d-os AV/blog

Photo Biennale | Topos

tv spot for the photographic exhibition held at the Museum of Photography (and various other venues) in Thessaloniki. created at beetroot. i produced the music as a tribute to the OneDotZero soundtracks by Nick Ryan.

beetroot team wins 3rd MEGA ΕΒΓΕ Award ! and then some …

it did come as a surprise, at least to me, as this is the 3rd MEGA ΕΒΓΕ in a row ! congrats to all teamsters, many thanks to our supporters, and no thanks to particular ‘anonymous‘ shitheads for making their best to disqualify the Marsheaux video ΕΒΓΕ Prize by means of false accusations.
thank you, you fucking cunts & donkey-punch biatches, whoever & wherever you are, for further solidifying my adamant faith in the meta-greek sleeze and abysmal genetic (or so it seems) predisposition to lie, falsify & backbite.

vile, spite & resentment of this magnitude won’t get you that far ahead in the game, you know. it does take too much of ‘working class’ resilience, irreparable emotional injuries and dear personal sacrifices in order to keep up with this line of work/lifestyle. shame.

here’s the winning entry once again:

more ΕΒΓΕ 2010 … valiant to vile ..

here’s the two introductory (category) videos created by beetroot for the ΕΒΓΕ 2010 awards. i did a quick sound design job on both of them, as well.

ΕΒΓΕ w.i.p.

here’s a few stills from the two introductory video pieces i’ve been preparing for the ΕΒΓΕ2010 awards at beetroot.
all done entirely in 3dsMax with a little help from PFlow scripting and reactor cloth.

EXTRAWELT video on STASH #67 !

an unexpected and  great honour indeed !

the EXTRAWELT (“Was Übrig Bleibt”) video piece is now featured on the current issue of STASH magazine !
this is a link to the trailer and here’s the actual piece below :

you can actually follow (comment & vote) my vids both on youTube as well as VIMEO !

fena – hot air balloon

here’s another one for FENA created at beetroot.

human error

this is beetroot’s short video piece submission for the athens video art festival (7th-9th May 2010 | “Technopolis”)

10 years of megaron logo treatment

here’s the motion logo treatment for the ‘megaron’ of thessaloniki. created at beetroot.

it consists of particles animated under force influence from target to target. i did the music to suit last night as a study on Penderecki.

Tags: beetroot, logo, megaron

more on “summer” by marsheaux!

now part of the permanent “official” Trapcode Gallery !!

http://trapcode.squarespace.com/

see? it really pays to use the best particle system for motion graphics in the world !

thank you Peder Norrby !

Tags: beetroot, marsheaux, out of line records, particular, summer, trapcode, undo records

museum of photography

here’s a wee little logo treatment for our city’s museum of photography. created at beetroot.

Tags: beetroot, museum of photography

the video for marsheaux is now part of ‘Trapcode Gallery on Vimeo’

Trapcode Gallery on Vimeo is an Album created by Peder Norrby.
See it here: http://vimeo.com/album/70879

this is a tremendous honour, as i consider Peder Norrby to be the most important plugin developer (for after effects), and an utterly inspiring genius!

extrawelt – Was Übrig Bleibt

golgotha and circle closes..

here is the video for EXTRAWELT‘s “Was Übrig Bleibt” (Traum Schallplatten Köln ©2009).

unfortunately, this should have been finished and released a lot earlier, in the fall of last year, however, things got slightly out of hand due to, somewhat, severe extraneous circumstances (äußere Umstände)…

during the development period i have had the chance to do extensive experimentation with very complex particle behaviours and liquid simulations which was utter fun!

most of the renderings were generated with FumeFX and the brilliant Krakatoa (i do prefer the grainy renders to the voxels, still!).

all of the visual elements and even the space warps and particle forces have been animated (via scripting) upon spectrally extracted audio parts.

i have also used a bit of MaxMSP- jitter in order to generate & synchronise the offset contours (of the CG terrains) based on both luminance, as well as, spectral (audio) information.

the resulting algorithms, under very low offset values created the ‘crystal-ised’ / ‘mountains of sound’ look for the conclusion of the piece.

finally, i have to apologise to EXTRAWELT, yet, once again, for the tremendous delay in execution. and, also, state, that they are one of my top bands, – especially their stuf on Traum which veers more on the ‘intelligent’ & even ‘electro’ side of things.

get their stuff online at boomkat and enjoy the visuals!

Tags: 3ds max, after effects, cocoon, extrawelt, fumefx, jitter, krakatoa, maxmsp, particular, trapcode, traum, was uebrig bleibt

marsheaux : summer

ok then, here is the finalised video conceived & carried out at beetroot for the band marsheaux in all its 4:3 glory ! the track is called “summer” and it was published by OutOfLine GmbH ©2009.

this second video is a montage of some of the procedures that i had to undertake in order to complete the task.
some of the stuff here, was crudely screen captured (for the showcase) and thus, jerky due to dropped frames ..

the first bits present a few of the steps that had to be taken, in order to 3d track existing summer-y and urban footage (of quite low-rez to be honest..) and painstakingly extract the 3D camera translations (after many tracking passes per scene), as well as, some sort of geometry & ZDepth information (based on the calculated point clouds).

the next step involved the importing of the point cloud data in my 3D software of choice, the refinement (by hand) of the camera data and the recreation of the approximate geometries and matte/shadow & reflectivity surfaces, as needed (on top of the backplates).

when all these were done the ‘protagonistic’ (sic!) geometries were added, bone-rigged, shaded, lit and rendered in all available passes.
i also, usually, like to extract 3D light information and then pass it on to After Effects along with the rest of the stuff (3D camera, point clouds, particle sources and video layers -particularly the normals!) in order to help me in the compositing process.

The compositing involved a lot of grading, re-shadowing and re-lighting (completely with CG lights) of the individual scenes. these were all, then, edited together and re-graded into a coherent (?) whole.

for some parts, i had to devise complex scripts for the bubble and water motion parts, made entirely out of (meta-blob) particleFlows in Max.
Another breakthrough, came about as the project was nearing completion with some amazing mandelbrot raytracing algorithms which helped aesthetically re-shape all the chorus parts of the video. those detailed implicit surface effects where created with the use a brand new julia fractal algorithm which works in true 3D.

in all, this has been huge fun, although it required a tremendous amount of work both in terms of pure math & physics (for the sims), as well as, huge amounts of manual roto work. the beetroot team have been of great help throughout this, especially in terms of the all-important psych factor ! enjoy a sort of a making-of montage :



now… for those ‘in the know’… this is one more project which could never have been completed without the brilliant Trapcode stuff by the utter genius that is mr. Peder Norby !

The jellyfish tentacles are, indeed, a hair&fur system scripted to suit.

no! Andrew Kramer’s Optical Flares wasn’t, obviously available at the time of working on this video, neither was the Knoll 3D Flare utility by RedGiant. I had to either hand animate the 3D lights and flares in After Effects, and/or do lots of scripting with a great deal of help by the equations of Dan Ebberts.

the soundtrack is an unsolicited (by the band..) edit that i did on the actual track (leaving out the vocal parts), with the addition of the true loves of my life : the KR55 and the 808 ! it was all performed in a little over a couple of hours last night, on the Ableton Live Suite!

Tags: beetroot, CGI, marsheaux, music video

ew_update

so, despite the horrible cold that i’m currently suffering, here’s a few more stills from the ExtraWelt video which i’m currently finishing.

Lots and lots of particles going through fluid and fume simulation algos, some rendered with Krakatoa, others via VRay in 3DSMax. The hardest bits were the 3d crystal structure sims in order to emulate a terrain movement of sorts for the last part of the video.

a couple of seasonal vids for beetroot

the first one’s for FENA’s the winter sale and it cause epilepsy ! jeez… i did the soundtrack in one frantic saturday afternoon followed by a night which i do not wish to remember…

the second is a seasonal greetings e-card for one of our clients at beetroot and it was all painstakingly keyframed by hand…

the music i did on this occasion, represents my more .. ahem.. retro/romantic side ..

010..

started out as a complete cluster-fuck …

however, i’ve managed to get over some serious med. shit i’d been dealing with, and am currently hard at work, trying to finish off two video projects (Extrawelt and Funckarma), which i, honestly, couldn’t be concerned with during the past 9 months or so…
hopefully they’ll all be finished, polished and uploaded within the next 10 days !

i’m also, re-doing my (defunct for years) myspace page !

fena fall09 for beetroot

as of september 1st 2009 and after an almost 3-year-long adventure i am very happy and excited to be back with my old friends at beetroot !

here’s a commercial spot for FENA involving some pretty complex c.g. hand & finger modeling, rigging and elaborate animation.

and, yes, for those in the know, the soundtrack is indeed making use of the free music-box samples for NI Kontakt given away over at kore-noisepages a few months ago

oh boy … oh well …

.. i guess, i shall overcome…

a quick-montage..

here’s a wee quick-montage i prepared today.. i’ve no stamina to do a proper reel yet ..
for the soundtrack, i edited down the track woodfaced by funckarma.

w.i.p. funckarma: Kinnex

here’s a few stills from the latest video i’m working on for Funckarma (nl). it’s taking a bit long due to the huge amounts of fragmentation & debris particles for the explosion of the fully rigged body, as well as, the fluid simulations. i expect it to be finished by the end of the moth! oh… the track is called “Kinnex” and it’s taken from their latest album “Vell Vagranz” (essential purchase imho)!

i am doing the whole piece in 3dsMax & After Effects with a little bit of Realflow.