Cabinet Of Curiosities

The first show of Apoptosis#1! in the sneak peak for the ArtScience graduates, a whole weekend full of curiosities. We will play our performance about 5 times in the Gemak

Here it is

We are now in the last day of corrections before the setup period. Running in around 20 fps with heavy heavy bass rocking out in the ANNA.

Some technical thoughts

Hey, here Emmanuel:
Ofer asked me to do some posts about the technical elements of the project so we can share it with the people reading this blog, and hopefully giving us feedback.
Ok, I will start with a small introduction. Currently we are developing 'apoptosis' using vvvv and DirectX's shading language HLSL. This decision was made after some weeks trying out different options. On one hand we had the chance to develop the project using QuartzComposer or Jitter, both of available on mac, the platform Ofer and myself are used to work with. In particular I was fond of the idea of using QuartzComposer as it has a fantastic GLSL(openGL shading language) interface and performance, altogether with the possibility of writing plugins using objectiveC, a programming language(more a C extension) that I find very friendly and elegant. It also had a nice and 'cute' mac-ish look.
However I have been interested in trying out VVVV as it uses the amazing DirectX API for rendering visuals. Let's face it, OSX really needs to update their OpenGL implementation as it is missing a lot of nice features. I had some experience with vvvv but since some months ago I started diving on the HLSL dialect, a fundamental feature of vvvv. I am amazed how closely shading is related to the way the system renders the visuals, it almost feels that you need to 'cross' a shader before it reaches the rendering screen, i love it! For my surprise I found HLSL very direct and clean, even more that GLSL. I love the idea of having 'techniques' inside the shader so you can decide the combination of vertex and pixel shader you want to use. By playing with some shading technique you can get superb effects: depth of field, blurs, post production shaders, lights, materials, etc. Also using HSLS allows the access to amazing shading libraries and resources; for instance the last month I started porting some shaders from the NVidia library into vvvv with an almost 'out of the box' approach. It is not surprise that DirectX is so well supported as it is the foundation of the game industry.
Another nice feature inside vvvv is the possibility to use c# to develop plugins. This has been my first experience with this programming language. I am still wondering why they call this language c# and not java# or something as the similarities between both languages are shocking. It reminds me the way java plugins are managed within Jitter. There are a lot of possibilities here for implementing physical behaviors and complex systems. For 'Apoptosis' we have just used a slightly portion of that power but I am sure we will develop more and more implementations using this approach.
We are still dealing with this animal, sometimes worrying more about system related issues and optimization. We are testing our patches on 3 different computers and, as Windows operates under a non-defined hardware basis, we also have noticed some differences in the way different hardware GPU behave. ATI and NVidia seem to react differently to some parts of our code. It is a every day learning process…and we are having fun!

Emergence of 'Apoptosis'

Some snapshots of today’s work with Emmanuel Flores Elias for the project ‘Apoptosis’. We are starting to feel very happy with the results. The depth of field really gives a drama to the material. The most rewarding part is everything is real time! Still, we need to optimize more the system and start adding the audio and performance interaction.

Screen Tests_2 Background

New place to experiment in, new images to work with, some background tests on the screen with a lighted mask behind. me dancing around and emmanuel moving them parameters.
Music ins David Sylvian. (just keep us warm)

Transparent Screen Tests

so Emmanuel and me got togather for a day of fun and no sun in the dark backstage of Koncon Theater to test some options for screens. I think the winner is a white semi Transparent Gauze.
Here is the video (white balance went automatically mad)

overview The Other Other side

Now for the gritty things...
Using still images to make a movie is not that easy, after investigating masks and other After Effects tricks

I found out I really need to go 3D. So I started converting all my images into 3D models using their brightness values to determine Z locations.  I got these huge meshs (planes, and spheres) and I started playing around with them in quartz composer. That was more or less the time I started to work with Emmanuel. and thus began our mysterious journey into vvvv.
 

Just following a thought

Overview The other side

I was looking for a while (and still am!! contact me if you have any) for SEM and other  kinds microscopique images of cells committing suicide. I found a few though a very nice guy called Dennis Kunkel and some phase contrast images from Naama Geva-Zatorsky of the Wiezmann institute of science.
Im afraid I cant post the pictures due to copy rights matters....

Concept Overview

Since ive been working for quite some time on this project there has been a lot of things happening all ready. Ill try to make a brief overview of them-
My last film (Transience) I used macro lenes to make most of it, for this film I wanted to go even deeper into the sub reality so I thought about using microscopes. also I saw thous nice pictures and got hocked on these nice big electron scanning microscopes.
I was looking for a while what should I film with microscopes, everything looks nice with them, but I really wanted it to have meaning... after some research I found out about cell death mechanisms and in particular the process of Apoptosis which is cell suicide.  
I decided to concentrate on that and to build the story around one cell that has decided to commit suicide. I want to take this normal everyday process and make it into drama using light visual and sound to give it an emotional dimension.  

the blog is alive!

welcome to my project.
I had a meeting to day with Emmanuel Flores Elias and he suggested I make a blog to update the world about whats happening with the project.
here it is