And I keep forgetting to mention that we're having an informal showing of the video that I've shot at DPI.  It's being projected inside the building at 983-A Dean St this Saturday, 26th July.  It's designed to be viewed from the street.  The building is in the middle of the block between Franklin and Classon (nearest subway C train to Franklin Ave).  

Weather permitting, Monica Ruzansky (www.monicaruzansky.com) will be projecting her beautiful photography on the surrounding architecture and up on the roof, where we'll be hanging out and having drinks with anyone who wants to drop by and join us from 9pm onwards.  Hope to see you there!

Last week I did a shoot at DPI with my friends Ariel Efron, Andrew Schneider and Katherine Behar. I went ahead with the setup that I previously described - which is two Panasonic DVX HD cameras shooting through a piece of non-glare plexiglass, with two overlapping retroreflective screens providing the background.  Both cameras were mounted with green led rings to provide a green screen effect.

 The plexi has a matte coating which reduces reflected light, which I thought would be essential in order to prevent the lighting being seen in the camera lens.  However, I discovered that this is more about angle and position of lights and camera than anything else, and the matte non-glare coating makes everything look slightly soft-focus - almost like someone has put vaseline on the lens.  Not what I wanted, but not a disaster, either.  It actually makes the HD video look a little softer and grainier and more like film, so that's really a question of aesthetic.

I tried using a polarizing filter to reduce reflected light, but of course, this just prevents the light from the led's bouncing back and providing a green background, so that was a bad idea.

Anyway, I spent the weekend working in After Effects with the content that we shot. The key is an easy pull (using Keylight), however, there are some slightly dicy shadows around some edges.  This is because of the angles of the lights that were necessary to avoid reflection.  However, I think it's manageable in this context, although would need a lot more work if it was for broadcast.

 
 read full post »

(just noticed that my last blog entry ended up as a comment, not as a proper blog entry, so here it is posted again)

 Not giantkilling, but giantkeying.
 read full post »

I've been getting into my research into second life during my recent times at DPI. I first saw a presentation about second life back in the beginning of 2006, when someone from Linden Labs came to NYU.  I was pretty amazed by it then, but have never spent time there until now, mainly because of my natural disinclination to spend (even) more time looking at screens, and also because I find that 3D aesthetic to be tough going.

But I've been in there, hanging out, dancing, chatting, staring around stupidly and flying for no reason - the things that a newbie does in SL, I guess. As I guessed, there seem to be very few non-humanoid avatars. In fact, it's more like going to a halloween party in LA.  Many people look like they've had cosmetic surgery, and most have some kind of 'sexy' costume.  This is probably good for my portrait project, because it's going to be easier for a stylist to convincingly dress someone up as a gothic vampire than a blue frog, or whatever. 

My avatar is a fox.  Simply because this was the sole non-human option on offer on arrival in SL. Screw it - I'm already human in RL.

Anyway, so far I've been to a dance club, a British theme pub, a New Moon Ritual, a new age church and a rather serious artists discussion group.  I've been very interested to observe my own familiar reactions to group social situations, even though I'm not even in the room... 

A long weekend at DPI saw me get some sensors up on the grid. I'm using 3 IIDC firewire cameras made by Imaging Source. All three of them are sensing presence. Two of them are tracking motion, and drawing trails that follow where people walk through the space,and one of them is both sensing presence and switching into live feed display when it 'sees' someone in a specific place.

All of this is being done through background subtraction with using a running average.  ie, if there is a change in environmental lighting it will be incorporated into the background and therefore ignored.

Anyway, it was the first time I hooked up the whole system that's installing at the Liberty Science Center, including optical repeater, etc, so it was great that everything worked.

Hal mentioned that I should post about the ease of using multiple IIDC cameras in Jitter, so here you go:  it's easy.  I am grabbing frames at low resolutions - either 160 x120, or 320 x 240, and at that low res I am getting three live feeds into the single firewire bus on my macbook pro (via a firewire hub).  I haven't tried higher res, because I haven't needed to, but I'll post back if I find the time to push up the limitations.

Tracking from one camera to another was going fairly well, but the use of wide-angle lenses wasn't helpful...   with the subtraction I'm using, white t-shirts were a problem, and so when people were distorted at the edge of the field of view, they were split into two 'blobs' by the blob detection. But when they were in the center of the camera's field of view (just being viewed from top down, bird's-eye view), they were just seen as a single blob. 

The DPI residency has already made a big difference to my world... before I even start using the space. As part of the residency I have been able to borrow a video projector and rear projection screen that enabled me to install my piece, Future Perfect in my dream location.  Future Perfect is about the Atlantic Yards real estate development in Brooklyn, near where I live, and I'd been looking for opportunities to show it in a place where local residents can have access to it.
 read full post »

Hi all, this is Ed checking in. My allocated months at DPI will be this Spring, and I've been gestating my original proposal and watching it evolve.

My original idea was to research online performance of self, and move towards an interactive video installation that somehow merged our physical bodies with online avatars.  I am also interested in the real-life re-performance of online interactions.
 read full post »