for my 365th entry, here is a video montage of  still photos taken over the last year.  the overwhelming majority of them have appeared as posts on this site.  what a long and interesting year it’s been.

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one year ago today i started this blog with the goal of doing something creative everyday and documenting it here.  i wanted to use this project as a creative catalyst to keep me motivated and help me feel more productive creatively.  i thought if i were really focused i could maybe last a month… i never thought that i would make it this far into the project. i really didn’t.

it has been a really fantastic experience. through keeping this blog i have connected with so many kind and talented people who have shared their thoughts and their work with me.  it has really helped me be more confident in my artistic abilities and less fearful of rejection.  highly recommend an experiment like this to anyone who feels like they need a little push to stay creative… you can really find creativity in your everyday life sometimes you just have to slow down so you can see it.

a lot of people have asked me if i will stop posting things here after the year was up…

i thought about it and decided a few weeks ago that making things and posting them here has become too much a part of  what i do and who i am to quit now.  after taking a few days off (i think that i earned it), i will resume  posting. i don’t think that i will try and hold myself to a daily schedule but instead try and focus on a mixture of bigger long term projects and the kind of smaller one day things that i had been posting throughout the first year.

thanks again to everyone for their continued support, it’s made all the difference. a special thank you goes to my wife nicole. she has been my biggest supporter and i love her dearly.

much love,

marc

p.s. if you have a moment, take a look back through the archive. even i forgot about some of those posts.

so 010 has been pretty great so far… if the rest of the year goes this well i will be more than pleased. here is a short video taken in industrial north portland around the corner from the photography studio. it was all shot on my new digital harinezumi 2. i love the kind of super 8 qualities of the video. also, i’m now 15 days from finishing out one year of blog entries. wow. that happened fast.

(this video shows the midi velocity mapped to saturation, pixelate, zoom out, edges then a combination of all)

i posted about this a few days ago but have now wrapped it all up for public consumption.

Midi-Vidi allows you to control the playback of Quicktime videos with Midi inside of Ableton Live thanks to the magic of Max for Live.  Midi-Vidi divides your video into 12 equal parts based on the length of your video and assigns those parts to Midi notes.  There is also an effects section that allows you to map attributes such as velocity to some simple effects.

Midi-Vidi is based entirely on Cycling 74’s Jitter tutorial #26 with only minor modifications by me. I can’t take any credit for it’s construction.  I hope to use this as a jumping off point and make further modifications in the future to allow for more playability.

enjoy.

Download Midi-Vidi Max for Live plugin

]]> http://unrecnow.com/dust/2093/feed 4 http://unrecnow.com/dust/2080 http://unrecnow.com/dust/2080#comments Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:03:54 +0000 marc http://unrecnow.com/dust/?p=2080

here is a little video that i put together of the midi note output of stretta’s polygome monome app controlling the playback position of a time lapse video in jitter.  i’m in the process of putting this functionality into a max for live patch. could be great for live shows.

here is the most recent edit of my current video project.  i presented the first half of it back on 301 and the second on 308. i think that i’m pretty with the edit.  expect to see a few more vignettes like this in the next few weeks.

bare branches + a rare mostly cloudless day in portland.

hello december.

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here is a little time lapse loop.  give it a moment to load then it should loop back and forth for as long as you have this page open.

enjoy.

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(edit: added music now)

here is a rough version of a little piece of music + video.  the music is all just acoustic guitar processed using the eventide timefactor delay/looping pedal (with a little reverb).  the video is a shot out the window of a moving car processed using a quartz composer tool called g.p.g.

i’d like to fine tune this at some point but i was much to sleepy to continue at the moment.

enjoy.

here are a few stills from an upcoming video project.  it’s focus is on natural light.

another rainy day indoors.  the three of us spent the whole day napping and eating. all good family activities.

here is a video shot from outside our living room window.  the audio is all just of bits of acoustic guitar processed with the wonderful eos reverb.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/11_13_09m.mp3

(if you don’t have flash, or would just like to download the track, you can click here)

here is a little video that i made while driving to the hospital today.

our big news is that our daughter gemma, after nearly 11 weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, will finally be coming home with us.  we will be bringing her home tomorrow (sunday) afternoon.  we are unbelievably happy but understandably anxious.

it’s an odd feeling to know that our routine of twice daily hospital trips will be over and something new will be taking it’s place.

thanks to everyone that has sent their kind and supportive words to us.  it has meant a lot to us.

here’s to a new chapter in our adventure.

last week i started taking a thursday night digital video class at pnca.  i am hoping to finally get to know final cut pro better. i’ve messed around with it a bit but never fully grasped it.

tonight our class went around collecting video + audio to put together a quick project.  the teacher went through a very general timeline of events. using that as a guide it was up to us to capture then edit the material that we collected.

here are a few stills from tonight’s project.

here is  a video using the same time lapse set up as last time.  i want to eventually make a longer video where i cut between multiple days shot at the same angle.

the music is some wurlitzer electric piano with granular processing.

here is a little time lapse video i made from our kitchen window as i made dinner.  the clouds move across the sky as our rice cooker steams up the window…  eventually it gets completely fogged up.  kind of like a low tech fade out.

if you watch closely you can see the flight path of some small planes running through the film.

the music is made up of layers of  field recordings and monome (playing sine waves with a little percussion.)



here is an mp3 of the audio.


http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/091027m.mp3

here are a few short video clips strung together along with a little synthesizer melody.  the video was all taken on the buchineko toy camera while clamped to my sun visor in the car.  i love the super 8 quality it’s video has.

who needs HD?

in other news a few web sites posted little blurbs on my nanopedal this weekend. one of which was the make magazine blog. they went on to also talk about a few of my other projects that i’ve posted here.  thanks make!

a great new photo blog called (not)common people also ran a little profile on me and posted a few of my photos.

the internet was really nice to me this weekend.

thanks internet!

sublimation in action.

today was a pretty good day.  i got to hold gemma for the first time  for well over an hour.  i can’t describe how great it felt.

here is a little ambient visual experiment using water and ink.  the audio is an edit from yesterday’s post. hope you like it.

a time lapse video of the trip from our house to the hospital and back.  we make this drive several times a day to go visit gemma in the nicu. i hope that some day the drive will feel like it goes by this quickly and that she were that much closer to us.

here is a little proof of concept animation i made for a larger video project i’m working on for autistici from the u.k.

it’s a triangle themed music video for a track from his upcoming release.  i have a bunch of ideas relating to folding and unfolding triangles that i want to focus on for it.  i made this to try a technique out that i think could look nice.  more to come soon.

i tried again (with mixed results) to work with the trackmate software to do some motion controlled music experiments.  i think i need to come up with a better light source for my set-up. i think it is much too bright and the computer/camera is having a hard time adjusting.  has anyone reading this had any trackmate success?  please give me some tips.

on a more positive note…

one of my songs has just been released as part of an ambient compilation put out by public spaces lab from barcelona.  i have the honor of being the artist whose piece of music starts the whole thing off.  the album is called ceci n’est pas une pipe and you can download it for free here. it has some beautifully designed artwork that you can print and assemble yourself.  please check it out… there are a lot of really good pieces of music on there.

thank-you public spaces lab!

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here are two 30 second videos that i recorded on my way home from lunch today.  they are my contribution to deelay ceelay’s latest video project for their performance at the pdx pop festival.  they are asking for videos of people doing “anything you think is rad”.  i think bike riding is pretty rad.

you can read their request here.  if you have free time, why not make a video of your own?

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okay, same space needle video as yesterday but now with sound.  the field recording buried in the background is from outside our hotel window in vancouver.  there is a ton of construction happening all over town right now.  they have a lot of work to do before the 2010 winter olympics come around.  good luck to you, neighbors to the north.

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we had another nice day in vancouver today. lots of walking and poking around in little shops around town.  we also met up with jen and jon for a drink after dinner tonight.  they are another awesome creative couple.  it seems like vancouver is full of them!

here is a short little video that i took from the space needle elevator and added some little floating bits to in flash.  i’ll add some music later.

good night.

there are a pair of finches that have been checking out a spot on our front porch for a possible place to build a nest.  some finches built a nest there last year but sadly it didn’t end well. let’s hope it won’t be a repeat of last time.  the music on this video is from the unrecognizable now ‘for sleeping it off’ ep

we made it almost a year ago for a fantastic all-night-long ambient music event that we played down in LA called tonalism. it was put on by the good people at dublab.com + s.a.s.s.a.s.

if you like the music you can find it here (iTunes link)

the strange agency made this great little granular synthesis iphone application called curtis.  it’s named for composer, author, granular synth advocate curtis roads.  this is just a quick little thing i recorded using a captured bit of sound from a thumb piano.  pretty fun little application to play with.

weather wise it was a strange day here in portland.  this afternoon the temperature dropped from 80 to 63 in under an hour. the sky turned dark gray and  the wind kicked up like crazy… then the thunder + lightning started up  i made this time lapse of the clouds and a field recording of the thunder.  you can hear some fire engines in the background.  i heard that there was a fire somewhere in n.portland.

if you don’t have flash, listen here.
otherwise…
http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/090604.mp3

here are some photos and part of a time lapse video that i made of a mushroom growing then dyeing in the soil surrounding a potted plant that we have at home.  it was pretty hot here in portland today. it’s not surprising that this little guys just shriveled up and died. mondays are tough for me too.

here is a little test of an idea that i had a while back that finally got around to trying out.  there is a wonderful place in my neighborhood called the rebuilding center that sells all sorts of salvaged building materials from reclaimed buildings and homes. off and on i’ve seen door bells in the electrical department and wondered how easy it would be to use the solenoids in the doorbell to make a battery operated mallet that could do things like play drums or xylophone (very similar to a door bell).  the answer is… very easy!

i put this little guy together today in about 15min.  the part that took the longest was looking for my drill bits to drill the holes in the little plastic case. ( i always forget where i put them last.)  when matt and i met up to play music tonight i tried it out on an old fire bell and on the lowest string on my baritone guitar.  it was kind of fun to press the little buttons and have it hit a string while messing around with pedals and all that good stuff.

the next step is to split the two solenoids into two different enclosures and then figure out a way to control them via computer (midi).  i know that people have done that kind of thing using the adruino but that is still a bit out of my league.  maybe one of these kits is a bit more my speed.

this video is a time lapse of the cherry blossoms in front of my porch that i recorded this afternoon. i think that they are partially responsible for my allergies this season… but i like them anyway.
the music is something that matt and i recorded this morning out in the concrete hallway that leads up to our practice room in downtown portland. matt is playing an unplugged electric guitar and i am playing a xylophone.
it was recorded with a little akai microphone that originally went with an old reel to reel. 
all natural reverb on this one. no effects or plugins.

the photos are of the little practice amp that we used to pipe music into our hallway echo chamber.

i noticed a few weeks ago on my way to work, that there was a shopping cart next to one of the supports under the fremont bridge. a few days later there was another one… then another… then another… now there are six shopping carts under the bridge in the same little area.  there are a two carts from target, two from home depot one from winco foods another from wild oats. none of which are stores that are anywhere near by. i guess as far as things go, if you were a shopping cart and you could find a little grassy spot under a tree in industrial north portland… why not meet up with some friends and hang out there.

this situation reminds me of these two things…

the first is my lonely objects post from february 28th. the last photo on the page was one of a single shopping cart peeking around the corner.

the second thing is this video that rob tyler made and i made the music for.  it’s an old one but i still like it.  it was just wurlitzer, bass synth pedal, xylophone, a field recording of the beeping carts from fred meyer and korg es-1 recorded to midi disc then edited with protools free.  i’m so glad that ableton live came along.

what a long post.

here is audio of the last 6 or so minutes of the live show that matt and i played last saturday synced up with the visuals that we played along to.
the video was put together using three point and shoot cameras mounted to a single tripod and put together using modul8.

it was a fun show. we really enjoyed putting this piece together. i hope that we get another opportunity to play it live.

my placement of my digital recorder could have been better.. but i think the recording tuned out alright.

here is some test footage of some of the visuals that matt and i are making for next week’s unrecognizable now show.  the video was made from some dual camera footage we shot last week and the audio is from practice this weekend.  sorry the audio is distorted… bad placement of my little recorder in the room.

just a few test stills from the video that we are putting together for our show next week.  the full version will have three camera views for each scene.  it seems to work pretty well with two.

i woke up early today and recorded this little improvisation inside the greenhouse that was behind the cabin we  had for the weekend.  i just used the objects that i found inside as source material (wind chime, a flower pot of broken glass, scrap wood, ball point pen, a glass vase and pebbles) i then stretched, re-pitched and processed bits of it.  it’s pretty long and not much happens… but it was a nice way to kick off my 32nd year.

video taken from atop a chairlift on my second night skiing trip of the year.  music made with the new beta version of Live

you can download the full quality version at the bottom of  this video’s page on vimeo