Kieran Nolan » Visuals

Mongi Slim

Kieran — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:44:22 +0000

The Random Album Cover Game has been around the last year, but I had a go at it a couple of days ago.

Not sure what genre it’d fit into exactly… possibly folk meets downtempo meets dnb…

Reverse Graffiti

Kieran — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:05:23 +0000

Reverse Graffiti is something totally original and organic, Paul “Moose” Curtis uses a powerwasher and stencils to create his art, cleaning the grime off polluted city walls to create murals of scenic forest vistas. This video clip is from an upcoming documentary by Doug Pray (who directed the turntablism documentary Scratch). I’m looking forward to watching this… more information at reversegraffitiproject.com.

Video Circuit Bending Workshop

Kieran — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:21:23 +0000

So the annual Darklight festival happened again in Dublin, one of the events I attended there was a video circuit bending workshop by Karl Klomp organised by DATA. Over two days participants found out about uncovering visual glitches in video effects hardware and then hardwiring and controlling these. Apart from distorting the inputted video we were also shown methods of hacking these machines text / graphics chip (the part that generates teletext text or channel information) and how to sync this up to an external audio source, making an audio visualiser.

It was a lot of use for my work, I found out a bit more about how all the components work and how to read the circuit board, also picked up some handy soldering tips. The piece of video hardware I had to play with was a Vanguard VA-445 A/V Edit System, now with 4 externally housed switches added to trigger off video glitches. Here’s a good interview about Mr Klomps work from makezine and some youtube footage of another video bending workshop.

Zbrush Zhead

Kieran — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:38:33 +0000

I downloaded the Zbrush demo and sculpted this head… it was fun to make, the process is very organic – you start off with a sphere and mould it like you would a piece of clay… this is pretty basic compared to what the pro’s make with zbrush… like Beowulf!

Visualising the Digital Ether

Kieran — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:49:01 +0000

“The Bubbles Of Radio” is an interesting project by students from AHO in Norway where they cataloged different radio frequency types in the style of a nature watch booklet. Each signal type was given a latin-style name, for instance Bluetooth is Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae and RFID is Raptus Arphadus and accompanied by creative illustrations that show them as visible, tangible parts of the environment. Full information including a PDF chart of the visualisations are at Nearfield.org.

Synth Candy

Kieran — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 16:20:27 +0000

The Synth Eastwood photoshop I submitted for the event of the same name is in the latest issue of Candy, it’s part of a montage… but it’s there! Candy is an Irish produced design magazine, featuring local and international content. It’s distributed free in PDF form and is well worth checking out.

Mobile TV, Toon Boom & Machinima @ Darklight

Kieran — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:44:16 +0000

I caught a few of the presentations at Friday’s session of the Darklight 2007 symposium. First up was a talk from reps of 02, Eircom, Babelgum and RTÉ about the future of television and how mobile-tv and tv-on-demand rewrite the rules of the normal linear broadcast model. For example the primetime slots for mobile tv are commuting hours and work breaktimes.

Next up was a workshop by Brown Bag where they described their experiences using the animation toolset ‘Toon Boom Studio‘ to create a new children’s tv series ‘Wobbly Land‘. It seems to have a steep learning curve, particularly if you are used to Flash (no tweening!) but they had great technical support from Toon Boom’s creators, including 2 weeks of training. TB also created custom effects plugins for Brown Bag, that helped give the show it’s unique (and very non-generic vector animation) look.

The last workshop I attended was ‘Machinima FilmMaking’ (the art of making movies inside video game engines) by Friedrich Kirschner, the developer of Movie Sandbox, a heavy modification of the game Unreal Tournament 2004 that turns it into a Machinima application. The game world becomes your stage and the characters your actors, who you can direct as you please, either ‘live’ or through pre-defined scripts.

Some cool input methods were shown, one involved controlling your ‘actor’ like a virtual puppet using the strings on a usb golf controller. Another made use of the Xbox 360′s Guitar Hero controller so your machinima actor can jam on some chords.

Also demoed was an innovative supporting technology called Milkscanner, a low budget but highly effective method of scanning 3d objects using a webcam, lego, a bowl and some milk(!). A (small plastic) elephant was gradually submerged in milk, each stage captured by the webcam and then the software assembled each ‘slice’ into a 3d wireframe suitable for import into Movie Sandbox. Great stuff, innovative and nutricious!

Synth Eastwood

Kieran — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:11:22 +0000

With apologies to Bob Moog…

A chop and paste photoshop I’ve submitted for this weekend’s ‘Synth Eastwood‘ exhibition.