Chiptune, or chip music is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. The “golden age” of chiptunes was the mid 1980s to early 1990s, when such sound chips were the only widely available means for creating music on computers.
Generally chip tunes consist of basic waveforms, such as sine waves, square waves and sawtooth or triangle waves, and basic percussion, often generated from white noise going through an ADSR envelope controlled synthesizer.
Chiptunes were widely used in early video game consoles to synthesize music and sound effects. This style of electronic music has been an infatuation of mine for quite some time. (more…)
Posted by jedypod on March 30th 2006 at 3:45 am to Evergreen |
Recently I have been continuing to experiment with the frame interpolation and warping capabilities of Reelsmart Twixtor and the TimeWarp and Optical Flow plugin for After Effects 7.0, in order to create smoother motion for 3d animation.
Frame interpolation refers to the process of creating new frames by analyzing existing frames. This is usually necessary when speeding up or slowing down footage. In such programs as Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro (and After Effects sometimes), this interpolation is often accomplished by Frame-Blending, especially when slowing down footage. Frame-Blending essentially means to take two adjacent frames and combine them by making both transparent. This usually results in the ghosts of objects showing up in the frame, especially fast moving objects. This can appear quite strange or distracting to my eye.
Twixtor uses a combination of frame-blending, warping, and motion blur to calculate new interpolated frames. The warping capabilities, if executed carefully, results in much smoother natural looking motion when slowing down footage. This natural-looking motion is useful to the animation experiments I have been doing.
Most stop-motion animation is performed at 12 or 15 frames per second, depending on the end frame-rate of the format. For example, if the final output was going to be 24fps, as my project will be, one would animate at 12, meaning that there would be 12 frames passing in one second. In order to “upconvert” the frame-rate to the destination format, each frame must be repeated twice (24=2*12). Having each frame play twice results in motion that looks much more jerky than normal live-action. Frame-Blending can help slightly to smooth this out, but it doesn’t look very good. Here is where Twixtor comes into play. If you import an image sequence of an animation into After Effects with an interpreted frame rate of 24 (meaning that each frame of the original animation is one frame, and our animation is playing double-speed), and then apply the Twixtor plugin the composition, slowing it down by a factor of 2, the motion is smoothed out considerably. (this is the video from the test animation in the 3D labs that I did with Brad).
Of course, one must carefully adjust the settings of the plugin to avoid artifacts of the image warping, as I have discovered in my tedious experimention. If there is a great deal of motion between frames, the warping and blending can really get out of hand. This is a crazy little animation with clay and a frenetically moving background.
These videos, which require the new quicktime plugin version of the Adobe Flash Player, and which in my estimation are of a great deal better quality than youtube, were made possible by the free Creative Commons media storage available at ourmedia.org, and the greatness ofarchive.org.
This is all very interesting, but I really must work on my soundtrack now.
Posted by jedypod on March 27th 2006 at 11:38 pm to Evergreen |
Animation Tests:
Wednesday, 2006-03-22, I got my proficiency for the 3d animation labs. On the morn of Thursday, I frantically attempted to convert Barbie dolls into functioning armatures using steel wire and stage blood. The results are somewhat cybernetic, and interesting looking. On the evening of Thursday, Brad Hutchinson showed me the ropes by helping me do some test animations, and taught me the finer points of lighting puppets, and performing exacting motion control and previsualization during the manual process of animating. Here are some photos from this experience (taken by Brad): (more…)
Posted by jedypod on March 20th 2006 at 2:26 am to Evergreen |
Bleary Polka is an experiment I did over the last couple days, trying out the amazing new graph editor in After Effects 7 to control time-remapping video in order to synchronize with music. The latter half of the video still sucks, partly because of the footage, and partly because I didn’t spend much time on it. It is however proof of concept that I can remap video to music inside After Effects, something I wasn’t able to do previously because of the lack of convenient real-time audio preview capabilities, and clunkiness of the time-remapping capability in AE 6.5.
It is amusing for me, and probably not entirely inaccurate, to imagine this being me early Friday morning of week 10, in a state of panic.
Posted by jedypod on March 13th 2006 at 9:27 pm to Evergreen |
By tapping into a visual curiosity and desire for novelty, attractions draw upon what Augustine, at the beginning of the fifth century, called curiositas in his catalogue of “the lust of the eyes.” In contrast to visual voluptas (pleasure), curiositas avoids the beautiful and goes after its exact opposite “simply because of the lust to find out and to know.” Curiositas draws the viewer towards unbeautiful sights, such as a mangled corpse, and “because of this disease of curiosity monsters and anything out of the ordinary are put on show in our theatres.”
– Tom Gunning, An Aesthetic of Astonishment, p. 124.
My Spring quarter project, Corporeal Composition, will take the form of an experimental music video, employing the technique of exacting sound and image synchronization through matching the motion, cuts, and content of the image to the rhythmic, melodic, and emotive attributes of the electronic music soundtrack. It will be shot and edited in 24p to emulate a film look, and will combine stop-motion animation with live action footage. The music will be developed in tandem with the video. Stylistically, it will appropriate attributes and techniques from three areas of avant-garde cinema: Surrealism, Structuralist-Materialism, and Soviet Montage. (more…)
Posted by jedypod on March 6th 2006 at 2:36 pm to Evergreen |
Tony Buba uses a number of innovative techniques in Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy that are quite remarkable for documentary film. He plays with the genre expectations of the audience by interweaving staged performances which could be considered fictional throughout the film. This is only one aspect of the many reflexive techniques he uses, which not only make the audience aware of their own position in watching the film, but contribute to a self-critique of both the film, and Buba’s own autobiographical presence in the film. (more…)
This portrait project was completed by Jed Smith and the excellent Graham Klyme, both of whom are somewhat compulsively addicted to online methods of social communication. Because of this interesting shared attribute, we determined to do a portrait of someone with a distinct and prevalent online identity. This approach would allow us to hopefully create a commentary on the interesting issues associated with online identity, persona, and communication. (more…)
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