Film
The Mielgo love continues with these images from his portfolio, no idea what the top two are from/for but they are stunning. Animations, including one for Philips which features the illustration below, can be seen on his Pinkman.TV site. 
I saw the animated intro for The Beatles Rock Band game some time ago by just discovered that concept artist Alberto Mielgo has several of the scenes posted on his website, just keep pressing the ‘+’ button to see more.
Check the full panning shot for the opening scene below – wow!
I’ve featured work by Jude Greenaway, before, his promo for Pendulum‘s ‘Coffin‘ last summer was fantastic. Long time associate of The Light Surgeons, owner of the Yellow Machines label and music maker under the name Scanone.
Now he’s put together a DVD of 13 unreleased experimental / cinematic audio tracks that have been worked on visually by 12 directors and collectives. The tracks span a 10 year period and this project has taken four years to put together overall. Catch a sample in the trailer below and pre-order the DVD here.
[quicktime width=”636″ height=”380″]http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/LRV-DVD-GREENAWAY-YM.mov[/quicktime]
While Tron Uprising fans wait until October (!) for the remaining episodes of the first season to air here’s some more concept art by Alberto Mielgo. If you haven’t seen this show (and if you’re outside the US then it’s unlikely unless you’re downloading torrents or subscribe to Disney’s XD channel) you can now buy a series subscription from iTunes and view the first episode here.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz13yVociqc&feature=plcp[/youtube]
I recently unlinked my old YouTube account and created a DJFoodOfficial one instead. Below is the screen you get when you unlink an account, nice touch. There’s not much up there at the moment but it will grow over time and I put the ‘Sunspot’ track up that I did for the Carling Zest campaign as this is the only place you can get it…
One take, no edits, from the forthcoming Kid Koala album – never fails to impress with his creativity. Buy at the Ninjashop: http://bit.ly/12bitblues www.kidkoala.com
This is the poster for an online initiative to make a live action trailer for Akira, this time by fans rather than Hollywood who have tried and failed many times to get a version of the film made. The Akira Project have just started a site and blog asking for help and equipment but already have a small team of people working on it.
This came about because of their love of the film and various leaked Hollywood plot rewrites and re-locations (Neo-Tokyo to Neo New York) that have frustrated fans of the original for years. In a recent interview with comic artist Chris Weston, who was drafted in to work on a Hollywood version of Akira, he said the first thing the production team asked him to do was redesign Kanada‘s bike. This is a classic case of Hollywood just not understanding the fundamentals of what makes something a classic and he said he was relieved when it was finally taken out of production.
The Akira Project’s aim is to stick as close to the original as possible and bring a faithful version of it to the big screen but they intend to start at a trailer to show what they are capable of.
New Dredd 3D poster, first seen on Everything Comes Back To 2000ad
DJ Food ‘The Search Engine’ live at SAT, Montreal from Solid Steel on Vimeo.
This is what I got up to in Montreal recently. Many, many thanks to Anne-Marie Bergeron who put this together at very short notice. If anyone seeing this works at a dome or planetarium, anywhere in the world, and are interested in hosting it in the future then please get in touch. I realise not every dome has a surround system or space to lay on the floor, it doesn’t have to, I will happily work with you to tailor the show to your needs. Contact details are up on the right there…
As it always does, the day of the show came and went in a blur. By 7pm on July 19th we actually had everything in place, there was no last minute rushing around or ‘that will have to do’ decisions. The only thing I was worried about was doing a short introduction in front of the assembled press, I’ve never been comfortable being center stage, even less when speaking through a mic. By the time the first show kicked off there was little to do but sit down and play, or even lie down and shift sound around as much or as little as it needed for the 50 minute show.
I should have done this years ago, I get to lie down with the audience and just play with the sound, no one is looking at me up on a stage, they’re concentrating on the dome and I can watch it too whereas most projections are usually behind me when I DJ.
Sébastien Roy – the SAT‘s photographer – took an amazing set of photos that really capture the scale as well as working well with the low light levels (see above and below galleries).
Sam from Vinyl Junkies made this video clip compilation. That’s his 6 year old daughter at one point at her first ever gig, she loved it. I also did an interview with him the day after about the shows which will be online soon.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”390″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIP1mAHZdOw&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
Thursday, post show comment: Thanks so much to everyone who came out last night, it was such a thrill to finally see it up on the dome. So happy to be hosted by the SAT in one of my favourite cities in the world, everyone who helped on this has been amazing, especially Olivier Rhéaume who helped me mix the sound all week. Looking forward to coming back for the Friday night crowd. Tickets have been selling so well that a Saturday show was announced too.
Here’s a review (in french) by Olash Bacon and a nicely put together set of pictures by Jü|Graphee
Friday, post show comment: Just back, another two down, we tweaked the sound during the day and it’s now sounding a lot better, less top end in places, the spoken word stuff cuts through a lot better too. One more show for Saturday at 8pm, tickets still left but selling fast, a lot who came tonight couldn’t get in and bought for tomorrow instead. I met so many cool people tonight and the posters are selling really well too.
[singlepic id=4017 w=640 h=480 float=left]
Also, more fantastic photos: this time by Susan Moss
I should take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped me, especially people who supplied some of the footage and gave invaluable advice before I even got to Montreal. Jan Zehn and Stefan Berke from Germany for their CymaSonics sequences, very happy to have their input. Paul Bourke, something of a legend in dome projection, and the sequences he sent, very generously at the last minute. Thomas English for the Red Epic footage, again donated very kindly. Phil Mayer and Ben Stern at Fulldome UK for advice and who will be staging the next version of this show in Leicester this coming November. Also Mario Di Maggio from Thinktank‘s Digital Planetarium in Birmingham for a special preview show which opened my eyes to several possibilities.
At the SAT it’s thanks to LP, Dominic (it was a boy!), Olivier, Guillaume and Alex that it all went smoothly. Evelyn at Evenko for helping stage it, Jeff Waye and Danna Takako Hawley at Ninja Tune N. America for setting it up and doing all the nitty gritty stuff. Finally a big man hug to Pat Hamou (that’s him below) who initially suggested it, helped out and designed the poster to boot – thanks all. I hope to make it back soon with a better show, each one is a learning process and there’s still work to do and plenty more domes to visit.
Some of this content appeared on the Facebook page for the event as this was the most direct way to explain what was happening to the people who were going, so apologies for any repetition.
Pre-gig article by Lucinda Catchlove for CBC Music on what it’s about and what I intend to do.
Now some background on the process of getting it to the screen:
July 9th: Currently rendering footage from both After Effects and Final Cut Pro as well as preparing images in Photoshop. To show films ‘full dome’ (ie covering the whole surface of a dome) you need to have an image between 3000 and 4000 pixels square. Only Red cameras can shoot over the 4k image size but this is only on the long side, and the raw footage for one frame this size is 36MB. As a result most full dome films are animations and I’m attempting to make a 50 minute sequence to go with my mix of the album.
July 12th: Another late night, nearly ready to put the whole thing into the final arrangement. Most of the animation is done in After Effects but AE isn’t too great for synching visuals and sound together, especially a 50 minute sequence. So image sequences are loaded into Final Cut Pro for an easier handle on editing to a timeline although low res versions are made because of the huge file sizes needed for a dome and not a regular projection screen.
Once everything is in it’s correct place an XML file of the session is exported BACK to AE so that a plug in that simulates a 3D dome environment can be added in various different ways to sections. More on that later, that’s the really tricky part where you go from thinking in 2D to 3D and start placing things in space…
Trying to render FX on 2700×2700 pixel footage from a R3D Epic camera inside a 3600×3600 pixel video sequence. “Computer says no…”
July 9th: Animating images is largely done in After Effects then rendered to Image sequences of huge jpegs at 30 fps (frames per second). That’s 30 jpegs per second x how ever many seconds in a sequence. I’m making a 50 minute + show: 30 x 60 x 50 = over 90,000 images. Here’s one below…
I’ve already broken the whole soundtrack down into ‘stems’ (each instrument or part isolated onto a separate track) and this has been sent to the SAT where they are busy making ‘sound maps’ for each song in the mix. With over 150 speakers inside the dome we can place each sound from each track wherever we want. Even better, once the show has begun I should be able to move sounds around the dome manually as it plays using a program on an iPad.
So if you wonder what I’m doing if you come along, I’m not surfing the web or checking email, I’ll be moving sounds around to mess your head up. The song I’m most excited about for this is ‘A Trick Of The Ear’ – this track was actually written with the intention of each part panning around a sphere. Besides various polyrhythms working in tandem throughout the track, I wanted it to feel like you were inside a gyroscope when you listened to it. Hopefully we’ll get somewhere near that next week.
Friday 13th: Last day putting the finishing touches where I can before bouncing it all over to After Effects and applying the full dome plug in to certain sections. Off to Belgium today for a gig too so going to leave stuff rendering no doubt but some will have to be done at the SAT next week.
Monday 16th: Well, I’m in Montreal, about to head down to the SAT and plug everything in, still need to do work on parts today before we push the ‘render’ button. Had to pull an all-nighter Saturday in order to make sure everything copied over to 3 external hard drives. Today should be a pivotal day in getting this from my machines into the SAT. For anyone thinking of getting into dome projection in the future, I’d say… think very carefully. But if you’re determined you’ll need a very fast machine / graphics card, huge amounts of hard disc space and lots of time on your hands…
It’s 9.40pm and I’m still at the SAT, today has been trying to say the least. The Mac to PC file exchange got off to a flying start when trying to copy 300GB to their servers was going to take 9 hours. Luckily they have a Mac Drive program now which enables them to read drives formatted in HFS+ (Mac read/writable) and we needed the time to finish fine tuning the show.
Dominic, who is helping me with all the visual side is about to be a new dad, I mean imminently, not any day, but any hour or minute. He was giving me tips by mobile whilst at the hospital 
The initial render time direct from my drive for the 50 minute piece was over 30 hours so we’ve stop that and are now copying the files needed to the server for a multi-machine render tomorrow. Here’s a shot of the mini dome that they have in their computer lab and the bar and terrace on the second floor outside the dome.
On the audio side we have 164 separate tracks to sort out and bounce to a manageable amount before ‘spatializing’ them into different parts of the dome for each song. This will create song maps unique to each track and enable me to move certain parts around at will. For everyone back in the UK, the sun was out this morning and I’m in shorts and a T-shirt. But lo and behold, what happened this afternoon? It pissed down, exactly like London, I couldn’t quite believe it.
Oh yeah, I forgot to say, at one point the master drive I’d bought as back up with EVERYTHING on it wouldn’t show up on my laptop after being pulled out of the SAT server. ‘The drive could not be found, would you like to reinitialise it?’ Luckily Disc Utilities saved the day.
Tuesday 17th: Day 2 in Montreal: Woke up to rain at 5.45am – WTF? I’m beginning to think I brought the bad weather with me from the UK. Monday was full on, got home around midnight with ‘homework’ on the audio to do. Couldn’t face it so got up super early this morning to get a few hours in before heading out.
Dominic was here (still no baby arrived) and set the visuals up on 6 machines to render, he thinks it will be done by tomorrow morning when it then has to be re-rendered for the various projectors in the dome. Making sound maps and spatializing all the tracks this afternoon hopefully – I need some lunch.
Wednesday 18th: Mixing, mixing mixing, all day and into the night with Olivier Rhéaume… The downstairs floor of the SAT is open plan and there’s been a full orchestra ‘practicing’ most of the week. Insanely good players, completely perfect to my ears, we’re working on the 2nd floor and hearing Holst‘s piece ‘Mars’ from The Planets suite wafting up the stairwell was amazing. Apprarently we really pissed them off with the volume we were mixing at unfortunately. Had a midday break to go and record a mix for CBC (see last post) and do an interview for La Devoir paper then dinner and back to the mix until 11pm.
Thursday 19th: Show day – last minute emergency, some donut (me) left a reference film in place of the last sequence. When we watched the whole thing through we got to the end and it looked like someone had used an animated gif in place of a hi res image sequence, not a good way to end the show. Currently re-rendering from the proper source files…
File under ‘Giant Robots’, a year away from release though
[youtube width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9uxoOmy_iA&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Kid Koala‘s new album ’12-Bit Blues’ is due to drop on September 17th and a couple of tracks, ‘2-Bit Blues’ / ‘6-Bit Blues’ (can you see a pattern forming here?) are doing the rounds on promo. I discovered the film, ‘The Cameraman’s Revenge’, a few years back – a story of insect infidelity, animated in Russia a hundred years ago this year! I thought it was the perfect pairing with Koala’s music as he has a, as yet unreleased, project involving an insect band in the works, made entirely from 3D models.
The original film is 11 minutes long so I had to speed it up dramatically to fit it to the music but the original was silent and it invokes those early examples of film where they set the speeds too fast. I must stress, this isn’t the official video or anything, just something I made for my DJ sets. You can pre-order the album here, which comes with a bonus flexi disc and DIY cardboard turntable that will play the disc.
Nice simple design and tag line, this is for a forthcoming horror film, ‘V/H/S’, consisting of 6 short stories revolving around video tapes, looks like it could be good if you like that sort of thing.
I find these expression sheets for various characters in the Tron Uprising cartoon fascinating, totally in love with the styling of this show, reminds me of Robert Valley.
