ByteMe Festival - Perth
Australia, 2007




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 I arrived in Perth on a sunny but cool day - but that didn't stop the sunbathers and surfers!

 

 

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The Pensioners, where I stayed, was beautiful!

A lovely Victorian with large rooms and fantastic service.

 

 

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 The light in Perth was even more beautiful than in Melbourne.

 

 

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 Everything glowed with it from 6 am onward.



 

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Evenings we spent at the town hall, where the festival was held.

So many different types of presentations and guests.

 

 

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This presentation showcased a program for teaching kids new media tools.

First, the kids watch loosely narrative animated films. Then they mash them up and make new stories, using tools on the PC or Mac.

The first film in this series of teaching tools, 'Caravan', was incredibly moving. It essentially told the story of a couple who are freed from the sadness and lethargy of old age by being weightless in space. There were so many touching moments in it, specifically related to age and romance, fun and play.  I would love to work on something that touched on these themes, and thought about it most of the following day while I was exploring Rottnest Island.

The other thing I kept thinking about was how something pretty abstract is a great teaching tool for kids. You let them watch first, then kind of edit as they would like - it gives them a frame of reference, but also lets them push the boundaries of the setting and characters. It was actually a great talk and I wondered if anyone does this stuff in the US.

 

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Then it was time for Sue Erokan's presentation about the basic production pipeline for animated films at Dreamworks. She focused on Shrek 3, and was mobbed with questions afterwards!

Smallest of small worlds: she lives about 5 minutes from my place in San Francisco.

 

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Storyboard

 

Pre-Vis

Rigging

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Rough Pass

 

Texturing Effects

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Compositing

 

Lighting  Polish

 

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Ta Da! One frame of final animation!

 

 

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After the talks were done, we had a VJ event - somethign I had never attended.

All these live cinema artists met up in the hall and projected images to a live mix of music.

 

 

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The featured perfomers had developed their own tech for managing and processing clips and sounds....

So at the show, people were mingling and checking out each other's gear.

 

 

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Chris's collection of tools/environments for performing live was super cool.

Because he's a game developer, it was easy to talk to him about the concepts and compare them with my own work.

 

 

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Robot Kid (of Harmonix) introduced me Todd just before the visit, over Facebook. Todd is based in Istambul, in part, by way of LA.

We area living in the future, I tell you!

 

 

 

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Each VJ has a style - a collection of sound, images and tech that they are working with, repeatedly, to create a meaning for themselves.

 

 

 

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Some of the VJS were very pop, others, narrative - some almost Brechtian.

 

 

 

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Mia, who goes by Solu, was the last to perform. 

Her visuals spoke to me in a deep and moving way - particularly because I was travelling alone, far from home.

 

 

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One can't really capture this stuff with a still camera...

 

 

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Ephemeral graffiti like dreams.

Thought.

 

 

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The images moved from scenes of winter, people walking in a monochrome field... to waves of landscape and motion. First abstracted, the video eventually resolved into a choreographed martial arts scene - a dance. The fabric of their uniforms made them into whirling dervishes, or birds.

 

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As the sounds moved from sparse electronica to a man speaking French (deep things, from the sound of it) the images distorted to fields of snow, faces emerging and then disappearing in pixels. By the end, there was only voice, hypnotic and sad.

It was quite stunning.

Everywhere you go, once you see something like this, you think about how what you see can be used in this way. It has an immediate impact on one's perception of digital images.. everything seems like it might be part of a live performance.

In a way, I suppose it is.