The last day of the residency was June 9th. We toured the NFB StereoLab in the morning. They have a great setup with many passive polarized projection systems matched with SANDDE 3D drawing stations. That week they also happened to be testing out the Panasonic twin lens 3D camera. The Director of Photography didn't give it great marks mostly because of bad compression artifacts and poor performance in low light. When I saw the footage I didn't think it was that bad. They were just starting to work with it and it was a pre-production model so it is quite possible their opinion will change. But for $22,000 the expectations are high.
In the afternoon, Valerie Walker of Studio XX interviewed Leila and I for her radio show. She is a skilled interviewer and it was great to talk with her about the project. The interview will air shortly. I'll post a link as soon as it does.
The rest of the afternoon and early evening, we packed up the studio and transferred files. We ended the day at Mochica, a Peruvian restaurant on St-Denis. Great food as always. I will miss the easy access to delicious food, the warm nights, and the street level terraces. Such great sounds.
I finally got around to posting a partial documentation of the work done at Oboro. It doesn't include most of the sounds that we recorded, and that were used during the artist talk in a live mix. What it does show is a trio of lungs breathing at different rhythms, with distinct videos and breath sounds. The three breath sounds match the breathing rate. Anyway, here it is. I'll post more as it becomes available.
lung trio from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.
Bacterial Update: It has been a while since I posted a bacterial update. I was slightly worried about going away for almost three weeks but everything worked out fine. I put the Kefir grains in a dormant state in the fridge with twice the amount of milk I would normally give them. When I took them back out they recovered right away and I would say are going through a growth spurt.
For the Kombucha I started a new brew about 6 days before I left and just assumed that the brew would be ruined when I got back but that the scoby would be fine. Turns out the brew was fine, quite fine. It was a batch I brewed with Pu-Erh tea and red rose buds. You can really taste the roses (yum!). I just started a new brew today, Pu-Erh tea and Chrysanthemum flowers.
A song for this post.
Showing posts with label Oboro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oboro. Show all posts
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
A few left (day 284)
June 4 (day 9) --
(written on June 5)
The new build of the Touch was posted already! I got the textures working and now we have many lungs with distinct videos. The next step is to get them breathing at different rhythms. I'm not exactly sure how I'll do this yet. Right now the instancing is done at the group level (whole lungs) and the animations are on its components. That separation may be an issue.
We also got the communication going between the graphics and the sounds. It was a thrilling start but it still needs work to sound good.
We ate at L'Express and met Glen Lowry there before showing him the studio and our progress so far. We ended the evening recording the Montreal night ride with the soundfield microphone. Right at the end of recording a group of girls out for a bachelorette party wanted to be recorded. It was a really kind of sweet and joyful encounter.
June 7 (day 10)
(written on June 8)
This was the last day before the presentation the next day. We prioritized the things we wanted to get done and all our priority lists were longer than humanly possible. Nevertheless we set out to do the first things first and munched on cacao nibs to keep the momentum.
My priority was to get the lungs breathing in sync with the breaths. Zoe had isolated four examples of each person's breath (miles, leila, zoe, maria). Unfortunately in the end I wasn't able to use Zoe's own breaths because they were too quiet. I matched the other breaths with the lungs by stretching the animation keys to match the length of the breath clip. I combined the animation transformations with those of the geometry instancing. It all worked well except for the transparency of the lungs which, for various reasons I won't go into now, didn't follow the breath properly.
Thea kept working on the stereo videos. Miles worked on foreground sounds and Zoe worked on background sounds.
Dinner was a bit scattered because we had to get back to the studio quickly. Miles and Jocelyn went to Schwartz. Leila and I took out some sushi.
June 8 (day 11)
Everyone put finishing touches on their little bits and pieces. Leila went out and shot some last minute urban video which I felt we needed to balance out the more natural shots. We moved the whole project over to the big gallery space. It looked much better there and had room for many people to sit, move around, listen, look. The Oboro techs were so gracious and amazing to arrange to move the project. It all went smoothly.
In the end I didn't manage to do more than three pairs of lungs for the visuals. One was mapped with a video of wind in the leaves, one with Montreal part and cityscape, and the other with pelicans swimming in the Bow river. They each had their own rhythm. To scale it to more than three lungs I'll have to redesign and offset the bad design choices of a sprint to deadline.
Zoe had a really great background audio composition which played while Miles added some foreground sounds like laughing, uncertainty, like it/don't like it, humming, etc via OSC messaging. It sounded a bit cacophonous at times but I think it worked well for a crowd feel. The stabilizing breath sounds helped offset the chaos a bit. I really enjoyed walking around to all the speakers and listening to the individual voices speak or hum, and the returning to the centre to hear it all together.
Once again no pictures. I am embarrassed by this. The event was documented by others so I'll try to get some pictures from other sources. Just before I archive the files tomorrow, I'll make a video of the lungs breathing.
I'd say about 15-20 people came to the artist talk. Lots of great questions and discussion afterward.
We finished the day at an Afghan restaurant nearby. Great food.
A song for this post. (an unexpected nostalgic group favourite one evening)
(written on June 5)
The new build of the Touch was posted already! I got the textures working and now we have many lungs with distinct videos. The next step is to get them breathing at different rhythms. I'm not exactly sure how I'll do this yet. Right now the instancing is done at the group level (whole lungs) and the animations are on its components. That separation may be an issue.
We also got the communication going between the graphics and the sounds. It was a thrilling start but it still needs work to sound good.
We ate at L'Express and met Glen Lowry there before showing him the studio and our progress so far. We ended the evening recording the Montreal night ride with the soundfield microphone. Right at the end of recording a group of girls out for a bachelorette party wanted to be recorded. It was a really kind of sweet and joyful encounter.
June 7 (day 10)
(written on June 8)
This was the last day before the presentation the next day. We prioritized the things we wanted to get done and all our priority lists were longer than humanly possible. Nevertheless we set out to do the first things first and munched on cacao nibs to keep the momentum.
My priority was to get the lungs breathing in sync with the breaths. Zoe had isolated four examples of each person's breath (miles, leila, zoe, maria). Unfortunately in the end I wasn't able to use Zoe's own breaths because they were too quiet. I matched the other breaths with the lungs by stretching the animation keys to match the length of the breath clip. I combined the animation transformations with those of the geometry instancing. It all worked well except for the transparency of the lungs which, for various reasons I won't go into now, didn't follow the breath properly.
Thea kept working on the stereo videos. Miles worked on foreground sounds and Zoe worked on background sounds.
Dinner was a bit scattered because we had to get back to the studio quickly. Miles and Jocelyn went to Schwartz. Leila and I took out some sushi.
June 8 (day 11)
Everyone put finishing touches on their little bits and pieces. Leila went out and shot some last minute urban video which I felt we needed to balance out the more natural shots. We moved the whole project over to the big gallery space. It looked much better there and had room for many people to sit, move around, listen, look. The Oboro techs were so gracious and amazing to arrange to move the project. It all went smoothly.
In the end I didn't manage to do more than three pairs of lungs for the visuals. One was mapped with a video of wind in the leaves, one with Montreal part and cityscape, and the other with pelicans swimming in the Bow river. They each had their own rhythm. To scale it to more than three lungs I'll have to redesign and offset the bad design choices of a sprint to deadline.
Zoe had a really great background audio composition which played while Miles added some foreground sounds like laughing, uncertainty, like it/don't like it, humming, etc via OSC messaging. It sounded a bit cacophonous at times but I think it worked well for a crowd feel. The stabilizing breath sounds helped offset the chaos a bit. I really enjoyed walking around to all the speakers and listening to the individual voices speak or hum, and the returning to the centre to hear it all together.
Once again no pictures. I am embarrassed by this. The event was documented by others so I'll try to get some pictures from other sources. Just before I archive the files tomorrow, I'll make a video of the lungs breathing.
I'd say about 15-20 people came to the artist talk. Lots of great questions and discussion afterward.
We finished the day at an Afghan restaurant nearby. Great food.
A song for this post. (an unexpected nostalgic group favourite one evening)
Thursday, June 03, 2010
A few good lungs (day 279)
June 2 (day 6)
More recording in the studio. It was a slow start with a discovery that all our previous recordings had been somehow faulty. They didn't sound bad or anything, just inaccurate in the soundfield aspects. A couple of hours later the problem had been located and we were able to record. We had a list of sounds to individually record:
June 3 (day 7)
A great day. The new build of Derivative was posted and I was able to have multiple lungs breathing using geometry instancing. It looks great. The Macbook Pro I'm working with doesn't seem to have any problems dealing with the load so far. I was so happy to see the multiple lungs breathing I forgot to take a screenshot or make a movie. As I said enthrall is inversely proportional to documentation in my case. At first I thought the multiple lungs looked kind of busy but when projected large the feeling was different. We displayed them in conjunction with a collection of breathing sounds and it created a kind of reverent space. I liked it a lot.
We ended the day at Sala Rosa, where they have great food and a performance space upstairs. After eating we took in a Vaudeville show by Les Filles Electrique upstairs. And what a show it was. They really made us feel believe all the tricks. It became such a magical place by the end of the show. There were some great visuals and projections. In one they projected talking faces on someone's face. A surprising result of a morphing face. In another they had a box made out of semi-transparent scrims with someone inside. Very interesting 3D kind of effect when projected from either side.
June 4 (day 8)
A somewhat unsatisfying day. My goal for the day was to get varying videos playing in the instanced lungs. I got close to a solution but ran into a slight hitch. I was trying to fill a texture array that I could use in the shader for the lungs. After struggling with how to do this, I posted to the forum and was delighted to get a response very quickly again! How amazing that is. The next build of Touch will include a quick and good way for me to fill my texture arrays. It makes for a slow process but not one altogether unrewarding.
Meanwhile, Miles processed the audio samples we've been recording, getting them ready for automatic generation of soundscapes based on OSC messages that I'll be sending him. Hopefully we get to that bit tomorrow.
Leila, Thea, and Zoe all went out to record stereo video with the new Canon Xacti cameras. We'll take a look at the footage tomorrow.
We also have some more time in the recording studio tomorrow afternoon. Now that I write it all down, it may be that some of these things don't get done. Who knows. Getting more material at this stage is both great and daunting.
We ended the day at a Lebanese restaurant called Daou. Amazing food.
A song for this post.
More recording in the studio. It was a slow start with a discovery that all our previous recordings had been somehow faulty. They didn't sound bad or anything, just inaccurate in the soundfield aspects. A couple of hours later the problem had been located and we were able to record. We had a list of sounds to individually record:
- words and phrases of uncertainty
- yawning
- dialogue and gossip pronouns (I, you, we, us, together, they, them)
- throat clearing
- breathing
- humming
 | Miles in the recording booth. ← |
June 3 (day 7)
A great day. The new build of Derivative was posted and I was able to have multiple lungs breathing using geometry instancing. It looks great. The Macbook Pro I'm working with doesn't seem to have any problems dealing with the load so far. I was so happy to see the multiple lungs breathing I forgot to take a screenshot or make a movie. As I said enthrall is inversely proportional to documentation in my case. At first I thought the multiple lungs looked kind of busy but when projected large the feeling was different. We displayed them in conjunction with a collection of breathing sounds and it created a kind of reverent space. I liked it a lot.
We ended the day at Sala Rosa, where they have great food and a performance space upstairs. After eating we took in a Vaudeville show by Les Filles Electrique upstairs. And what a show it was. They really made us feel believe all the tricks. It became such a magical place by the end of the show. There were some great visuals and projections. In one they projected talking faces on someone's face. A surprising result of a morphing face. In another they had a box made out of semi-transparent scrims with someone inside. Very interesting 3D kind of effect when projected from either side.
 | A seance right at the beginning of the show. ← |
June 4 (day 8)
A somewhat unsatisfying day. My goal for the day was to get varying videos playing in the instanced lungs. I got close to a solution but ran into a slight hitch. I was trying to fill a texture array that I could use in the shader for the lungs. After struggling with how to do this, I posted to the forum and was delighted to get a response very quickly again! How amazing that is. The next build of Touch will include a quick and good way for me to fill my texture arrays. It makes for a slow process but not one altogether unrewarding.
Meanwhile, Miles processed the audio samples we've been recording, getting them ready for automatic generation of soundscapes based on OSC messages that I'll be sending him. Hopefully we get to that bit tomorrow.
Leila, Thea, and Zoe all went out to record stereo video with the new Canon Xacti cameras. We'll take a look at the footage tomorrow.
We also have some more time in the recording studio tomorrow afternoon. Now that I write it all down, it may be that some of these things don't get done. Who knows. Getting more material at this stage is both great and daunting.
We ended the day at a Lebanese restaurant called Daou. Amazing food.
A song for this post.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Failure, Success, Failure... (day 276)
My goal for today was to get a few pairs of lungs breathing independently, or at least visually distinct from each other. Getting instancing working in Touch took me a little while but it worked and in the end I had a little group of identical lungs breathing. But the animation on the lungs looked wrong because the instancing broke the pivot point of the objects. So my little success turned into a pretty big failure as I tried to alter the pivot on an instance basis, to no avail. I finally decided to write to the Derivative forum. Lo, I heard almost right away from one of their developers who said it's a bug. He'll be releasing a workaround in a day or two. I was almost relieved to hear that my defeat was not solely from rust. The workaround involves writing a shader to rectify the order of transformations. Since I had to write a shader for the lungs anyway, it's not such a hardship. Rather more like a prod.
Tomorrow we spend the majority of the day in the recording/listening studio. It is the last day in the studio so hopefully we will record everything we'll be needing later on.
I found one thing that Vancouver is better at than Montreal: Public Transit. I never realized how smooth and uncomplicated Vancouver's system is until I came here and tried to find my way around a maze of different systems for the bus, metro, and different regions. So many frustrations later I had to admit to myself that it couldn't solely be my unfamiliarity making this a scene out of The Castle. And it's expensive! $5.75 to go one way from where I'm staying in St-Hubert to the Plateau in Montreal.
We played the Tulip Theory production song in the studio today. This song became our theme song when Steve Nichols played it over and over again, particularly when things were tense or tedious. Here it is:
A song for this post.
Tomorrow we spend the majority of the day in the recording/listening studio. It is the last day in the studio so hopefully we will record everything we'll be needing later on.
I found one thing that Vancouver is better at than Montreal: Public Transit. I never realized how smooth and uncomplicated Vancouver's system is until I came here and tried to find my way around a maze of different systems for the bus, metro, and different regions. So many frustrations later I had to admit to myself that it couldn't solely be my unfamiliarity making this a scene out of The Castle. And it's expensive! $5.75 to go one way from where I'm staying in St-Hubert to the Plateau in Montreal.
We played the Tulip Theory production song in the studio today. This song became our theme song when Steve Nichols played it over and over again, particularly when things were tense or tedious. Here it is:
A song for this post.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Happier Here (day 274)
Getting here may have been work but being here does not feel like work at all. I find myself out of my usual context into another one that is strangely familiar. The language is familiar, people's faces are familiar, the way people move is familiar. The parts of my body that remember Quebec awaken and start dancing with each other again. It's a bit awkward at times but the dance is getting more limber and smooth. I look around and it seems that people are happier here. I said as much to Leila and she said "maybe you're the one that's happier here". Indeed, smiling people see other smiling people. I admit that being away from a steady flow of emails and being able to concentrate on production and creative work is like a summer morning after a fresh rain.
I've been trying to remember to document the experience. Documenting is not something that comes naturally to me and if I'm really enthralled by something I usually forget to document. Likewise, failed experiments rarely get any kind of treatment. Still, here is a spotty photo doc of some of the activities we've done so far. I've had to at least get this much written down before the details are forgotten.
May 25th (day 1)
We spent the day getting settled and learning about the soundfield ambisonic microphone. We had plans to take the mic to a bird sanctuary in the evening but it ended up being too windy and the Vancouver part of the team was silently grateful for this reprieve. It had already been a long day. Leila took me to The Liverpool House in St-Henri for dinner. Amazing dinner. Amazing dessert.
May 26th (day 2)
A very hot day. We spent the late morning and early afternoon recording birds (and flowing water) at the bird sanctuary in LaChine, by the rapids. A great time was had by all. When we got back we heard some of the samples in the recording/listening studio. There was some pretty great footage in there. We then made plans to go see Hubble 3D at the Imax but these plans were thwarted because the late show was in French and it was better for Miles to see it in English. We ended up at Leila's for an impromptu homemade dinner. Extreme goodness. We finished the meal at an ice cream parlour near her place where we ran into Lynn Hughes and Alain Thibault. Walking back to her place, we stopped and got a dozen St-Viateur bagels for the next day's lunch.
May 27th (day 3)
Today we recorded many sounds including:
We tried again to make it to the Hubble 3D show but last minute tasks got in the way. We made it an early night and I had dinner with my mom. Sorry, not pics. It's too bad because there were some pretty hilarious moments in there. I'll post some sounds when I have them.
May 28th (day 4)
While Leila was wrangling camera purchases at Concordia, Miles and I parallel-played on our respective computers. He played with speaker setups and sounds, and I played with lung graphics. Just as I was thinking of a lunch break around 2pm, Chantal came in and said a curator from Glasgow would be touring through at about 2:30pm. Miles said we should still have a quick lunch. As we were eating lunch Leila arrived and we told her about the curator. We decided to get something ready to show. Much like the impromptu meal of the day before, Miles and I took the ingredients we had on hand and put something together that wasn't bad at all. The previous day's recordings were very interesting when mixed with images of the lungs breathing and mapped with video. I think we surprised ourselves and it was a wonderful ramp into another stage of the residency.
That afternoon I tried the Sonic Bed by Kaffe Matthews. It's a bed surrounded by speakers which when laid upon gives a kind of sonic massage both auditory and bodily. Very interesting. There is currently a call out for compositions for the bed.
In the evening we went to a Gregorian Chant performance by the Ensemble Scholastiques Neumatiques. It was amazing. We finished the evening at an informal gathering of people performing noise music at which Zoe was performing.
A song for this post.
I've been trying to remember to document the experience. Documenting is not something that comes naturally to me and if I'm really enthralled by something I usually forget to document. Likewise, failed experiments rarely get any kind of treatment. Still, here is a spotty photo doc of some of the activities we've done so far. I've had to at least get this much written down before the details are forgotten.
May 25th (day 1)
We spent the day getting settled and learning about the soundfield ambisonic microphone. We had plans to take the mic to a bird sanctuary in the evening but it ended up being too windy and the Vancouver part of the team was silently grateful for this reprieve. It had already been a long day. Leila took me to The Liverpool House in St-Henri for dinner. Amazing dinner. Amazing dessert.
 | A sculpture I came across on my first walk towards Oboro from the Metro station. It was in front of a very regular Montreal walk-up. I wondered how it came to be. ← |
| Dessert at The Liverpool House in St-Henri. → |  |
May 26th (day 2)
A very hot day. We spent the late morning and early afternoon recording birds (and flowing water) at the bird sanctuary in LaChine, by the rapids. A great time was had by all. When we got back we heard some of the samples in the recording/listening studio. There was some pretty great footage in there. We then made plans to go see Hubble 3D at the Imax but these plans were thwarted because the late show was in French and it was better for Miles to see it in English. We ended up at Leila's for an impromptu homemade dinner. Extreme goodness. We finished the meal at an ice cream parlour near her place where we ran into Lynn Hughes and Alain Thibault. Walking back to her place, we stopped and got a dozen St-Viateur bagels for the next day's lunch.
 | Red-winged black bird at the sanctuary. ← |
| Zoe and Miles recording. → |  |
 | Zoe, Miles, and Stephane learning about soundfield workflow. ← |
| Leila with the plated food. We ate outside on her deck. Menu was Stuffed Portobello mushroom with blue cheese, basil and tomato; Grilled asparagus with reduced balsamic; Tomato cucumber salad with Tzatziki; Gin&Tonic with Basil and Mango. → |  |
Today we recorded many sounds including:
- group laughter
- individual laughter
- banter
- sounds of uncertainty
- breathing, slow and fast
- random phonemes
- singing bowl, tibetan bells
- "I like it", "I don't like it" both normal tone and whisper
We tried again to make it to the Hubble 3D show but last minute tasks got in the way. We made it an early night and I had dinner with my mom. Sorry, not pics. It's too bad because there were some pretty hilarious moments in there. I'll post some sounds when I have them.
May 28th (day 4)
While Leila was wrangling camera purchases at Concordia, Miles and I parallel-played on our respective computers. He played with speaker setups and sounds, and I played with lung graphics. Just as I was thinking of a lunch break around 2pm, Chantal came in and said a curator from Glasgow would be touring through at about 2:30pm. Miles said we should still have a quick lunch. As we were eating lunch Leila arrived and we told her about the curator. We decided to get something ready to show. Much like the impromptu meal of the day before, Miles and I took the ingredients we had on hand and put something together that wasn't bad at all. The previous day's recordings were very interesting when mixed with images of the lungs breathing and mapped with video. I think we surprised ourselves and it was a wonderful ramp into another stage of the residency.
That afternoon I tried the Sonic Bed by Kaffe Matthews. It's a bed surrounded by speakers which when laid upon gives a kind of sonic massage both auditory and bodily. Very interesting. There is currently a call out for compositions for the bed.
In the evening we went to a Gregorian Chant performance by the Ensemble Scholastiques Neumatiques. It was amazing. We finished the evening at an informal gathering of people performing noise music at which Zoe was performing.
 | Waiting for the sonic bed. It was popular. ← |
| Zoe performing in funky Montreal loft. → |  |
A song for this post.
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