Earthcore and Renaissance Festivals

The last couple of weeks we've been trekking around the countryside to outdoor festivals. First one being Renaissance Festival, a 3 day event where we braved some hostile weather to put on a show. We created the weatherproof V-cube - a kind of marquee tent set-up with 3 projectors inside rear projecting on to the walls to be seen from outside.

This was followed by Earthcore, one of the largest dance festivals in Australia. Playing for a few thousand people was definitely worth the 6 hours of driving.

Tetrachroma at Federation Square

Here are some images of my most recent performance. This one was a commission from Federation Square as part of the Urban Screens 08 conference in Melbourne. The brief was to create an audio and visual performance to engage the theme of water (a scarce resource in Melbourne at the moment).

Alongside my colleague, Robert D. Jordan we created a system of MIDI percussion controllers to trigger audio and visual effects across a projection and large LED screen. We also found great use for a fish bowl, playing with egg yolks, olive oil and milk to get strange fluid effects through a live video feed in to our system.

http://www.urbanscreens08.net/usm08-multimedia-program

Boris & Dmitri vs. Fashion Latte

Well it's over half way through my final year degree project which has been in full time production for the last three months. It's a 5 minute animated short and the first time out in production with the animation workflow I researched and put together earlier this year.

The general idea behind it, is to take a standard 3d character animation workflow and add in video and motion capture data to try and inject an organic feeling into the motion. 3d animation has a habit of looking dead and mechanical in it's motion, especially for facial movements.

So far so good. The characters are real bodies on greenscreen, they wear a DIY tracking harness in order to track and replace their heads with 3d heads. As a separate process, the voice artists are filmed with facial track points, which are used to drive the movement of the heads. Finally heads and bodies are combined with 3d environments, camera movements, 2d textures to create the end result.

One big advantage to this technique is that lip synching is automatic from the facial track points, though it did require some fairly tedious scripting in order to build in custom controls to the rig (sliders to scale the relative influence of each track point on the face mesh).

Here are some samples from the work in progress

Pigeon Hole Studios

Late in 2007 when I decided I wanted to lease a monstrous filthy industrial warehouse for studio space I was labelled as ridiculous. Fortunately there were a brave few who shared the dream of being equally ridiculous and 8 months on Pigeon Hole is all 850 sqm. of goodness. For those interested we now have a blog at www.the-pigeon-hole.blogspot.com

Optic CD cover designs

I’ve been playing in the various incarnations of Optic (www.opticband.net) for many years now and our first full length album has just reached its completion. To create the artwork our singer Pia Interlandi did a great job setting up a photo shoot at a local swimming pool and art directing the project. The photographs gave us some fantastic organic and ethereal textures to use in the design.

Credits to

Optic:

Pia Interlandi, Michael Glen, James Dalmau, Peter Agrotis

Photography:

Liisa Triin Vurma and Devika Bilimoria

Multicam Clip Player & Content

A couple of months ago I had the idea of being able to better manipulate time and space within video so we set up a shoot using an array of 10 small cameras roughly forming a semicircle and shot some content of whatever we could get our hands on. This turned out to be flour in water, paper cups, human dancers, a squid in a fishbowl among others. It brought out some really interesting textures which I'll post up when I'm finished working with the data however we do have a custom flash application for delivering the software. At this point it draws on a relatively large library of frames so it's not practical to put the flash file up, but I do have video of it in action which you can find here

for the record this project was developed by
Michael Glen
Kav Singh Brar (special mention for the mega actionscripting)
Robert Jordan

Trenchmouth Records

Trenchmouth Records is a project we managed to get up with the help of funding from the RMIT Arts Union to press a limited edition run of 12" vinyl records containing the most intensecore noise music we can find in Melbourne.

web page here

Channel 31 Promos

Just recently I've had the pleasure of working on some promotional material for Channel 31, The first being a station I.D., created with fellow animator Robert Jordan a few weeks ago and the second being a 45 second opening graphic for the 2008 Antenna Awards (the awards for community television in Australia), which went to nationwide broadcast in May. This shows a segment from the broadcast piece, while the whole project was done in conjunction with John Pedder.

Motion Capture

The bachelor course at RMIT involves a project that spans most of the final year, so a good portion of the start of this year has gone into preproduction and development. As part of the development I've created a system using using a basic form of motion capture to track 3d heads on to video bodies and get facial deformations from live actors. If you're interested I've posted a tutorial on youtube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNn7wBN3xas

First Post

The first post of my blog, in addition this will function as my psuedo website while www.michaelglen.net is reconstructed