The summer is in full swing, my blog has been quiet for the last few weeks, and I’ve been struggling to nail down one big opening date for my studio party – HOWEVER, I finally decided to set it in motion and see what happens!
Next weekend I’ll be having an official open studio night, Saturday, August 7th, featuring multi-projector live video mixing, and a poster exhibit displaying my new design series. It is a private party, so please, if you are interested in coming – Email me to RSVP.
If you can’t make the opening party on the 7th, you’ll be happy to know that another date is also potentially in the works for a Kodomo show on Saturday, August 21st. Hope everyone is having an adventurous and creative summer!! See you soon.
After every trip, I am immediately fueled into an active wanderlust, longing to go somewhere else…
I always come up with the most visual ideas when I’m outside my routines and experiencing different cultures, conversations and vibrations of people in other places. Traveling is something I became obsessed with years ago when I first started designing. Having only been back in town for a week, I can happily say that Austin sparked a new light for me. It’s the beginning of spring and the beginning months of my studio. There are good energies all around, exciting shows on the way and hopefully more travel in the near future. New visuals on the way!
By Day 3 I was hitting my stride and in full information-absorption-networking-documenting mode! I trekked to the convention center with my laptop & I began my day with a panel called Real Time Video Blogging led by the makers of Rocketboom, a witty, successful NYC-based daily video news blog, and Amanda Congdon of Sometimesdaily.
A lot of the session seemed pretty common sense to me, but there were good tips to remember. They suggested that if you are interested in starting your own documentary style blog series, to first and foremost, always get a lawyer involved and make sure you are legally contracted, no matter what the project big or small. Find your personal niche to write about, create a mission statement and figure out who your audience is. Then get involved with larger projects that attract a similar audience so that you can attach your name to them and generate threads of new contacts back to your site.
A great site for copyright free stock video material to use in your blog if needed: archive.org. I’ve known about them for years, but haven’t yet put any of it to use in my own work. Personally I think they need a more organized website to be useful for my needs, but there is a tremendous amount of free material on there.
Video blogging in itself is something I’d like to try my hand at, but have never been good at turning the camera on myself or interviewing people at random. Those are two things I’d like to work on for future documenting practice. After this experience at Burning Man, I promised myself I would learn how to speak in front of the camera properly!
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On Day 2 my number 1 priority was seeing Michel Gondry in person. He is one of my all time favorite visionary heros, who has inspired me endlessly in creative projects. I waited an hour to see the man and get 4th row at his seminar. Gondry echoed a similar practice to something Ze Frank had mentioned in Day 1’s panel. The emphasis to pay attention to every single off-the-wall idea that you have. Don’t dismiss it out of fear or logic. Pay attention and put energy into them. Give them breath before you kill the idea. Test it out and reinvent each step of the way to be as open as possible to all concepts.
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I finally have a quiet moment to myself to digest, decompress and formulate information. I have an overwhelming amount of data swarming through my head and need to transcribe it all along with the words scribbled throughout my trusty notebook.
Day 1 began when I left the windy rainstorm that took over NY, as I departed Laguardia at 6AM. I was on 2 hours of sleep and on the cusp of delirium. Somehow in that state of mind I thought it’d be a good idea to upgrade my flight to first class since the self-check in machine asked me if I wanted to. The big shiny button was too enticing not to push. Plus it was 5AM and I was feeling claustrophobic and sleep deprived. Though for the most part I just really wanted some decent space to set up my laptop and do some editing. Yes – Editing at 6AM! I was in the mood for some god awful reason. Most likely motivated by the fact that later that day I was aiming to hit a Final Cut “Supermeetup” that would allow me to share my work with a group of editors. I had to cut down a reel into 10 minutes, so I spent that morning cutting deliriously before the sun rose.
This is my 4th trip to Austin, and yet only my first experience at SXSW. I organized my schedule to reflect over 95 panels during the course of my 5 day stay. Saturday I arrived, just narrowly escaping the hurricane behind me, and got in just in time to catch a conversation late in the day with Ze Frank.
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To celebrate some good news that I will be posting about in upcoming days, I’ll be giving out my new DANGER PINS at the next few performances. Just come over and say hi!
Hope to see you all at the Kodomo + Danger show tomorrow night at Monkey Town! I can’t think of a better way to bring in the new year…
I’m keeping my fingers crossed… I’ll be calling a couple of potential design studio spaces this week to see about taking my biz out of my crooked little apartment and into town. Wish me luck!!
A drawing sample from students in class
Friday night I trekked out to Washington, DC to join the Motion Graphics Festival. The workshops all sounded wonderful, but it especially piqued my interest when I read that VJ Shantell Martin was teaching a workshop in live-painting. On the practical side of what I do, my instinct was to take the After Effects class, but the VJ side of me couldn’t let go of the opportunity to hang with other visualists from around the world, so I signed up.
The class introduced the idea of using a wacom tablet mixed with painting software to drawing live and intuitively to music, while recording your session and being able to cut it up and re-use it as animation in performance or later for editing. I found this particularly useful because I never record what I’m doing directly from the screen. There is a program called I Show You which does this perfectly, creating a high res quicktime file.
While much of my personal VJ style has been to mix motion graphics & after effects work, with video files, I’m interested in seeing what direction the concepts I learned in class could take on for me. Definitely a lot of fun, and definitely a new tool to play with and explore.
Thanks to all of you who I met this weekend. I hope our paths cross again soon!
New projects are underway for upcoming summer festivals and collaborations. One that I’m particularly excited about is a project called Chrysalis. It’s an inflatable, multimedia dome, which stands at 100′ in diameter. 12 projectors will be affixed and mounted on the inside to create a 360 degree live video performance. DJs, VJs, musicians, dancers, and puppeteers will be performing from within, and will create an incredible, experimental, interactive, multimedia experience. The project was conceptualized by my friends of Waking Dream and Light Harvest Studio.
Tonight I designed a flyer to promote a few upcoming fundraiser dates for the project. I’ll be projecting visuals in the dome on Saturday July 18th, with Waking Dream, Light Harvest, and Levitation Theory. There will be endless amounts of music both nights, and camping available for free.
Make sure to mark your calendars for July 17th, 18th, and a pre-event fundraiser at the House of Love on July 11th.
Click here for location of the dome in Google.
Photos below taken by Waking Dream and Light Harvest Studio.
