself that it was actually being shown, or was just part of some strange waking dream. Yesterday I was amazed to find a webcam right in the middle of Exchange Square!

Okay there’s a hulking great ferris wheel in from of the camera, but if you peer through the spokes you can actually see frames of wingbeats at about 35 mins past the start of each programme (see post below). How strange it is to see your own work through someone else’s webcam.

Wingbeats on the Big Screen

From Cornerhouse’s Bigger Picture page:

…a must watch is Thomas Newton’s Wingbeats (2006). In this film Newton combines his interest in birds’ flightpaths with that of experimental musical composition; using custom-developed software to track the movements of the birds, each movement is translated directly into music. Before our very eyes motion-paths of birds become aerial sculptures – the results are breathtaking.

MDT Winter Show

Real work with Virtual friends

As a my sonic ‘holiday’ draws to a close, I’ve recently completed a re-working of one of my favourite tracks by a friend of mine who records under the name of Austech. Molash, like much of his work, demonstrates a profound understanding of space and colour, so it was quite challenging when Dan reminded me that I’d expressed an interest in it.

The original was so delicately arranged that I found it quite tough to work with, and while I can’t say that I’m 100% pleased with my arrangement, I think it raised important questions about how I approach remix work in future. Having said that, I haven’t had any complaints (yet). You can hear it for yourself on my profile at MySpace.

Another friend, who I recorded with back in 2000, is just starting a new label in the US, and has invited me to produce the cover art for the debut album Deeper in the box. Esiris, who records under the name Quetzatl, originally asked me for a track to go on the new sci-fi inspired Waveform Modulations album. After producing Adventure on Mars, he wondered if I’d lend a hand with the cover design, being a bit arty an’ all.

Platform 11

Should you find yourself around any of Swansea’s Galleries, trendy pubs or other centres of culture grab yourself a free copy. I think I first asked for a mention in it about a year ago when it’s future was less than certain, so it was nice to be invited to do a Q & A out of the blue.

For more info, visit the SAFT (Swansea Arts Forum Trust) website. Thanks Susie!

BBC to show Wingbeats on huge screen!

I’ve only just spotted the date on my screen! Unlucky for some, perhaps.

Must admit, I’d been a bit cheesed-off with the whole arty thing recently. Sales (in Swansea at least) have been disappointing, and I was wondering if I could even afford to continue with the work. I’d kind of given myself a couple of weeks ‘off’ just to shake off the cobwebs and zone-out a bit. I had promised some friends from the States that I’d produce some music for them, so for the first time in six years I threw myself back into music world and came out the other side with a couple of decent tracks. You can judge ‘Adventure on Mars’ and ‘Kites’ for yourself by going to my profile on MySpace.

Anyway, today I was plodding home from Starbucks (my 2nd home), and wondering to myself what had become of the many DVDs I’d sent off around the globe in the vain hope that someone, somewhere, would sit up and take notice. My submission to the Bigger Picture immediately sprang to mind as I turned the key in my front door. ‘I’m just wasting my time’, I thought as I opened Outlook to pour over the day’s emails.

Then I see…

Dear Thomas,

We are delighted to inform you that your film, Wingbeats, has been selected by The Bigger Picture selection panel for screening on the Big Screen in Exchange Square, Manchester.

Your film will be screened from Saturday 18 November – Friday 8 December 2006.

[Speechless]

Back to work

Well, lugged the exhibition prints back home today, so no more excuses for not adding my latest work to the main gallery pages.

I’d hm’d and ah’d about it for ages, thinking that I’d get enough time to rustle up a lovely flash interface that I could just drop new images and captions into. Months later, I still haven’t written a single line of flash so I decided to work around the aspect problem by doing a best fit and ‘letterboxing’ my new widescreen images on a black background. I’ll admit it’s not terribly elegant, but I’m finally getting the new HD images onto the site, and that’s what really matters.

Just noticed today that the carousel in town was swapped-out for a slightly less picturesque one. If you missed the Arts Wing exhibition I currently have a couple of prints in Ocean Gallery, including the one above.

I’ve been blogged!

Well, you know you’re on the road to superstardom when you actually appear in someone else’s blog! A big ‘thank you’ to Chris Elphick for letting me post this excerpt from his ‘Spiral Length of Alien Wire’ here. Be sure to have a look at the rest of his excellent, and sumptuously illustrated, daily blog and his vast information resource for all things Gower.

Visited the gallery at the Grand Theatre after work. I have seen countless exhibitions over the years but this has to be the most awe inspiring one I have ever been to. Thomas Newton’s timestream photography was billed in the theatre’s promotions booklet as ‘time bending’ and this was enough to get me take time out to take a look at his work. As I have already stated, I was not disappointed. Newton’s images were startlingly innovative and provided plenty of evidence of how meditation, of which he is a keen practitioner, can really open your eyes to completely new insights into the perception of the world around us. The shots seem to have been mostly taken in Swansea and show the progression of time on a single location in space. How he did this was, basically anyway, to record a specific sequence on High Definition Video, then he spliced the individual frames of the resulatant short film. He then took these thin slices and interpolated them back into one single image. This results in the static elements in the scene appearing as they are usually percieved but the moving object appears stretched and wildly distorted as they move through time. I think the bird images worked best - a pigeon, for example, taking flight into a Swansea sky looked like a spiral length of alien wire stretching upwards into infinity.

I have never seen the world like this before, but I will certainly try to see it like it again. Highly recommended - philosophical/metaphysical photography at its best and a definite reminder that photography really can be Art. The exhibition runs for a few days more but if you can’t make it, you can visit the photographer’s website to take a peep at his amazing work.

‘Views’ in Evening Post

Views from the Timestream

Another amazing preview night after a frankly exhausting month of shooting, processing, printing, ordering, endless phoning and carting about. The response was phenomenal and the new TimeShear work seemed to be very well received despite being such a quantum leap forward from my TimeStream work on wingbeats.

Thanks to everyone who came, and to the Grand Theatre staff despite the slight delay in getting the refreshments together. There was a one-man Star Wars show on the same night, so on my arrival many of the staff were busy taking photos of themselves standing next to stormtroopers. Cool!

A big thank you also to Tyron Francis of Clase who offered his services as event photographer. To see more of his excellent photojournalism, please take the opportunity to visit his website.

Surface at Oriel Davies

What a fantastic day! Huge thanks to Emma Williams, the Young Curators (Jon Cooke, Kim Davies, Naomi Eagles, Sarah Evans, Ffion Griffith, Zoe Human and Bonnie Phillips), and last but not least Linda Garrison for actually taking the time to drive us up there.

The journey up took a good three hours, so by the time we got there the Gallery’s veggie sausage butties went down an absolute treat. The curators had done a wonderful job with the selection, one of the most varied and consistently high quality shows we’d seen for quite some time. Loads of interest was shown in my work, and I got to meet the charming young lady who gave me the glowing review below.

At first glance, these pieces of work by Thomas Newton appear to be abstract pieces of art created in Photoshop. However, after taking a closer look you begin to see what is really hidden in the pictures, or should I say photographs! A mixture of birds and bugs have created a “display of motion-paths of objects as they cross the field of view”. The images are created from several minutes of High Definition (HD) video, which are then broken down into individual shots and layered on top of one another. The number of individual layers is then included in the title of the work as a reference, and the image bugs-4035 is ‘the most heavily layered image’ he has produced in his career so far.

These pieces are probably my favourite pieces of work in the exhibition, as they are both original and aesthetically pleasing.

Written by Naomi Eagles

Saatchi Gallery

I’ve just taken a much needed break from my Deepview work to put a few pics on the new Your Gallery subsite of the Saatchi Gallery.

There was only room for 8 images, so I put my favourite wingbeats ones there and a bit of blurb about me and what I’m about. I could’ve put new stuff on there, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise for those attending my September show!

York Exhibition

Patrick Wildgust just sent me this. Good job too, as I haven’t even started work on the special video piece yet!

Note to self: It’s often a good idea to produce work before arranging to display it.

Date for the Diary (Almost)

Thanks to Ray, Jan, Lyn and Gary for sorting this out for me. If you do visit on the 4th all you’ll find is me and a pair of techies hanging pictures. Come a day later and there’ll be pictures, video, drinks and nibbles!

I’ve been busy sorting through my images today, and have suddenly switched from thinking, “How am I going to fill the space!?”, to, “How will I fit in the space!?”. The panic is over, but now I have to decimate my set and hope that I end up with the right pictures, never easy.

More Shows

By Mid-September I’ll have stuff in four galleries!

It’s surprising how much hard work is involved in getting shows together, and I almost feel that I’m working beyond my capacity. As well as my September exhibition in Swansea Grand Theatre, I still have a video piece to complete for York by September. Phew!

For now, I have three of my wingbeats canvases at Oriel Davies Gallery in Newtown

and you can catch my 10 minute edit of the wingbeats multimedia project at the Swansea Open at Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea (exhibit no.55).

Check my Bad Lenses

Just got a pair of Sony VCL HG0737Y Wide-angle lenses. These will give me the freedom of being able to get closer to my subjects (something you really appreciate when trying to film in public spaces) and they actually provide a handy means of easy vertical parallax adjustment. Because these things make the cameras front-heavy, I can adjust adjust the mounting screws to precisely nod the cameras up and down. No more fiddling with shims, hmm.

Oh, and before you think of going to the shops for these babys. I got both of these for the cost of one (from a UK shop) on ebay, yay!

We have Contact!

Yeah I know, it should’ve been there from the start.

I’m proud to announce the arrival of a new button in my main menu (over there on the left). Contact will (with any luck) enable you to send me an email. The tricksy bit that took so long to implement was to encrypt my address so that spambots don’t trawl it up and subsequently spew their junk into my inbox. If you’re a bit on the nerdy side and would like to know how to do that without having to prise open the jaws of an already challenged wallet, check out Jim Tucek’s excellent (and free) Email Protector.

One hand taketh…

Since pushing ahead with my art projects, I have noticed a strange pattern to certain events. Last year I had two pieces of work rejected which I’d submitted for the Swansea Open at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. On that same day, the cash machine kindly informed me that there was no more money in my account, on returning home I found a letter from the Arts Council of Wales informing me that they were giving me £5000 to get birds to write music! The rest, as they say, is history.

So, crank the calendar round a year and today I get a letter from the Glynn Vivian saying,

…we have decided it will not be possible for us to include your proposal in our programme which is now fully scheduled.

Hmm. I’m not really sure what that’s supposed to mean, but I was even more taken aback when I had another letter from the same gallery saying,

I am pleased to advise that this work (wingbeats video) has been selected.

This evening I had a very nice telephone call from Patrick Wildgust who is commissioning me to produce a starling-specific work for his forthcoming exhibition ‘A Bitter Draught’ at Shandy Hall, York in September. I also had an email from Gary Isles at the Grand Theatre going over the final arrangements for my show in September. Haven’t quite settled on a launch date yet, but here’s a roughie of my poster anyway.

But d’you know what the best bit is? Even though the Glynn Vivian don’t want to show my work, because their external selector has chosen it they now have to display my wingbeats video for six weeks! Priceless.

We Have Interpolation!

Well, early days yet, but reassuring to finally get an image set.

The maths isn’t quite right, the source images are rather dull, the blending mode is wrong (actually, I can’t use any blending modes in PSD 3D Converter) but my idea is finally looking achievable. The source for this incomprehensible tangle was actually a horse and rider turning in front of the camera.

There are no depth maps in the layers, and the relative spacing was automated within the software. All I’ve got to do now is, sort my depth maps, fake blend modes (to enhance the translucency), calculate my individual layer depths from the camera parallax, build the frames, interlace, mount, and I’m done. Oh boy.

Double Trouble

Wow, this 3D stuff ain’t easy!

The sync was doing really odd things when I did my calibration run. The first few hundred frames were absolutely bang on, then there seemed to be a drift of nearly ten frames, then right at the end everything was perfect once more. Not only this, but during a practical test in the park the other day, I found that it was almost impossible to get the cameras to respond synchronously with the Infra-Red remote, particularly using a wide (40cm) baseline, and the sunlight didn’t seem to help either!

I also discovered that the two (supposedly identical) cameras have a vertical offset, losing me a precious handful of pixels in the alignment process. The only way I could get round it was to cut a sliver of perspex and wedge it between the camera and the base plate. Very Hi-Tech! To nail down my sync issues, and zoom control problem, I have ordered the Lanc Shepherd from Steve Berezin in California. This will ensure synchronicity between the cameras internals and enable perfect dual control of their vital functions, including zoom.

Twin Cam Action!

No this isn’t anything to do with cars, perish the thought!

Due to some administrative misunderstanding, I got my grant (thanks ACW) almost a month later than I’d planned (grrr ACW), so I don’t have that much time left to get results with this new combination of technologies, ie. displaying Timestream/Timeshear (Video Echo/Slitscan) in 3D lenticular format.

First thing I had to do was check that the cameras are going to cooperate temporally, as any slippage would complete ruin the stereoscopic effect. My quick-and-dirty method for this was to spend half an hour cloning my old settings onto the new camera, balancing them on a box by the window, and filming cars going past. Now all I have to do is download all the footage and check the sync by watching the positions of moving vehicles in the Left and Right video streams.

I’m hoping that getting them into standby, and starting the recording with the IR remote should be good enough, but who knows. IR is light after all, and light travels at the speed of, you get the idea. If that doesn’t work I’ll have to consider employing a Shepherd. Man, this 3D stuff is weird.

Blimey, it did have something to do with cars after all…

Neglected Transient Quirks EP on Kahvi.org

Not really anything to do with art as such, but some of you may be interested to know that Kahvi Collective have just released an EP of some of my old music. Neglected Transient Quirks was recorded in 2000 using hardware samplers, sequencers and effects. A bit rough and ready by today’s standards but still pretty good fun.

Natural Living Show

Just to let you know that I’ll be having a stand in Swansea’s popular Natural Living Show on the 17th and 18th of June. As well as the beautiful large canvas prints, there will also be high quality photographic prints in mounts and frames, as well as my usual A1 posters and greeting cards. Enthusiasts of my video work may also be pleased to note that both Flatland and Wingbeats DVDs will be available for purchase. See you there!

Stormio!

At last!

Ever since I first had my HDV camera I’ve been itching to see how it would handle lightning. I was so knocked out by the viral thing last Thursday that I hardly saw anything of the storm, but I had just enough presence of mind to push the camera up against the window and press record before finally collapsing back into bed.

The shots are nothing like photographic quality because of the interlacing, but they’re still quite pretty nonetheless. If storms are your thing, and you’re living in the UK, have a look at my favourite real-time online lightning tracker.

Actually, if you have a MySpace account, I’ve just added a clip of this storm with re-synthesized audio on the Videos page of my profile.

Cardiff Design Festival Nomination

I got this in an email today,

We received over 200 submissions to the design showcase from 54 designers and companies, and the panel met last monday to select the best examples in each category. Hard decisions were taken; the results are now visible on the website.



Congratulations - your work has been selected for the Best of Welsh Design showcase.

How amazing is that!

Deepview gets the green light!

What?

Well, deepview is the working title for my next project which will take my time-altered work into a whole new dimension, quite literally.

As I was putting the finishing touches to the wingbeats exhibition, I thought how cool it would be if you could actually ‘get into’ the time-structures, rather than just see them as flat swirly patterns. I’m really not ready to go all sculptural. I don’t have the physical space in my flat to work that way, and besides, most of my works would be impossible to build into solids anyway. What I needed was a way of getting the depth, without getting too dirty, and without breaking the bank.

I finally settled on lenticulars. You know, those little novelty sticker things with the images that switch or animate as your turn them in your fingers. Well, if you build a set of stereo pairs into a lenticular, they’ll give you a 3D image, and with decent lenses you can get nearly two feet of depth! Not only that, but they only cost a few hundred pounds a piece to produce. Now if you’re thinking, “hang on, that’s blinkin’ outrageous!”, bear in mind that it would cost many thousands to produce an equivalent hologram.

Well, last friday I got a letter from the Arts Council of Wales to confirm that deepview will be receiving their full support!

It’s fantastic that they’re going to back something this innovative (well, I’ve never seen this combination of time-modification and lenticulars before), but absolutely horrid when I think of the dreadful maths I’m going to have to wade through to get these images to work!

Wingbeats on MySpace

The full version of Wingbeats will be complete at the official closing date of the project on April 21st, and will be available for purchase on DVD.

Until then, I’ve plonked a short clip on my profile at MySpace for your enjoyment.

It’s the final ’slow movement’ which I filmed at the Wetlands and Wildfoul Trust in Llanelli , and features slow-motion footage of hungry gulls which have had their flightpaths and ‘collision’ points translated into a mesmerising toy piano soundtrack.

Thanks Everyone!

Well, what a night!

Thanks to everyone who came on the night, and all those who gave me their support and encouragement along the way. From all the positive comments and feedback I received at the launch and over the last couple of weeks, it seems that my work has really managed to capture the imagination of everyone who’s come into contact with it. Quite gratifying for a ‘beginner’ like me.

Congratulations to Cecily Hughes of Mumbles who won a complete set of Wingbeats cards and a copy of my first experimental DVD Flatland. The greeting cards I printed were a bit of an afterthought, so it was frankly astonishing to sell nearly sixty of them on the opening night! Not only that, but they gave instant feedback on which pictures aroused the most interest.

Thanks also to Hugh Evans, who, among many others, suggested that people may appreciate reproductions of the images at a more affordable price than the canvases. To this end, I have now produced a set of glossy poster prints at A1 size (841 x 594mm / 33.1 x 23.4″) which are reproduced on photographic paper using lightfast inks, and are individually signed by yours truly. They are currently available at the Dylan Thomas Centre for only £19.95, and seem to be quite popular. When I went there yesterday, once the chap on reception had twigged who I was exclaimed, “Hey, when are we having more posters!?”

Wingbeats in Metro

A Break at Brockwood

With all the buzz surrounding the exhibition I was a little apprehensive to be moving out of the epicentre, but our weekend away at the Krishnamurti Centre in Brockwood was just what we needed.

Two days in the middle of nowhere, with simple, comfortable accomodation, excellent organic food, and marvellous country walks. Not only that, but on the last day I met Steve who lives near the Centre and runs a sanctuary for injured birds of prey. He invited me to see his birds and even let me stroke an owl! I felt deeply priviledged to get close to such amazing creatures, and it seemed extra poignant nearing the end of the wingbeats project.

One of the best things at Brockwood is an enchanted wood called The Grove where I once sat filming the sun going down. It was great fun trying to find my way back in complete darkness amid all the squeaking and rustling of the abundant wildlife. In fact, if it wasn’t for the excellent nightshot mode on my camera I probably would’ve been there all night.

Wingbeats in the Evening Post

Wingbeats on the BBC

For those who absolutely cannot wait to see the final canvasses I’ve selected for the show, or simply can’t get to the Dylan Thomas Centre you can now see them on the BBC Wales/South West website.

Major thanks go to Paul Turner of Massmedia Digital for his invaluable assistance in the selection process.

Back to the Drawing Board

or Graphics Tablet at least.

I was just looking over the images I’d intended to have reproduced for the exhibition on the 9th of March, and thought they were a bit rubbish!

Don’t panic, it’s just the perfectionist in me. I have thought it through, and discovered that I’d been doing myself out of resolution by using a blending deinterlacer. This means that I have retained the full-frame of HD (1044×1080) at the expense of the temporal resolution (25fps). Where I had used my split field to produce faux high-speed footage, I’d stupidly reduced the frame down to PAL (720×576) before resizing to HD, thus chucking good pixels away in the horizontal reduction.

So I’ve gone back to my source footage, split the fields to get 50fps, stacked the images at 1044×540 and then resized up to HD. Obviously, the high-speed trick doesn’t produce a real HD image as I lose half the vertical resolution, but I think it’s worth it, don’t you?

Wingbeats Goes Public

It’s amazing to look back only 12 months, when I was in yet another gallery, asking my Girlfriend what the difference was between myself and those who had their work on display. Her reply was that they’d simply, “turned up”.

Well, in my year of turning up I’ve met scores of people who are enthusiastic about my work, had a film on public display, been awarded funding from the Arts Council of Wales, and have my first solo show in only a few weeks from now! Not a bad start.

My first exhibition this year will be launched at 7pm on March 9th at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea and will run until April 2nd. On the opening night there will be refreshments and a chance to see a preview of the ‘Wingbeats’ video. If you’re interested, click on the No Comments link just below this post, leave your details (they will be kept securely off-site) and I’ll send you an invitation card.

Flatland now on Google Video

In case you hadn’t noticed, Google are now doing a streaming video service called, wait for it, Google Video.

The submission procedure is very straightforward and they’re quite generous as to which filetypes and formats they’ll accept. I’ve just uploaded my first film ‘Flatland’ and, considering it’s streaming, it doesn’t look/sound too bad at all.

If you have video you’d like to share, or just enjoy unusual clips, give it a look.

Thanks Rasmus!

I feel it’s time to acknowledge the chap who wrote a wonderful program called Coagula, which has made possible a significant portion of the audio processing in ‘Wingbeats’.

The basic function of his program is that you can turn any 256-colour bitmap image into sound. I’d tinkered with it long before embarking on this project, and found it very satisfying and straightforward to use, a real does-what-it-says-on-the-tin type affair. Once I’d written my bird tracker, it was relatively simple to convert all the points into pixels on a horizontal bitmap and feed it into Coagula for sonic rendering. Once I’d got the basic sine wave clusters out I fattened them up with an audio editor, lovely.

Only trouble is, while looking for Mr Ekman’s contact details, I bumped into a musical programming language called Csound that enables you to script every aspect of audio synthesis. Just the sort of thing I needed at the start of this project. Well, I simply don’t have time to learn it now, so I’ll have to leave it until my next multimedia extravaganza!

Flyrworks!

These are the trails described by the flock of starlings that gather their forces in the centre of Swansea early every evening. Who needs fireworks?

Most of us will at least lean out of the window to watch fireworks, but no-one seems to give these amazing birds a second glance. Generating the audio for this sequence was one of the toughest challenges yet, with three minutes of tracking up to 807 birds at a time. At last count it required the generation of over a million sine wave events (1,010,357 if you must know). I had to compute it in two halves as my 2Gb got eaten up in no time. The final comp wasn’t quite snappy enough, so I multiplied the half-speed HD footage by four to produce a motion that was double real-life speed. To contrast, I regenerated my favourite section at half-speed as an alternate version I will drop-in to the final cut.

Also, I’ve decided to order a sound card as my on-board sound sucks donkeys, not quite what you’d expect for £1500 machine. I’d always noticed that my mp3 collection played with frequent little clicks and skips, but the worst bit is when I try to edit audio. The timeline skips and jumps all over the shop, making it almost impossible to do any precise operations. I’ll soon be working on transitions and fine details for ‘Wingbeats’ and I’ll need all the precision I can get.

Fantastic Flapping Font

Well, this one had been bugging me for ages, almost to the point of me abandoning it in fear of it taking so long that I’d run out of time to complete the project.

You see, I had this dumb idea of having the title made out of birds. Of course, this alone would’ve been too easy, so I decided that they would have to fly into position, hold still to be read as letters, and then gracefully fly apart again, all without looking corny or mechanical.

While many of you may have been mangling birds on the Christmas dinner table (yuk!), I was busy attempting it on my PC, and it wasn’t easy I can tell you! I started by going through 8,000 frames of seagulls fighting over crumbs in Brynmill Park. I eventually got all the letters I needed, but when I checked the lead-in and lead-out times of each bird I had to abandon them. Hungry gulls will contort themselves into amazing shapes for a discarded kebab, but only stay in shot for a second at a time. I tried pigeons too, and starlings, which hurl themselves around like bullets, were quite out of the question.

Then I go back through my old footage to find half a minute of kestrel on Kilvey Hill, perfect! Flys into position, stays steady and then drifts off gracefully. Once I’d separated out all the shapes I needed to build the letterforms, the rest was easy. Well, okay, it took a few goes, and I had to learn about hierarchical compositing in AE, but it was worth all the brainbleeding, really.

Long Time no E

Well, it’s been a while since my last post, so here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to.

As I’ve hit the halfway point of the ‘Wingbeats’ Project I though it would be sensible to touch base with my local support network to check that everything’s in place for the project’s completion. I’ve confirmed with David Woolley at the Dylan Thomas Centre that I’m booked in for next March, probably just for display of the canvasses. After scanning the Spring 2006 flyer from the Grand Theatre flyer (without my name in) I got back in touch with Ray Foulston. He apologised that he’d been on extended sick leave and had gotten out of sync with the Arts Wing bookings. He suggested that September was the first full month available, and would be a nice time of year for a show as people might be scouting for early Xmas presents. I asked if there was were any floorplans of the Arts Wing as an aid to visualising the layout. He admitted that there weren’t any, and that they’d be useful so I hung around with my clipboard for a couple of hours and measured the place up with a Leica Disto borrowed from work. Being a Senior CAD technician in a survey office sometimes has its advantages.

With the lack of usable daylight outside my working hours I was getting a little edgy that I couldn’t get as many shots as I’d have liked. Bearing in mind that the project is only halfway through, and that the video part wouldn’t have to be complete until the official completion date of April 21st, my initial panic has since subsided. There’s loads of work to do, mainly technical brain-bleeding type stuff, but I probably have enough footage already (about 18 hours so far) so things aren’t really so bad.

It’s also surprising what you can uncover in your own backyard. Work colleagues were telling me about a couple of sites where spectacular flocking regularly take place, but without a car it’s not so easy to get to these remote places, least of all at the crucial hours of dawn and dusk. After observing the starling colony in the centre of town for a few days and working out the timing of their movements I have got some pretty astounding video. The sight of these birds breaking from a high altitude amoeboid pattern and firing themselves like winged bullets into their ivy bush base camp is truly a wonder to behold. It’s for this reason that I now choose to call these birds startlings.

To think that I could be living only two minutes walk from such an amazing thing is even more incredible.

Planet Kilvey

Nearly 20 years in Swansea, and this was the first time I’d ever ventured up the hill. Actually, I once got ridiculously drunk at a Samba Band party at the top of Morris Lane and crawled all the way home on all fours, but that doesn’t really count.

My original aim was to photograph the TV transmitter mast at the top, so I could add it to my library of beautifully ugly man-made structures for my birds to ‘play’. There are actually three masts surrounded by radio dishes and a security fence, nice. An interesting space, quite removed from the bustling metrolopus below, save the odd scrambler and dog-walker. As well as filming the masts, I actually had the good fortune to witness a kestrel hovering around looking for lunch.

The weather turned sour at 4:00, so I packed up and made my way back into town to check my footage over a coffee.

The Watercalls

Despite Angharad and Gareth’s assertions on the 16th that Aberdare Mountain was just a training run compared to Ystradfellte, today went like a dream, in every respect. The wellies I got from Tenby yesterday behaved themselves all day and allowed a degree of freedom that made the walk extraordinary, particularly when traversing waterfalls.

Thanks to Nigel’s driving we had a head start and it seemed only minutes before we were enjoying the spectacular, snow-dappled scenery of Sgwd yr Eira. The energy of the place was quite overwhelming and it took an extra degree of concentration to stay focused. The second series of falls we found were even more beautiful than the first, the river looked as though it had been snapped lengthwise rather than broken across its width. I tried to get a particularly breathtaking shot from the top of one of the falls, but was somehow told that my breath was not the only thing that would’ve been taken had I attempted it.

Some things are just better left where they belong.

Tenby Low Zero

“You can’t go to Tenby this weekend, not in this snow!”

Well, yes we did. We got there Friday to find the place blanketed in frozen slush and almost devoid of life. We were so relieved to find Val’s Cafe open that we just dived in without a second thought to fill up on scampi, chips and peas. The proprietor informed us that the last time it snowed in Tenby was 1981, almost a quarter of a century ago. “Lucky old us!”, we thought as we crunched, slipped and skidded our way to the hotel with our heavy bags.

Our accommodation wasn’t quite what we expected, so I went out that night to look for somewhere else to spend our second night. Our dingy room in the ‘Earlygrave Hotel’ had a tiny rear-facing window, grotty 1950’s decoration and an overwhelming sense of unease about it. To step into St.Agatha’s the next day was like entering another world.

Got a reasonable bit of footage, a couple of stunning dawn shots over the bay (courtesy of new gloves and wellies), and an extraordinary bit of flocking Saturday evening as a nature-loving local lady completely ignored the warning notices. Bless.

Flares are cool

Lens flares anyway!

Had another breakthrough this evening, namely that of managing to drive After Effects directly from the output of my tracker program. Motionscript (.jsx) is a bit like Javascript and allows you to automate virtually any operation in AE. It’s a bit tricky at first, but it can cut hours of mousework from composing time, and build outrageous comp’s that you’d never attempt by hand.

It’s a bit rough in terms of memory handling at the moment, but the sync is perfect and it paves the way for some potentially mindboggling visuals. Here’s a test shot of my favourite group of pigeons with lens flares twinkling as each bird crosses the wire, lovely.

Birds are Rubbish!

..were the words I muttered under my breath while visiting the Wetlands and Wildfoul Trust Centre in Llanelli this afternoon.

It was my first visit, and for the first three hours, I was not mightily impressed.

The birds that were socialised enough to stick around were rather lazy and would sooner peck your ankles than show you their aerobatic skills. The flyers, on the other hand, were so wild that they would flit into the distance as soon as you got within a hundred metres of them! I visited a few hides (some signs to link them to the visitor’s map would be nice guys!) though didn’t stay too long as some were crammed with twitchers, only one rung up the evolutionary ladder from train-spotters in my opinion.

At 3:30pm I was about to pack up when one of the keepers appeared with a trolley filled with huge buckets of birdseed. Obviously, things improved somewhat from there on!

Birds In -> MIDI Out

Hoorah! Got my head ’round the MIDI synchronising bit at last. Should be ashamed of myself really, it ain’t rocket science.

The trick is to generate your midifile to run at 187.5BPM, so that the timing of each 32nd note corresponds to a frame of PAL @ 25fps. This is an easy enough tempo to work with on most sequencers, and also allows for splitting into 64th notes if I’m tracking my ‘players’ with the high-speed video technique. I was going to try using SMPTE codes in my tracker output so I could nail notes events to specific video timings, but honestly, the 187.5BPM thing works like a dream.

Also, popped in on the Natural Living Show at the Dragon Hotel, mainly to keep my Girlfriend company (these Mind Body Spirit things aren’t really my cup o’ tea) and say ‘Hi’ to Angharad who had a stall there. She very generously allowed me to put a few of my TimeStream cards there, alongside her Aqua Healing DVD and some very nice cards and prints made by her friend.

The Butterfly Effect

I’m usually okay with what people like to call ‘coincidence’. I usually shrug it off as just another by-product of the collective (un)consciousness, where an interpersonal exchange gets repeated or mirrored after a relatively short time interval.

I do find it odd, however, when co-incidence, to give it it’s proper name, manifests itself in the impersonal, material world. Today, for example, I left the Newsagents’ with my usual Thursday copy of the Western Mail (jobs day you see), and my eyes flashed upward toward the magazine rack where they fixed their gaze onto the latest copy of New Scientist. I used to read it many years ago when I had an interest in mainstream science, but hadn’t bothered with it since then. This incident was odd enough in itself, but as I approached the steps at my workplace, I caught sight of a red admiral which flitted around me for a few seconds before landing squarely on the crown of my head. I could feel the weight of its tiny body on my hair, and see it in my shadow for about half a minute before I slowly made a move for my rucksack to unpack the camera.

It flew away before I could get a photo, though as I was reaching for my cardkey to open the door, it landed on my head a second time before finally vanishing into the trees.

Schauberger was Right

Well, obviously. Take it away Viktor…

“The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of Life, is water. In every drop of water dwells the Godhead, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the ‘First’ substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates.”
“More energy is encapsulated in every drop of good spring water than an average-sized powerstation is presently able to produce.”

Thirty-six years of city living and I’d never drunk water from a mountain stream. Such a simple thing, but having always unconsciously assumed that drinking water could only ever come from a tap or a bottle, today’s experience on Aberdare mountain was nothing short of revelatory.

Didn’t get to Ystradfellte as there wasn’t really enough time to treat it with the care it deserved, and instead took the tour of ‘The Dare’ with Angharad and Gareth. My new, unbroken boots were absolutely killing me by the time I limped home at 6:30, but what a fantastic day. Only managed to get a few minutes of footage, and probably won’t use any of it for ‘Wingbeats’, but you can’t always capture the energy of a space on film, and energy is everything.

I’ll be headed back to Aberdare on the 28th to tackle Ystradfellte with Nigel from the Retreat. I just hope my ankles have recovered by then.

Everyone Likes Cheese

Even pigeons apparently!

I don’t eat it very often nowadays, but I was completely out of my usual fruit and leaves this lunchtime so I had to get my fill from the local sarnie shop. I didn’t really need to go to Brynmill Park as I’d captured some superb footage there last week, but wandered there anyway as it would be a nice space to sit and munch.

As soon as I’d freed my snack from it’s polythene wrapper the filling leapt out onto the ground and I found myself at the epicentre of a pigeon apocalypse! I haven’t (yet) resorted to bribery to get my bird shots, but I will certainly be making a mental note of the cheese thing if I find myself in need of any serious swarming.

Fresnel Fish

At last, I managed to get back to Plantasia and re-take my favourite ‘Flatland’ shot in glorious High-Definition.

Only trouble is, my 256 greyscale masks to control the time-depth are too low a resolution to produce a smooth shear with a full frame of 1080i. I need more shades of grey, but don’t know how as I’m only used to working with 24bit images in VB.Net. You can see what I mean here in the close-up below.

Despite the fresnel effect, it looks pretty mindblowing after being passed through a bit of fake camera shake and panning/zooming in After Effects. Takes it from being just another visual effect into the realm of a convincing scientific anomaly. I don’t just want people to see it and think, “Oh, that’s pretty, how did he do that?”, but rather, “What the hell was going on in front of that camera!”.

Anyway, it was great to see Plantasia again, and a big ‘thank you’ to Diane for letting me in for free!

The High-Speed Video Trick

Well, being back at work means that things have slowed down considerably project-wise. Now I have to focus on my remaining core challenges, and figure out a way of getting quality footage in the little bit of daylight left now that the nights are drawing in.

I had tinkered with the idea of splitting HDV into odd and even fields and resizing them to produce double-speed footage at full (almost) DV resolution. I say almost ’cause a single field of 1080i obviously leaves us with a vertical resolution of 540, 36 scanlines short of a full PAL frame.

Last time I tried it, I forgot about the half-scanline shift and ended up with an annoying vertical jitter that I just couldn’t work out. Today I stumbled across the Field Bob filter in VirtualDub, and after a bit of tinkering came up with a recipe that allows you to turn 25fps HDV into 50fps DV. Here’s my VirtualDub recipe:-

• Deinterlace ‘Discard Field 1′
• Field Bob, both fields set to ‘Quarter Scanline Up’
• Resize to 720*576, using ‘Bicubic’
• Save image sequence, prefixed ‘Odd’
• Bulk Rename images to 1, 3, 5, etc.

• Deinterlace ‘Discard Field 2′
• Field Bob, both fields set to ‘Quarter Scanline Down’
• Resize to 720*576, using ‘Bicubic’
• Save image sequence, prefixed ‘Even’
• Bulk Rename images to 2, 4, 6, etc.

Compile frames with TmpegEnc (or back into VirtualDub), and Bob’s your filter!

I Need Me Some Boots

Met an interesting couple today (Angharad and Gareth Llewellyn) who had produced a video filmed entirely at an extraordinary looking place called Ystradfellte. They had been ‘guided’ there to film on certain days, and while I’m no hippy, I must say that even simply watching their film ‘Aqua Healing’ left me feeling deeply energised and refreshed. I really felt like I’d been somewhere. After sharing a few ideas, we agreed to meet there on the 16th so I could check the place out and maybe capture some HD footage.

There was one shot in the film that got me particularly excited from a musical point of view. There was a stunning segment filmed across the surface of the river as it started to rain. Apart from my fascination with ripples and waves, the way that the rain produced tiny flashes on the river made me think that it would produce an excellent piano-like piece fed through my software.

All I need now is a pair of walking boots.

Always a Newbie

It’s been long overdue, but today I actually think I almost understand this blogging business.

In the original project proposal I wrote for ‘Wingbeats’ many months ago, I thought it would be pretty nifty if I could have an online journal of my progress. Partly so that the Arts Council could keep an eye on me and check that I wasn’t having (too much) fun with their Grant money, partly ’cause blogs seem to be the current ‘in-thing’, and partly I hadn’t the faintest clue how to produce one and might have a bit of fun working it all out.

Having half an eye on this over the last month or so, I became aware of a free, ready-made, off-the-shelf system called ‘Wordpress’. No matter how many times I poured over the FAQs, it all looked far too complicated for someone like me. I like simple, point and click. At least for the first couple of minutes, then I quickly find myself moaning that it won’t do this or that, or just looks cheap.

Having been on such a roll with my coding over the last few days, I thought to myself, “Thomas. You simply have to get this done. Now”. So I downloaded it, followed the step-by-step instructions, and failed miserably.

No, it was alright you know. I had to ask my webspace provider about the settings for my wp-config.php, but that’s about as taxing as it got. Within a few minutes of getting it running I found myself tweaking the .css, and I’m total newb.

Beyond the 5th Dimension

Well, just ’cause I write the programs, it doesn’t mean I really understand what they produce.

Today I managed something that I dreamed of when I was making ‘Flatland’, namely being able to manipulate my time-masks dynamically.

Perhaps I should simplify this for those who haven’t yet taken a look at the explanations and video clips of the process I call TimeShear.

Basically, when you watch TV or film, you can safely assume that every part of the image is happening at the same time, right? Another way of describing this would be to say that normally the plane of time is flat. My TimeShear technique allows me to twist this temporal plane so that it is no longer parallel to the visual plane, a bit like partially opening a greetings card. This particular example would result in the video images nearer the ‘fold’ on the left-hand side showing in realtime, and those on the right-hand side displaying the future.

If that weren’t enough, I went on to mould and sculpt the temporal plane using greyscale ‘maps’ to define the depth of time for any given part of the image. Previously I’ve (rather pretentiously) called this ‘Advanced TimeShear Modelling’, but it’s really quite simple. Video goes in one slot, and in the other is loaded a still monochrome image where the dark areas define past events and the light defines the future.

Still with us?

So the trick I did today was to not only have a still image controlling the depth of time across the video, but actually use more video. I’m no scientist, but I’d say that such a trick would be like temporily sending the viewer into a virtual 6th dimension. The results do look pretty mindboggling from the nonsense shots I’ve processed so far, and I hope to use at least some 6D footage in the final cut of ‘Wingbeats’.

Tweaks for Beaks

Today I streamlined my audio process by one stage by removing the targeting routines and going directly from deltas to tone clusters. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for a sheer processing speed, robustness, and the variety of sources it’ll handle.

Okay, it’s only sine wave clusters at the moment, but gimme a few days and I’ll get the MIDI worked out too. I’ve been wanting to turn that Sail Bridge into a harp for ages!

Meanwhile, putting next door’s cat through my audio mangle may not be to everyone’s musical taste, but try anything once eh?

Mission Control, We Have Audio

Whoa, enough programming already!

What an extraordinary result though. After all the troubles I had at the start of this project I now have 95% of my software re-written, running faster than ever before (no more overnight rendering extravaganzas to squeeze out a few measly seconds of video) and I’ve managed to figure out the audio bit.

That’s right. Birds in one end, music out the other.

In fact, I can shove whatever I like into it. Apart from testing it with flocks of gulls, pigeons and starlings my favourite shot so far is of a cluster of mosquitoes near the Sail Bridge in the Marina. The way that the program accurately assigns a pitch (and stereo position) to each insect, regardless of the frenzied aerobatics, is an absolute joy to behold. If there was a single shot that had to be included in the final cut of ‘Wingbeats’ then this would be it.

Flying Fluey

What is it about influenza and programming breakthroughs, or is it just me?

I had it back in January while I was writing a program to interlace images ready for lenticular lenses for 3D (you know, those pictures with the ridgy plastic coating that change image as you tilt them). Well, after three days of rolling around on the sofa, sweating and hallucinating, I suddenly found myself dropping the lenticular thing and writing routines that would warp space-time instead. This is how I got started on the ‘Flatland’ film.

Well, this time I didn’t have the dubious pleasure of the hallucinations, and had to endure a fortnight of feeling desperately exhausted and drowning in snot.

As I started to recover I stumbled across an article by VB graphics guru Rod Stephens who suggested on his excellent site that dumping bitmap data to an array, doing your manipulation on it, and copying it back into the bitmap was at least ten times faster than using Getpixel and Setpixel.

I patched this into one of my simpler routines (an image stacker) and the thing positively flew along, and without any yucky memory leaks to worry about. If I can incorporate this method into my other TimeStream programs I’ll be ecs-blinkin-static.

Cards on Sale in Exposure

Had a call today from Julia Rowe at Exposure Gallery, to tell me that she liked my cards and was going to display them for sale.

Nice to know, though I can’t wait to get some HD shots together for a 2006 Calendar. Not long now, I’ll need to get my skates on.

We Have the Power, Apparently

So I pulled apart my old iiyama 18.1″ LCD to find that there was nothing coming out of the internal power supply unit. I made a note of it’s ins and outs and left it in bits.

During my lunchbreak I had a quick shuftie on eBay to see if there was any such thing as a PSU that kicked out 19V at 4A. Well, whad’ya know! That’s the exact same spec of a typical laptop supply.

Later that night I pulled out my Vaio PSU, hooked it up to the board of my dead monitor (via a couple of bent paperclips) and voila! Oh yes.

It’s Never Just the One

Okay, so yesterday my backup drive goes pop (well, more of a tick).

Today, my old LCD monitor dies!

What’s next, eh?

Softwhere!?

Still trembling from the shock of installing the Reserator (the geeks reckon it’s a five-minute job, they’re havin’ a laugh) I find that my old external hard drive has died. Humph!

I don’t really care about all the personal rubbish I had on there, but lost absolutely oodles of software.

And, don’t ask about backup. That was my backup!

‘Puter Plumbing

Another day like today I could well do without!

I’d met a PC builder a few days ago, so I thought I’d ask him for a hand in getting my pipes done. Nice bloke, though after reducing my pride and joy to a pile of bits on the lounge floor, he announced he had to dash off to a kids party. Ho hum.

Well, I couldn’t just leave it could I?

After a few minutes staring at all the pipes and wires, I just dived in and finished it off. I was so terrified of messing it up, and so careful, that when I finally switched it on, everything just…

worked,

Beautifully.

(Does this make me a ‘modder’ now? Heaven forbid!)

Three Xmas’s Rolled into One

Don’t you just love getting parcels, I know I do. But three at once, delivered to one’s workplace is a little embarrassing.

From eBay, I did mainly get today:-

• One new scanner - My perfectly good Canon D1250U2 took umbrage at XP Service Pack 2, so I had to show it the door.

• A Bigger monitor - Really wanted to see my 1440×1080 HD footage properly, something my old 1280×1024 just couldn’t handle.

• That water thing - Dear God, am I really going to install this? The only ‘modding’ I’ve ever done is add the odd card or CD Drive.

Can you smell the fear?

No More Spin Cycles!

You know, I’ve really had enough of this new machine’s constant droning. Call me a pedant, but when you’re chilling at the ‘puter in the wee small hours, knocking out code to your favourite mp3’s you really don’t want to feel like you’re in the laundrette at rush hour. Having done a few evening’s worth of research on the subject, I have decided to do the sensible thing and pull my brand new machine apart and fill it with… water.

This Zalman Reserator thing looks like complete madness, but all the Geeks love it, and if it means I can hear myself think at the PC I’ll be lovin’ it too.

Bending Cats and Falling Over

Boo! My new machine is pretty awesome really. Throws around HD footage like it was candy. Video encodes now get done in realtime, rather than overnight. So, what’s the problem?

Virtually all of my TimeStream programs, despite having the luxury of 2Gb of RAM to lounge around in are bombing with ‘out of memory’ errors, yikes! I’ll be the first to admit that they were a bit scrappily coded (I’ve only really been doing VB seriously for a few months) and I was hoping that running them on the new machine would solve all my problems, in a half-arsed slapdash kinda way.

Looks like I’ve got some more learning to do.

Did I Order a Tumble Dryer?

…was my first thought when Paul Morgan or Llansamlet’s EasyNet IT delivered my new PC this afternoon. I had no idea a computer could be quite that big. Now what was it that he said in his email of August 3rd…

Hi Thomas

I like the spec mate, we have got up to the 4000 so far, a dual core 4400 would be nice to do.

This unit will need some sort of bolting to the floor as you may find some drag on take off.

Let me know your thoughts

Paul

Well, you were not wrong about the ‘drag on take-off’ bit. This thing is so loud! Seems like what I ordered at least sounds like a tumble dryer after all.

Clunky Beginnings

Okay, I couldn’t wait to get some HD TimeStreams compiled so I’ve bunged a firewire card into my old machine, downloaded a nifty bit of freeware called CAPDVHS and started capturing.

Takes ages to produce the ‘Streams, and I’m still not as confident as I could be with the new camera, but I’m quietly excited at the test shots I did this evening. Being able to take 25 3.0 Megapixel shots a second is quite a thing.

SUN Network Plantasia Party

Well, I never thought I’d see the day when nearly a hundred folks would be watching ‘Flatland’, let alone in the same tropical paradise in which I filmed it.

My thanks go out to Nigel and Hazel at The Retreat for making this possible.

Something Well-Wicked This Way Comes

To throw High-Definition footage around, I’m going to need quite a good machine. Spent a couple of evenings nosing around, looking at advice on HD-ready machines and finally decided on a spec that would fit the bill.

Okay Geeks, here it is…

• ASUS A8NSLi with Athlon64 4400 Dual Core
• 2048MB DDR
• 2 x 160Gb + 1 x 80gb SATA
• FX6800GT

Obviously, this’ll be called pathetic in a month or two!

Got the Camera Today, I Think

When my Girlfriend told me that I had a parcel, I was a little taken aback to find a simple courier’s bag containing a small square box. Okay, the box was emblazoned with Sony logos and lovely photos of the camera I paid for, but the package was so light I was momentarily convinced that Sony had shipped the thing out without checking that it actually contained a camera.

It transpired that the one thing that Sony did actually neglect to include in the box was a DV tape, just in case you wanted to try your shiny new camera out. Just my luck I happened to have one lying around then wasn’t it, grrrr!

The HC1e is actually a bit smaller (and lighter) than my old analogue 8mm camcorder. It really is hard to believe that something so small could be packed with so much loveliness.

Hitting The Wingbeats

At last I can get to use my grant!

Ordered my new camera today from SS Electricals. I was originally looking to get the Sony HDR-FX1, but when the HDR-HC1e was released at about a grand less, I decided that the money left over would be well spent on a new PC. My TimeStream programs run slow enough as it is already, if I started feeding them HD footage (four times the size of my current PAL/Standard Definition images) then my old machine would be stuffed!