i may not have been blogging terribly often the last few weeks but that’s because i was making this!  it’s for james annesley’s virtual proximity – the track’s called suburbia.  dig the album here.

the clip was made using a combination of stop motion animation and projection mapping and i put together a little video describing the process.  dig that below.

ch ch check it out.  this may be the last zeal gig for the year plus i’ll be vjing for the black chords so you get some extra zealiness for your dollar.  dig the facebook event.

there’s more to report – new music video, newcastle, tassie, stereosonic.  but that will be in the next post.  adios for now.

i’ve started a new clip for Virtual Proximity – the sax/beats/pixels trio i VJ in.  the new clip uses a combination of stop motion animation and projection mapping.  so far the process has been something like this:

1.) animate thing
2.) project thing onto other thing
3.) capture thing 1 projected on to thing 2 one frame at a time and animate that

the track’s called suburbia and the clip has a big focus on power lines and houses (both large+real and small+paper).  i love the look of power lines and i’ve really been enjoying projecting onto them, making the ceramic insulating doohickies flicker and causing anxiety amongst my neighbors.

And then I made this.  It’s called Archaeopteryx, it’s a MIDI controller designed with VDMX in mind and I think it’s pretty hot.  I’m going to make a run of similar, smaller controllers called The Sleep Crime so if you’d like to get your hands on one shoot me an email.  But for now here’s how this one came into being.

I came across this post by Fake Money detailing building a MIDI controller around a modified Korg Nanokontrol and a USB hub and, having hacked up a qwerty controller in the past, I started scribbling out ideas for my ideal controller.  I’ve always been big on the Livid Ohm 64 but it didn’t have enough knobs for me.  The first idea i scribbled down came out like this.

The required ingredients:

• 2 nanokontrols
• 1 usb qwerty keyboard
• 1 usb hub
• 3 10k linear faders
• 33 10k linear pots and knobs
• 9 toggle switches
• 55 momentary push buttons
• Some sort of case

All up the parts cost about $400 AUD.  The case I scored for free in hard rubbish.  In a past life it was a cutlery box.

I started with the keyboard – keyboards work by having two conductive sheets placed one on the other that lead to a little PCB with a whole stack of terminals.  When a button is pressed two terminals find each other and the keyboard figures out which button you pressed.  In order to make your more awesome push buttons do the same thing it’s a case of tracing the two sheets back to the PCB and figuring out which two terminals are shorted to the desired keypress.  There’s a good run down on how to do that on the ableton forums here.  I ended up with a squid like PCB and a notepad full of gibberish:

Getting stuck into the nanokontrols was a bit tougher.  I followed Fake Money’s guide to dismantling these little things and after a bit of trial and error managed to remove everything I needed to to solder my own pots.  If you’re trying this yourself, this is a good way to dismember the faders:

after a bit of trial, error and almost frying one of the boards, all the pots somehow soldered themselves in place.

drilling…

staining…

wiring up one half of the buttons…

wiring up the other half…

attaching the qwerty squid…

slapping the whole shebang together.  I used a USB hub with a USB B connector to save more soldering and it’s actually a great little hub.

inserting the hyperstrobic eureka shield™ – scientifically designed to lift and separate.

and with the hyperstrobic eureka shield properly installed the whole thing was done.  there were a couple of little bugs found in testing.  just one or two miswired qwerty buttons but with that fixed  Archaeopteryx is ready to scavenge in the jurassic period.

if you’re in melbourne, you can see these plugins in action along with some button pressing, singing and jumping around when i play live at plugnplay next thursday the 28th of april at the kent st cafe, 201 smith st, fitzroy.  i think i’m playing with vdmokstati, jean poole and others… bit short on details at the moment… but it’ll be awesome, i’m sure.  the day after that (friday 29th) i’m playing at the builders arms with time shield, the leafs and sun blindness.  i’ll also supplying visuals for the leafs and sun blindess.  check the fb event!  and the poster:

in other news, the dudes at projuice have thrown up a little write up about me which makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy.  projuice is a media creation showing airing on abc at the moment – it’s really great seeing tutorial style programming making the airways especially since it’s pretty much favorite sort of thing to watch on the interwebs.  that and videos of baby sloths.

in other, other news, i’ve been inspired by this, this and this and have decided to build a midi controller (i’ve undertaken a similar project in the past).  i’ll be using the guts from two korg nanokontrols and a usb qwerty keyboard and it should end up looking a bit like this:

can’t wait.

While you’re at it, check out all things Subsketch.  He makes tremendous stuff.  It is worthy of your attention.

this is going to be the format of the new Zeal live set except expect some acoustic guitar, live sampling and words that sound nice but don’t mean much.

Download: VIZZable Modular VJ plugins for Ableton Live

UPDATE!

These plugins are completely compatible with the amazing V-module suite by Fabrizio Poce. These two projects have now merged to provide a comprehensive suite of video, effects and real-time graphics tools for Live. If you’d like to become involved in testing and developing these plugins please join us in this google group.