Jeff Thompson | Blog

John Cage playing amplified cacti… enough said.

Further experiment with Voronoi Diagrams, Processing, ffmpeg, and video (Max/MPS-ers may recognize the classic bball.mov source file).

A video still created programmatically; thousands of these can be combined into video using the ffmpeg library – faster and cleaner than a clunky Final Cut project

Well, it might not be Lion (doing live musical performance with my laptop makes me leary of new operating systems) but after finding little recent info on installing ffmpeg on a Mac, I’ve put together this basic outline.  For someone who isn’t great at installing libraries using Terminal, it wasn’t completely straightforward, but it works!  You will need the Apple Developer Tools to make this work (so far as I can tell).

This tutorial is based on the tutorial by Stephen Jungels, with some explanation and consolidation targeted at noobs (like myself).  Definite hat tip, Stephen!

The basic steps are as follows, full details after the break:

1. Install Git
2. Download LAME
3. Download ffmpeg
4. Find or create folder to install to
5. Install LAME
6. Install ffmpeg
7. Test

Read the rest of this entry »

A really fantastic project (even if it was initially accidental) by Phillip Mendonça-Vieira: “Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour from September 2010 to July 2011, I accidentally collected about 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the nytimes.com”.  I find I’m most interested in the small quirks in the resulting time-lapse video, such as the wiggling text below the masthead with the date/last update and that some ads stay longer than others.

Also really nice is Phillip’s post about how the piece was compiled into a video.  As someone who ends up taking a lot of stills and turning them into video (usually accomplished very slowly using Final Cut), his suggestion of ffmpeg seems an interesting one.

Finished video based on experiments sorting hexadecimal colors.  Watch on Vimeo here.

“Mea Culpa” by Bruce Connor (with excellent sounds by Brian Eno and David Byrne) from 1981.

Via: the ever-excellent Triangulation Blog

Very nice, somewhat low-tech kinect works with a strong sound component by Peter Bosch and Simone Simmons.

Video by Timothy Evans – “A video image consists of three primary components – red, green and blue. For this work each component channel was fed a differently timed sequence of 50 common video transitions. As the three components recombine to create a video image; constantly changing forms and colours are revealed.”

Via: Triangulation Blog

Very glitchy still from the poster image of a video about candy corn.  Haven’t watched the video, since I HATE candy corn…

Via: YouTube

“Haxcauch x Vokoi” by BEDG