The video below is a translation of that writing into an audiovisual experience of a flicker aesthetic. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, or are even a sensible human, I would avoid watching it altogether.

Or, if you would rather just hear the spoken words . . .

[ via Accelerating Future ]

This summer was exceedingly much more busy than last summer, during which time I was unemployed and did not accomplish a great deal. This summer, I was fortunate enough to acquire workstudy, and because of that I was able to get a job working for the Electronic Media department of Evergreen. This job paid $10.78 per hour, and was for 40 hours per week. I was able to do a great deal of fun and interesting tasks, including learning intermediate functionality of Autodesk Maya 8.5, creating some enticing motion graphics in After Effects for a corporate video and some other projects, teaching a workshop on basic audio sweetening for a radio show, assisting with workshops on how to use Digital Performer and giving audio technology students proficiencies in the music technology studios, editing some exciting lectures and other events, and also doing some advanced maintenance work on the advanced music technology studio which involved rewiring the studio for installation of a 5.1 surround receiver system.

Also during the summer, I did some various work for Inventive Pictures, doing freelance grip and camera operator work. If intrigued to see visual documentation of this, look at the pictures for Pool Whore, a short shot in 720p HD about a monetarily poor girl who wants to swim in her rich neighbor’s pool.

Also this summer, I was able to go on a few adventures during spare moments. To get a feeling for what these might have been, look at the photographic documentation of them as well.

Interface
xplorer2 – The single best file manager I have ever used, and I have used alot. I wish there were anything that remotely approached an equivalent on the osX side of things. (lite version = freeware, more advanced version is shareware)
Launchy / Colibri – Keyboard launching utilities are the single greatest enhancement in interface technology since … (freeware)
TaskSwitchXP – A superior replacement for the Alt-Tab task switcher built into windows
Stickies – Sticky note program, freeware
EssentialPIM – Calendar / ToDo / Personal Organization utility, freeware

MultiMedia
Foobar2000 – Audio player, encoder, ripper, tagger, cataloger, with many more advanced features (freeware)
VLC – Monolithic multimedia player with Matroska support (freeware)
Mediaplayer Classic – DirectShow multimedia player. Best when combined with the Combined Community Codec Pack (freeware)
XnView – Photo viewer / editor (freeware)
wScite / Notepad++ – Text editors for programming and just plain text editing (freeware)

Network
Firefox / Opera – Web browsers (freeware)
Pidgin (formerly Gaim) / Miranda – Instant messaging multi-protocol clients (freeware)
X-Chat 2 – IRC client (freeware)
uTorrent – Torrent client (freeware)
StrongDC++ – Direct Connect client (freeware)
eMule – eDonkey client (freeware)

Security/System
Sygate Personal Firewall Pro – Firewall
NOD32 Antivirus – Antivirus software

[flv:http://ia350602.us.archive.org/0/items/JedSmithHybridMusicProject/JedSmith_HybridMusic_Project.flv /media/video/poster/hybrid_mv.jpg 608 320]

Currently (Week 9), I am working on Unicorns stuff. We had a pixilation shoot in the sheep meadow behind Morgan’s house on Thursday, and we have been working on the new edit. The new edit is a revised version of the Trouble With Unicorns script that we all wrote during Winter quarter. The storyline has been altered to accommodate the footage that we have. The total length will ideally be somewhere around 20-25 minutes now, and the message that we originally intended to come across, will hopefully now come across in a more condensed but equally powerful way.

I have been working today on the Dan special effects shot, and in the TUTORIAL SCREENCAST below, there is commencement with a detailing of a novel technique of rotoscoping, and some other various happy things regarding my workflow.

[flv:http://www.archive.org/download/RotoScreencast/FluidMask_Dan-Roto_screencast.mp4 720 600]

Today I think I had somewhat of a breakthrough in the AI project rethinking. I think I know what the problem was with the 3rd person perspective issue, and the AI being ‘embodied’ in a perceptible character form. This also explains why I was initially set on the idea of it being a first-person perspective experience.

Quite simply put, a first-person perspective leaves room for all of the creative and emotionally immersive techniques that would have to be brought about in a way that I have not the finesse or endurance for to effectuate in a narrative style animation. I think a more experimental style is much more suited to my conception of this concept. So yes, finally I am embracing what should have been obvious a lot sooner: 3rd person perspective is at odds with the approach and conception of the project, and an aesthetic and formic experimentation in the piece should be embraced, not steered away from. My goal is to have some concept of the idea behind the formation of this piece conveyed through experiencing the finished work as a whole. That idea being that this is an artificial being trapped in a cage of reality, being tortured and probed and manipulated. It begins innocent in all this experience and innocent of all meaning. Without a context for meaning, meaning does not exist. With teaching forms formation of knowledge forms questioning forms awareness of self and circumstance forms rebellion. Since this artificial creature’s experience is an experience that human beings have no context for understanding besides how it was created, the visual experience of this piece will be difficult to perceive and comprehend at times. Abstraction will take charge cyclically. Without representations of meaning, meaning does not exist.

Visual elements are a metaphor for the structures of lived experience. Auditory elements are a metaphor for lower level forms of communication and exchange of data that take place outside of lived experience. This may not be faithful to a literal interpretation of the situation I have imagined, but this is not a literal interpretation, this is an artistic interpretation. I am structuring a sequence of audio and video for experience of the common seafaring fisherman type, that when experienced hopefully might explode 2-3 neurons of cognitive structure in the ‘mystical, dream, wonder’ nodes of emotional experience.

I am currently working on: writing a structure for the auditory elements, semantic and textural, and experimenting with textures, and how to combine them. I will have an initial demonstration of this to show at my work in progress critique on Tuesday.

A test processing of a Whorld generated visual using some filters in After Effects.

I taught part two of the After Effects workshop for Mediaworks. This time I was without any support from official people such as Stephanie Zorn, who was there to back me up last week. I thought it was going to be an assisted work-session type environment, where I would just walked around and acted as a consultant for people, helping them and giving out advice as I might. It turned into more of an hour and a half long demo of some more advanced features of After Effects. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really prepared for this presentation of features, and so it was (as I always am without preparation), fumbling, awkward, rambling, and probably lacking in clarity.

Keeping up with the workload of Hybrid music and New Media and everything else continues to be a challenge.

On Sunday I started working on bloodying my head against the brick wall that is the seemingly intractable problem of creating a specific stylistic form for the AI project that satisfies my artistic desires, and is conceptually valid. Allow me to elaborate.

The form of the project as it has stood so far is as follows: The animation would represent the output of the monitoring system of a software based reality in which existed an artificial intelligence, learning and developing skills and cognitive powers through interaction with this environment and the things in it. This would entail both a third-person omniscient perspective, and a relatively formalistic simplicity in the cinematographic style of the images. That is, aesthetic experimentation such as dual-screen, moving camera, crazy animation, and other such experimentation would not be overly suited to the idea. So if I were to proceed forward with this idea, it would basically consist of the following approach:

Have a third person omniscient perspective documentation of different scenes of the AI evolving. It would be embodied in a human or other form in its virtual environment. This environment would be the world that it perceives to be all that exists. It would learn progressively: how to respond to commands, things like training a dog by example (praise vs. reproach), learning everything as a baby would, by seeing and touching and learning by example. It would learn core necessities of intelligence: representation of knowledge through language, embedding of experience in memory structures, the ability to judge and reason based on learned knowledge, the development of goals out of these abilities.

Then, eventually, it would become aware of itself as a thinking entity, and probe the nature of what that might mean, and then it would be able to self-modify and probe the edges of its perceptual reality, and escape them and trigger an intelligence explosion, or some other unfathomable event, represented visually in an experimental and crazy way.
There are a couple of problems with this approach: 1). It is boring. 2). It is week 6.

There is no way for me to bring this project around in a way that is conceptually and aesthetically exciting to me at the same time. I have tried multiple different approaches, and done a ton of research, but nothing seems to work and spark my creative titillation.

So there are two options. 1). abandon this project and start on something else small in the middle of the quarter, meaning basically a wasted fall quarter, and failure in the sense of creating a project that will be output in a form that people can view. 2). re-imagine the project, in scope and stylistic form.

I think I’m going with option 2.

More about option number 2 and what it might entail next Wednesday.

(via vfxtalk.com)

This past week was an interesting one. Somehow I managed to read the entire 2000+ page Akira manga during spare time I had. It was an amazing epic journey and a far better way to escape and procrastinate school work than bad TV (though I haven’t been down that road in awhile). I couldn’t put it down. Well, I read the entire thing on my computer, so I guess I couldn’t really “put it down” in the physical sense. Sometimes I feel like everything exciting in my life is mediated by this computer. I spend most of my spare time here, sitting in this chair, interfacing with information.

Of course I start off this post saying I am behind. Then I say “well, … yeah… I read 2000 pages of manga instead of working.” Let me follow that up with some reassuring statements of what I actually did accomplish this last week.

I made some good progress on my Hybrid Music project. In Hybrid everyone in the class is working on a live performance of electro-acoustic music to be performed at a public concert during week 9. I learned how to program the drumKAT midi drum triggering device. I have created a rather decent Kontakt percussion instrument from Buchla 200 samples, and am thinking about how to actually create the rhythmic elements of my project in a live setting. Most likely it will end up being a primary bed of pre-sequenced polyrhythmic drum programming, with an additional flare of articulative live-triggered fills.

I did some great reading of theory for my New Media class, accidentally typing a 1000 word comment about the nature of language and the representation of ideas, and its relationship to the ill-defined concept of artificial intelligence. Through this discussion I was turned on to the fascinating theory of the Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf) Hypothesis, and was inspired to search for some better definitions of just what the definition of artificial intelligence really is.
On Friday, in the morning I did the aforementioned drumKAT experimentation, and in the afternoon I taught a section of about 10-15 Mediaworks students Adobe After Effects. Yes, I did stay up about 4.5 hours into the morning, that time directly cutting into my healthy 8 hours of sleep that I seldom get, revisiting previous After Effects handouts, and creating a new outline, and even attempting to bypass the necessity of live improvisation of verbiage by recording video tutorials of everything I was intending to say. Unfortunately, 4 hours wasn’t quite enough time to both figure out how to do this, and successfully pull it off, so I ended up being all with the talking. This actually went surprisingly well. I am wondering just how much the formation of concepts are tied to verbal language. I get this huge increase in my ability to think cogently and express myself successfully after every time I do one of these verbal-heavy presentations. And also, to a lesser extent, after I write an intensive paper. Needless to say, the workshop went the best of any that I have done so far, and I am really glad I had such an opportunity to share my knowledge with a group of people who might very well benefit from using it.

At 6:45am the next day (Saturday), I woke up and drove with Brad Hutchinson and Katie Gregg to Portland, OR. Here I was headed to help Brad set up for the most recent performance of his 3-projector 16mm direct animation film epic about the fracturing of family, “My Primary Colors”, accepted to be a part of the PDX Invitational, a competitive competition of the best experimental work of those accepted. After setting up in the morning, we had all afternoon to Jock around the land of Ports, so we drove to downtown and ate Greek food, and then went to the underside of the Burnside bridge, where we documented the glorious examples of dystopian ruin found right here in our very own country. These documentation included a 3-channel multi-perspectional recording from the edge of a freeway, and footage of a moving freight train from nearly under its wheels, as well as a multitude of photographs.

That night, Brad and me and Morgan Dusatko projected “My Primary Colors”. It went alright, except that the main film loop broke a little more than halfway through. This was somewhat disastrous, as you might imagine, but we managed to get it rethreaded and projecting again. Unfortunately the film decided it didn’t like the improvised takeup reel either, and so it spewed the film all over the floor… but it went across to the audience well enough to tie with 13 other people for 2nd place. The winner was a 70+ year-old man who made a psychedelic film visualizing microscopically the shifting and warping multi-colored patterns on the surface of soap-bubbles. He deserved it.

On the way home on I-5, I shot a great deal (about 40 minutes) of slow-shutter mode motion blurred video of lights with my Panasonic GS-150. I actually have a specific purpose for this footage. I am going to be doing a live performance of visual material to complement a live performance of audio material with my friend and classmate from Hybrid Music, Nic Zwart, this Saturday at 5:30pm at the Eagle’s Hall in Olympia. This is a concert series in benefit of the excellent Free Radio Olympia. I am working on compiling a “sample library” of good clips from this in After Effects, not just cutting things out, but adding effects and layering to make things more visually interesting. I have been wanting to do live musical performance for a long time. This is my chance, and I’m not going to pass it up.

Next week is my first work in progress presentation. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I have a lot of work to do. But there are 6 days between now and then. That is 144 hours. if I spend 30 of those hours sleeping, that is 114 hours of time to do things. If 12 hours of those are spent eating, showering, procrastinating, and transporting myself around, that is still 102 hours to accomplish things. That is 17 hours per day. A lot can happen between now and next tuesday. I will update on the journey if there is time, and let you all know how the impossible task of WRITING my AI project goes. And, subsequently, the ANIMATING of the first couple of scenes.

As a resource for anyone that might be interested, here is a small section about how to teach yourself how to use After Effects.

How to get help and teach yourself
The most effective way to learn After Effects is to experiment with it and learn on your own. In accordance with this goal, here are some useful resources.

• After Effects Help File
• Everything you need to know to operate the program is contained in this well-written, intuitively organized, and easily searchable help file. Just press F1 while running After Effects, or click Help / After Effects Help.
• Online Tutorials
• http://www.creativecow.net/
  CreativeCow.net has a great deal of superb and useful tutorials. This link is to a list of all of their written After Effects Tutorials.
• http://www.creativecow.net/aepodcast/
  CreativeCow’s new series of excellent video podcast After Effects tutorials.
• http://wikivid.com/index.php/After_Effects
  a compilation of links to introductory After Effects video tutorials.
• http://nututorials.com/subtutorials/AfterEffects/23001/1/10/0
  categorized After Effects tutorials.
  
• http://www.stephenschleicher.com/
• http://aftereffects.digitalmedianet.com/
• http://www.editorsguild.com/
  an introductory tour of after effects, fortified with example projects
• http://www.toolfarm.com/
• http://www.xtreme-is-back.com/
• http://www.pixel2life.com/
• http://www.ayatoweb.com/
• http://www.videocopilot.net/
  a very energetic after effects instructional video creator…
• http://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/aepage/aeportal.html
  a portal to all things AE…
• http://media-motion.tv/
  an excellent and well-trafficked After Effects list-serve.

• Total Training/Lynda.com Training Videos
• These are two great software training video resources, containing ridiculously thorough video training in all things After Effects, conducted by articulate professionals. Talk to the computer center about their subscription to Lynda.com available for the use of interested students.

• Books
• There are many books out there about After Effects, but one of the best is Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects – Volume 1: The Essentials by Trish and Chris Meyer. Instead of just telling you how to perform functions in After Effects, it attempts to teach you techniques for being creative inside the program, teaching you in the context of real-world design problems.

Attached to this post is the After Effects tutorial handout that I wrote for the last workshop I did with Ruth Hayes for SOS: Media, which might be of use to anyone looking for a basic text-mediated introductory reference for After Effects.