The concept that got me started on my Quartz Composer path was based on dancing. What I was hoping to do was create an audio visual patch which would allow the user to manipulate a character's movements. The individual movement would be plain and simple on its own, but, a lot like dancing, a combination of these simple movements create a complex and visually appealing new flow of motion.

Thinking about this further, I would like to offer a different view on how to think of dance. Dance is usually performed in response to music, particularly to a beat. In this project I wanted this trend to be reversed, and instead have the music play in response to movement. This way, only when the correct combination of movements are made will the beat create fluency and rhythm.

The process involved in the creation of this patch started with the recording of a friend in a plain space. The recording involved him making preforming simple single movements. This recording was imported into After Effects where he was removed from the background and the individual movements were rendered in single video files. In Quartz Composer these files were linked to buttons on the keyboard; one button for each movement. Linked to the same buttons were simple sounds. I was able to highlight my friend through a motion tracker, which was given color through a color generator. Videos were imported from Video Pong to be linked to the melody and bass sounds which were given the same motion and color treatment. The result was a colorful environment capable of visual and audible change.

In this article by Andrew Bucksbarg, there is a lot of reference towards the importance of movement and rhythm in VJing and Live A/V, which involves repitition and variations. Here is a summary of his writing.

The first problem that I faced with this project was actually finding the site. Having selected the gym I now needed to find a gym that would let me go in and actually film it. I was hopeful towards my first choice in using the victoria university gym which was quick to decline my request, claiming something along the lines of "its against university policy to have people film inside the buildings". This set me back quite a few days until I managed to find a friend that would let me use their hostel gym (with management's permission of course). The problem with this gym was that it didn't have a boxing bag, so I would have to find yet another site to shoot this part in and hope for the best in editing to make it look as if the two different locations appeared to be shot in the same place... The boxing bag shots were actually done in my friends garage.

The location that I have chosen to work with is the gym. The dictionary describes the gym as “a building or room designed and equipped for indoor sports, exercise, or physical education” (dictionary.com).  But to me, the gym represents an entire range of different uses beyond the obvious; working rigorously to change aspects of your body, for some people to loose weight, for others to gain it. To me the exercise is a form of stress relief, or possibly even meditation, and the gym is where I go to do it.

 

The way in which I intent to present my view of the gym to my audience would be through a narrative that includes a character who is experiencing an extreme amount of stress in his life and has gone to the gym to relieve himself of this stress. The main way in which I intend to display the fact that this character is stressed is by making it obvious that there are all these voices going through his head. Visually, we will be able to see through his expressions that he is thinking distressing thoughts, while audibly, we can here those exact thoughts as they run through his head. Many of these thoughts can be running through the character’s head at the same time, but at different volumes, the most ones that are most distressing having the highest volume.  The more the character works out, the more the thoughts fade away from his mind.

 

The climax in the movie will come at the point where the character is hitting up a boxing bag, where the voices in his head become clearer, and the character is visually more frustrated.  This is where I hope to have my visual effects to play a greater roll as well; working with changes between slow motion and changes in camera angle, along with illustration, particularly when the character hits the boxing bag hard enough to silence his stresses. 

OK, considering the ridiculously poor attempt at a presentation, I feel its important for me to explain my assignment hand in. Seeing as this is my first (and probably the only) post about my project it's best if I start at the beginning. Origionally it was my aim to come up with a 30 sec clip which was more, in a sense happy. The reason behind this was other, having seen some of the previous students work, I felt there was a general unhappy and negative theme in most of them. So I made it my aim to search and download open source media which I felt sent across positive images.

http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/19303

Remix and Remixability by Lev Manovich

What I gathered from Lev’s blog is that he argues that remixing is part of culture. Which is remarkably true, but in many of his examples, for example when “Ancient Rome remixed Ancient Greece”, I would argue is something that you would label as development. Perhaps then it would be safe to argue that remixing is just another word for development, or at least is vital to development. 

I would also like to deliver some negative feedback though. Personally I think Lev could have just left the article at “[we are] endowed with a certain flexibility and modularity which enables collaborative remixability a transformative process in which the information and media we’ve organized and shared can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services.”