In 1985, computer graphics were exotic enough that using them for a TV commercial was the kind of thing you might save for a Super Bowl ad slot, as seen in this short documentary. I would not have guessed that the first significant use of CGI on TV was for an ad illustrating the sexy (?) futuristic appear of _aluminum cans_.
(They fail to mention this in this mini-doc, but the ad studio was clearly lifting the chrome-plated sexy robots imagery of Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama)
Don’t Be a Sucker, a surprisingly (and sadly) relevant 1947 film from the U.S. Department of War about how xenophobia, suppression of minorities, and the obliteration of facts and education can quickly lead a country into ruin.
(I guess this wouldn’t have been made just a few years later, as McCarthyism swung into full gear?)
Another SIGGRAPH, another mind-bending example of video being freed from linear time — Jiamin Bai, Aseem Agarwala, Maneesh Agrawala, and Ravi Ramamoorthi’s Selectively De-Animating Video:
We present a semi-automated technique for selectively de-animating video to remove the large-scale motions of one or more objects so that other motions are easier to see. The user draws strokes to indicate the regions of the video that should be immobilized, and our algorithm warps the video to remove the large-scale motion of these regions while leaving finer-scale, relative motions intact. However, such warps may introduce unnatural motions in previously motionless areas, such as background regions. We therefore use a graph-cut-based optimization to composite the warped video regions with still frames from the input video; we also optionally loop the output in a seamless manner. Our technique enables a number of applications such as clearer motion visualization, simpler creation of artistic cinemagraphs (photos that include looping motions in some regions), and new ways to edit appearance and complicated motion paths in video by manipulating a de-animated representation.
Now that I have a retina display, I want a screensaver that looks as good as this 1963 AT&T microfilm video:
This film was a specific project to define how a particular type of satellite would move through space. Edward E. Zajac made, and narrated, the film, which is considered to be possibly the very first computer graphics film ever. Zajac programmed the calculations in FORTRAN, then used a program written by Zajac’s colleague, Frank Sinden, called ORBIT. The original computations were fed into the computer via punch cards, then the output was printed onto microfilm using the General Dynamics Electronics Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. All computer processing was done on an IBM 7090 or 7094 series computer.
A fun Boston nightly news clip from 1988 on the outbreak of the Morris worm, one of the first Internet-spreading infections that caught mainstream attention. There’s much to love about this clip: the “part-time virus hunter”, the scenes of MIT’s computer labs, the bizarre (but maybe slyly satirical?) footage of the infamous Atari 2600 ET game inserted, um, I guess to, uh, illustrate something computer-y?
GelSight, a high-resolution, portable 3D imaging system from researchers at MIT, basically what looks like a small piece of translucent rubber injected with metal flakes. Watch the video to see some of the microscopic scans they’re able to get using this. I love non-showy SIGGRAPH tech demos like this one.
If you’re a fan of the old Lucasfilm Games (and the kind of video game nerd that likes this sort of weird find…), don’t let your week go by without watching this internal Lucasfilm Games parody video unearthed by Mix n’ Mojo. Shots of Skywalker Ranch, Ron Gilbert, Larry Holland, jokes riffing off of the “Bo Knows” and “Spielvergnügen” (erm, Fahrvergnügen) ads, and even a song sung on the Ranch’s porch about their adventure games. It doesn’t get much more 1990 then this, folks!
(Bonus: watch for the boxed copy of King’s Quest V on the desk at around 8 minutes in — how’d that get in there??)
Music – Blackbird Blackbird “Pure” // http://blackbirdblackbird.bandcamp.com
Skateboarding – Aryeh Kraus
Director: Eli Stonberg // http://elistonberg.com
Executive Producer: Danielle Hinde
Commissioner: Sara Greene
Producer: Josh Fruehling
Director of Photography: Ross Riege
Camera Operator: Hermes Marco
Camera Operator: Ariana Natale
Editor: Eli Stonberg
Asst Editor: Josh Sasson
PA: Jackson Hoose
Produced by Doomsday Entertainment // http://www.doomsdayent.com
In Association with The Masses // http://www.wearethemasses.com
Thanks to The Idealists // http://theidealists.com
Created for Burn // www.burn.com
Extremities: six GoPro cameras attached to the skateboarder’s arms, legs, head, and one mounted underneath the deck (my favorite), combined with a couple of static cameras for context. Between this and the hula hoop video, these little cameras are cranking out some fascinating new perspectives this week.
More from the “things I did not know” file: Paul Rubens’s first widely-seen appearances, years before he hit it big as Pee-Wee Herman, were on the Gong Show.
The behind-the-scenes of one of my favorite Spike Jonze music videos, Pharcyde’s Drop (original video). The group had to learn to rap backwards to create the right lipsync for the effect, so Jonze hired a professional linguist to help transcribe the reversed audio track!
“Tarantella” is a five-minute color, avant-garde short film created by Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer of visual music and electronic art in experimental cinema. With piano accompaniment by Edwin Gershefsky, “Tarantella” features rich reds and blues that Bute uses to signify a lighter mood, while her syncopated spirals, shards, lines and squiggles dance exuberantly to Gershefsky’s modern beat. Bute produced more than a dozen short films between the 1930s and the 1950s and once described herself as a “designer of kinetic abstractions” who sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding with the … rhythmic cadences of music.” Bute’s work influenced many other filmmakers working with abstract animation during the ‘30s and ‘40s, and with experimental electronic imagery in the ‘50s.
Bute’s final piece was an interpretation of Finnegans Wake, one of the very few attempts ever made at staging Joyce’s novel of troubled dreams.
Eyewriter 2.0 + Robot Arm = Livewriter. Combining the FFFFAT Lab’s inspirational Eyewriter project (named this week as one of Time’s top 50 inventions of 2010, and now glasses-free!) with their GML RoboTagger Sharpie Magnum-wielding robot arm, kids were able to try out the eye-tracking graffiti system to print out giant-sized tags of their own names. These projects touch on so many of my favorite areas of interest, so very cool.
Frank Zappa as the mystery guest on What’s My Line. Pretty dry, to be honest, although some might find interest in hearing him go into surprising detail about the video-to-film process used in filming 200 Motels(it was shot and edited in PAL video then upconverted to 35mm, a novel process at the time).
This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world.
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
We’ve collected some of the best images from the project and made a book of them you can buy: http://bit.ly/mfmbook
Read more at the Dentsu London blog:
http://www.dentsulondon.com/blog/2010/09/14/light-painting/
and at the BERG blog:
http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/14/magic-ipad-light-painting/
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
And speaking of the Graffiti Research Lab, if you happen to be in Houston next week, you can see the local chapter demonstrating their laser tagging as part of the MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY event at the Menil.
I can vouch that this works, and it’s pretty straightforward once you manage to grab and build the two or three additional Quartz Composer plugins successfully. I had to fold in a newer version of the ARToolkit libs, and I swapped out the pattern bitmap used to recognize the AR target to match one I already had on hand – the default sample1 and sample2 patterns weren’t working for me for some reason. Apart from that, Quartz Composer’s a lot of fun to use, almost like building eyecandy demos with patch cables and effects pedals, and it’s already on your system if you have Xcode.
BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, one of the best games I’ve played this summer. A hypnotically synaesthetic music platformer, something like an inspired cross between Vib-Ribbon and Michel Gondry’s Star Guitar video. Well worth the few bucks if you’ve got a Wii.
(Seen above is a run of level 1-11 by YouTube user NintenDaan1, the level that I’m currently stuck playing over and over again trying to get all of the bonus gold…)
One great use of YouTube: watching long out-of-print vinyl flexidiscs warble out alternate takes on songs that I’ve been listening to for 20 years. This one is an early disc from They Might Be Giants, with a non-album version of “Everything Right is Wrong Again”.
From Jamie Oliver’s TED talk urging us to teach our children about food, for the sake of ending our chronically poor (and ultimately fatal) eating habits:
For the last 7 years I’ve worked fairly tireless to save lives in my own way. I’m not a doctor. I’m a chef. I don’t have expensive equipment, or medicine. I use information and education.
Sonar by Renaud Hallée. Hypnotic music visualization (keyframe animated rather than generative, though). Reminds me of a cross between a backwards Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and my favorite NASA video of all time, the Huygens Probe Descent Camera.
Ballad of the Skeletons. So good. Allen Ginsberg backed by Paul McCartney and Lenny Kaye on guitar and Philip Glass on keyboard, video by Gus Van Sant. This is the considerably shorter radio edit version of the full 7 minute recording that was one of my favorite CD’s when it was released back in 1996.
We’ve all been exposed to a glut of volcano videos lately, but this one has something I’ve never seen before. If you watch a few seconds in you can see the first of a series of visible shock waves rippling through the cloud of ash. Yikes.
Things I did not know: Tom Waits appeared on an episode of Fernwood 2 Night, playing The Piano Has Been Drinking before begging a couple of bucks off Martin Mull (he was trapped in the fictional town after his tour bus broke down). Crazy.
A Turing Machine. Possibly the nicest assembly I’ve ever seen of 35mm film, servos, motors, and dry erase markers that’s actually capable of demonstrating the foundational theories of computing. A bit slow on the maths, but who’s complaining?
For the March 2010 issue of Boards Magazine, Emily Gobeille and I worked with Nexus Productions to develop an interactive cover experience called Rise and Fall. Here is a little preview of the experience.
You can download the software and the cover from: http://boardsmag.com/RiseAndFall
Update: Found out you can buy a copy of the magzine for $7 by emailing – BoardsCustomerCare@boardsmag.com . You can also download the cover as a pdf from the link above.
The project uses the Ferns library for tracking ( http://cvlab.epfl.ch/software/ferns/index.php ) and the whole project is open source released under the GPL v2.0 . Grab the source code here: http://boardsmag.com/RiseAndFall
Credits:
Digital Directors: Emily Gobeille – http://zanyparade.com Theo Watson – http://theowatson.com
Produced by: Nexus Productions – http://www.nexusproductions.com
Sound Design: MOST Original Soundtracks – http://www.m-ost.nl
Software: Made with openFrameworks – http://openframeworks.cc Using the Ferns library for tracking – http://cvlab.epfl.ch/software/ferns/index.php
Boards Interactive Magazine – Walkthrough. Gorgeous interactive promo piece: you hold up a copy of the magazine (or a reasonable facsimile…) in front of your webcam, and the app responds to and tracks its orientation, letting you navigate through an playful graphic design landscape. I saw a small live demo at SXSWi, and the audience was definitely delighted. Built with openFrameworks and the Ferns object detection library, the app is entirely open sourced, too!
Kottke linked to this time-stitch-stretch video, which is kind of fun to watch. Reminds me of the 1990’s video morphing work done using Elastic Reality, especially Michel Gondry’s video for Björk’s “Joga” (which I think was done with ER…anyone know?)
A circa-1966 industry ad for Leon Maurer’s Animascope process for producing animation on the cheap: animation without drawing and with fewer pesky artists! Similar to but different than rotoscoping, this process used high-contrast photography and actors in contrasty costumes with their skin painted white and contour lines painted on. The performers would then be filmed dancing around under bright light on a black-lined stage, and the resulting photography could be composited onto traditional background plates. Weird, but sort of a primitive version of mocap, and done for the same economical reasons.
(Via Cartoon Brew – for more info on the process, a good place to start might be this comment left by Brew reader Kustom Kool)
Visions of the Amen, a voice-responsive kinetic sculpture by artist Mitchell Chan (demonstrated in this video by soprano Ashleigh Semkiw). The software is written in Processing, the hardware is controlled by the ArtBus interface being developed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kind of like a real-world oscilloscope.
GML (Graffiti Markup Language) drawings from 000000book.com are converted into DXF via a small Processing utility. Motion paths for a robot arm are developed from these DXF files using Rhino and MasterCam. The ABB IRB-4400 series arm is wielding a 2″ Montana Hardcore marker. Developed 11 January 2010 by Golan Levin and Jeremy Ficca in the CMU Digital Fabrication Laboratory (dFAB).
Co-produced by the CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the CMU Digital Fabrication Laboratory, in cooperation with FAT Lab and 000000book.com. For more information please see http://www.flong.com/blog/archives/565.
The GML RoboTagger. Automated calligraphy via the Graffiti Markup Language and an industrial robot arm gripping a giant Sharpie or Montana Hardcore magic marker. Tele-tag.
Michael Vorfeld’s Glühlampenmusik, creating music through the sound of incandescent filaments popping on and off. The percussion of light and electric resistance.
Pretend to be Radiohead with this Instructable guide to 3D light scanning using a projector, camera, and a bit of Processing! This is designed to create the visualization seen in the video above, but you could also use the point data for output on a 3D printer, animation package, etc. Neat.
An AR iPhone simulator for the iPhone, with working controls. I can’t put it any better than this anonymous comment from the MAKE post: “Yo Dawg, i heard you like augmented reality, so we put an iphone in your iphone so you can touch while you touch.”
A Parallel Image, an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller in collaboration with Franz Büchinger, consisting of an array of sensors, 2500 wires, and small light bulbs to make an “electronic camera obscura” for lo-fi video transmission.
FluidPaint: An Interactive Digital Painting System using Real Wet Brushes. An experimental project by Tom Van Laerhoven of the Hasselt University Expertise Centre for Digital Media in Belgium. Unlike previous digital painting applications, this one uses actual water (detected by a surface-level IR emitter) to record strokes on the surface and more correctly models the tip of the brush being used, whether rounded or fanned, and it can even simulate a sponge. Looks like it makes some convincing watercolor-like images.
Magician Marco Tempest demonstrates a portable “magic” augmented reality screen. The system uses a laptop, small projector, a PlayStation Eye camera (presumably with the IR filter popped out?), some IR markers to make the canvas frame corner detection possible, Arduino (?), and openFrameworks-based software developed by Zachary Lieberman. I really love this kind of demo – people on the street (especially kids) intuitively understand what’s going on. This work reminds me a lot of Zack Simpson’s Mine-Control projects, especially with the use of cheap commodity hardware for creating a fun spectacle.
The Rotating Kitchen, an installation by Zeger Reyers that was put into motion at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf late last month, where it will keep rotating for the next three months. Hypnotic, like an inside-out katamari.
MyDsReader, Nintendo DS text-to-speech document reading software for the visually impaired. It’s using the Flite synthesis engine designed for embedded devices, implements gesture controls for ease of use and even throws in an integrated email and to-do client. Excellent use of homebrew development.
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
[…]
At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker’s film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists’ viewing copies are bartered.3 Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.
Pinwall, by Germany’s art/marketing group URBANSCREEN. Fabulous concept, but wow that’s garish! Would be fun to see some other urban architecture re-envisioned by actual pinball playfield designers. Tilt the Reichstag?
Yann Tiersen’s Comptine D’un Autre Été, L’après-Midi played on six iPhones. While far from a perfect, beautiful performance, I have a soft spot for this piece and it’s fun to see someone trying to overcome the limitations of the tiny virtual keyboard.
Metallica singer James Hetfield commissioned playfield artist Wade Krause and game developer Tanio Klyce to create a custom Metallica pinball table, and they did just that. Excellent.
For the hardware they sanded down and repurposed an old Earthshaker table (it has a rumble effect gimmick built in, which sort of makes sense for a heavy metal themed game), and created custom music and sound programming using a Gumstix and Arduino Mega microcontroller to keep watch on the original Williams System 11 CPU’s signals. Double excellent.
From the ANIMAC to the FairLight Computer Video Instrument, a nice roundup of mostly analog video-mangling technology from the 1960’s to the 1980’s. Lots of pictures and back stories, too.
“At Home with English”, a fabulous early 1990’s low-budget ESL public access TV course filmed here in Austin, TX, dredged up by the Found Footage Festival. A truly exemplary bit of late-night public access weirdness. I’ve been mentioning this guy to friends for years, always hoping to catch it on so I could tape it. Glad someone’s found a copy, and they’ve even tracked down the star for an interview! This highlight reel’s pretty good, but it’s edited down considerably: each segment was made all the more absurd because they would go over each of the verb tenses repeatedly using the same odd inflection, interspersed with a super-macro-closeup shot of a woman’s lips reciting the vocabulary.
Near real-time face detection on the iPhone using OpenCV. An obvious point to make, I know, but I still think it’s amazing that this would have been very difficult to do on any home computer just a few years ago but now our mobile devices can handle the task with relative ease.
From the SIGGRAPH 2004 emerging technologies demo, here’s the CirculaFloor, for when you want to play a bit of live-action Mario Bros. The tiles automatically rearrange themselves holonomically (albeit a bit slowly) depending on what direction the user is trying to walk.
Taito’s new Cho Chabudai Gaeshi, a game based on a literal interpretation of the Japanese idiom “flip the table” (chabudai gaeshi). It gladdens my heart to see new weird games being made for the arcade. At least it’s easier to relate to than Boong-Ga Boong-Ga.
As one commenter on Kotaku notes, “If they localized this in the US it’d have to be called ‘F*ck This’”
Interactive Audio Visual installation for
Mekanism’s “After School Special” art show
location: gray area foundation for the arts http://www.gaffta.org/
“Touchable Holography”, a hardware demo by researchers from the University of Tokyo at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference. This mostly builds on the work they presented last year involving their “Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display” (PDF), a device that shoots out directional ultrasound to simulate haptic pressure, like the impact rain has when it hits your skin. I don’t think this current display counts as holography exactly (the image is made with a refracting mirror, just like Sega’s 1991 arcade game Time Traveler!), but being able to reinforce the illusion with the sensation of touch is a cool idea. Hopefully they can expand it to use more than one of their ultrasound boards so they can simulate a feeling that’s more than one-dimensional. Also good to see that researchers are using the inexpensive, off-the-shelf Wiimotes for projects like this.
Rhonda. It’s a nifty 3D drawing/sketching app that’s been making the rounds for a few years, and now the video of its creator sketching with it has finally been posted on the web. Even better: it’s been ported to openFrameworks and is being actively maintained on a number of platforms.
The so-called “Mother of All Demos”, the technology presentation given by Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, which introduced to the world a number of useful developments: hypertext, the computer mouse, timesharing, email, video conferencing… And this was a bit over forty years ago, just before the ARPANET went online. Pretty amazing times.
Blit, an early Unix-based multitasking windowing system demo from Bell Labs, a precursor to the X Window System. X11 didn’t look much different ten years later, and true multitasking and multi-user systems have only recently filtered into the Mac and Microsoft Windows worlds. Not bad for 1982.
Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” faithfully played on the Nintendo DSi. There’s a new version of the KORG DS-10 software coming out in September (in Japan, anyhow – here’s hoping that it comes stateside), which will be a must-buy.
Hmm, a Google employee is using some of his 20% time to add 3D viewing options to YouTube. Not in a fully working state at this point, but it’s a cool idea. The more people out there wearing anaglyph glasses the better, if you ask me.
Videos from the recent ART && CODE Symposium, featuring presentations by the folks behind Scratch, Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, and other fun + education-leaning graphics tools.
It’s weird to see how generic the times were in 1990: way more acid wash denim and pastel colors, but otherwise the clothing wouldn’t look too out of place at the mall today. The storefronts and water displays still have their decidedly 1980s look, though. ‘90 and ’91 were the formative years when I spent a lot of time at the mall during the summer, bothering the folks at Babbages (they had an Amiga set up to play Lemmings and LucasFilm Games demos!) and whatever comics / gaming stores were around back then, or wasting quarters at Tilt. PS: Terminator 2’s mall sequence was probably filmed not too far from one of these scenes, around the same time.
This new series of promos by Pepper Melon reminds me of the good ol’ days when MTV was running experimental stuff like Liquid Television and the more subversive late-night blocks of animation with Ren & Stimpy, MTV Oddities, The Maxx, and The Brothers Grunt (maybe not so much that last one…). If Cartoon Network’s ditching cartoons, maybe the more artful ones can migrate back to MTV (which stopped caring about the M part of its name way before most Spongebob watchers were born anyhow, as the cliche goes). See the rest at Cartoon Brew.
An animatronic version of Pixar’s Luxo Jr. has appeared outside Disney’s studios in Hollywood, performing a couple of different shows depending on the time of day. That’s some fluid movement there! Even in robotic form, the character exudes more pathos than most animated film characters do in their respective movies. (Via Boing Boing Gadgets, which has the other Luxo performance video handy for watching)
Mind-controlled Addams Family pinball! But can you do it with a lit lightbulb in your mouth?
Compared to invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), non-invasive BCI systems based on Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have not been applied successfully for complex control tasks. In the present study, however, we demonstrate this is possible and report on the interaction of a human subject with a complex real device: a pinball machine.
The final footage from the Japanese JAXA KAGUYA/Selene moon probe’s telemetry camera before it crashed to the surface (as planned). There’s something poignant about these last bits of video – after the years of engineering, planning, and information-gathering, it’s got to be hard not to personify the things. See also my favorite science/UI video of all time: final telemetry from the NASA Huygens probe.
A short clip from Double Take, a film by media artist Johan Grimonprez (there are a handful of other clips on YouTube). “They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him.” Hitchcock versus Hitchcock versus the Cold War, with cinematic history folding in on itself. There’s a worthwhile interview with Grimonprez over on the Cinema Scope website with more info.
Documentary: A Little Love: The Art of Bill Melendez. A great short video taking a look at Meléndez’s work for UPA, the quick transition he made from working on those shorts to the graphic design of the classic Peanuts tv specials, and also the influence that he had on Wes Anderson’s films (I’d gotten the Charlie Brown / Max Fischer connection, but never noticed the homage where Max is walking with the little plant for Margaret Yang – brilliant). Via Cartoon Brew.
A high-def flyover of the moon taken by the JAXA (they’re like Japan’s NASA) Selene / KAGUYA orbiter, which recently fell to the moon’s surface at the end of its journey. Beautifully still imagery.
A video of composer Harry Partch demonstrating some of his innovative musical instruments, including the excellent 11-tone diamond marimba. Henry was an uncle of ex-Disney/Lantz animator Virgil Partch (aka VIP), a factoid I didn’t know until today!
A vintage 3D stop motion film of a car being assembled, produced by Chrysler Motors (despite YouTube title, I think this is from later than 1939, when it was re-filmed in Technicolor). The springs must have been a pain to animate. Fun stuff! (via BoingBoing)
A segment from the early 1980’s TV version of Omni magazine features electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani developing the chip-based vocalizer and music samples for the pinball table Xenon (her official site has much more about her work on Xenon’s sound if you’re interested). Found via the Make Blog (I think)
A brief explanation of a three-rotor Enigma machine, the cryptographic device used by Nazi Germany during WWII to encode their communications. While the encryption technology had some flaws, it was largely broken by the Allies due to human mistakes made by the operators (not disposing of their key tables, writing down portions of the codes, captured hardware, etc).
First localized video from the upcoming Phoenix Wright spinoff, “Miles Edgeworth: Turnabout Prosecutor”. Notable for the series is the move to adventure game-style sprites for the character interaction / investigation scenes. Watching this I realized what must be done: we need a hacked ROM of “Streets of Rage” with these sprites of Edgeworth, Gumshoe, and new “sidekick girl” character Kay replacing Alex, Adam, and Blaze! </videogame nerdery>
DB: We used to say “pirating.” I mean, the term pirating was used for my early work.
CA: Was it really?
DB: Yeah. For example, when I started, there were no home-recording units. There was no TiVo. There was nothing like that.
CA: I must have been very difficult for you to get that footage.
DB: It was. There was no way to get the footage I needed directly. I had to find people inside the industry who believed in my artwork and were willing to get images out to me. So they called me a “pirateer” of imagery. That had a very romantic sound to it: “Oh, she’s the one who pirated imagery from television.”
Maybe this is the real difference between our generations. In pirating, originally, there was no way to talk back to the media. That’s why I did it. The stuff was coming one way at you, and there was no way to arrest it, stop the action, divert it, alter the vocabulary, or change the syntax.
Todd Vanderlin’s working on a project using OpenFrameworks and ARTag markers to simulate scratching a real record but using a camera as a the virtual needle. Nifty.
Follow me. Ted Cassidy is one of my favorite sitcom actors. Few people seem to know that he also played “Thing” on the Addams Family tv show! (why the show’s producers got the 6’9″ guy to cram himself under whatever table / Victrola / box that Thing pops out of instead of just hiring a second actor, I don’t know)