jonnybaker

gorgeous loops

it's been quite a remarkable few months on proost. wonderful content has just made its way to us as if by magic! we've had seasons before where we've had to do much more searching it out. this month on proost we have two new artists which we always love...

tim dendy is a london based freelance video maker, vj and photographer who is in moot. years back we did a series of worship images in a video tape as it was then between the ground breaking collective one small barking dog and grace. anyway he has created 7 movie loops using time lapse photography that are really gorgeous - VJ Loops 4. tim's loops seem to blend both the beauty and fast paced nature of life in the city. if you look on the VJ loops 4 page you can watch one of the loops there. in keeping with the ever shifting realm of technology we have made these loops hd size - i.e. great quality and size.  

then we have an album dark matter from a feckless boy. they hail from scotland and their music is soulful, aching and spiritual. there's something in the scottish soil that seems to cultivate this sort of soulful artistry in wonderful measure. have a listen to the preview track beza's song on the album page.

on the subject of which...

(the subject that is of the last blog entry) i have added a few loops to vimeo - speed of light | chair | walker | tunnel vision

speed of light from jonny baker on Vimeo.

advent movie and VJloops2

unwrap our darkness from jonny baker on Vimeo.

following the advent card i posted i have had so much good feedback on it that i decided to make a movie with a few more lines from cheryl lawrie's christmas confession in hold this space. i used the movie at cms carol service on weds and played sufjan stevens version of o come o come emmanuel along with it as the opening to the service. anyway, it being christmas and all that i have added it to vimeo and if you log in or sign up (which is free) you can scroll down the page and download it for free... if you are a subscriber to proost it is also in the download section of the site. thanks cheryl for the beautiful words.

if you are not a mac user i don't know how what i'm about to say compares with powerpoint as i never use it, but i use keynote (and arkaos at times) for presentations. keynote is so simple but does what you want it to - i'm a big fan. this movie originally ran in keynote. to make it i dragged the movie in and then set it to loop in the inspector. then each line of the movie is a build that runs for a round 15 seconds. but here's the neat bit - you can trigger the builds automatically with a delay before each one if you like. so put the slide on and the the whole thing plays. to turn it into a movie for somewhere else is a bit more tricky. the problem (and i don't have the latest version of keynote so don't know if that has been improved) is that if you export a presentation as a movie it only runs a movie through once even if you have set it to loop. so to get round this i created three slides and had two lines on each slide so that those transitions fitted with one run through of the movie. the transitions between slides when the movie exported were a little bit clunky so i then deleted a few seconds of the transition using quicktime (pro) and you can see the end result. did you want to know that? i have no idea. but i am making it a worship trick.

anyway this month on proost our upload is 5 movie loops - VJloops2 all filmed by me on the 5dmkii which takes such wonderful movies. they include the movie of the sky lanterns so the movie above is an example of how you could use a loop like this. you can actually watch all the loops in vimeo (though not download them). they are sky lanterns | carwash | candle hand | sparkle | fireeater . my favourite is still carwash - the first ever loop i took on the camera!

now i wish i'd waited

now i wish i'd waited - the iDJ2 looks a whole lot better than the iDJ...

the NuVJ looks like fun as well... anyone tried it?

vj podcasting

i feel like i've hardly got my head around podcasting but seems like video podcasting is also going to be all the rage (though requires good bandwidth)...

ben hanbury gives a round up of vj podcasting

chelsea vs barcelona and onedotzero free night - looks like a good week ahead

am delighted to say i have got tickets for chelsea vs barcelona on weds night. can't wait... sadly i only got two tickets so harry has to stay behind (sorry harry!). the game last year was fantastic - i love the big european games...

if you are in london this week and want a good free event, the V and A museum have a late night event transvision on friday with onedotzero and VJs in galleries - it really looks like it should be good. it's my birthday the next day so a few of us are going along and then on to abbaye which is about 10 minutes walk away for belgian ales afterwards. if you are around see you there. the blurb on the web site says

for this one-time event, onedotzero has invited over 20 key creatives from diverse fields, representing the full breadth of moving image programming that onedotzero explores.

across motion graphics, music videos, short films, interaction design, live audio–visual performances, music, and architecture, featured artists will include airside, hi-res!, trevor jackson, allofus, the light surgeons, d-fuse, intro, jason bruges, neutral, peepshow, phillip o' dwyer, pre-loaded, sennep, tank.tv, universal everything, usman haques, and united visual artists.

Technorati Tags: onedotzero, V&A

netlag video - worship trick 57

thanks to bob and jon for the heads up on Netlag - a video which is the world made up of flickering images. i've added it as a worship trick. i haven't used it but be ideal for background to prayer/intercession. the direct url to the movie is Netlag.mov (15mb). if anyone knows where to get a higher resolution copy let me know.

it's worth a look at the rest of the films on pleix.net - i've got a couple on either creative review dvds or onedotzero dvds or both. ben hanbury has also blogged about this with his faves. sometimes is excellent - would have fitted well with our september grace where we smashed a mirror and plates and wanted images of empires collapsing. though for that we used radiohead's go to sleep followed by lemon jelly's shouty track which were also stunning...

Technorati Tags: onedotzero, pleix, radiohead

coldcut album launch

went to the launch party of coldcut's new album sound mirrors at cargo in london last night. it's a great venue and was a treat to see coldcut mixing up their music and visuals behind a bank of computers and gadgets. they played several of the old classics - timber, people hold on, revolution, atomic moog... as well as a few off the new album. the new album features several guest vocalists which i suspect is why they didn't do more of it. house legend robert owens turned up to sing...

the evening had several technical hiccups which was vaguely reassuring. a highlight was actually a freestyle hip hop encore which included some sharp witted battles between the night's two mcs. feels good to attend the first gig of 2006!

Technorati Tags: coldcut

more footage from the bbc

uk readers, the bbc have made more footage available following their superstar VJ clips. this time it's 80 clips of news footage. it's an experiment so won't be up there for ever so go and have a look soonish. (thanks ben)

[update] i have spent a while browsing through and downloading some clips including the berlin wall coming down and the poll tax riots - amazing stuff. but one of my favourite clips is in the superstar VJ section with footage of mobile phones when they first appeared and looked like bricks - how technology changes eh!?...

Technorati Tags: bbc, news, footage

VJs for greenbelt06

today i had a day of meetings (most of which were of course at the scooter cafe)...

it was great to finally meet bryce and fellow traveller from fusefactory, who create soundscapes and VJ in clubs and festivals across europe. we talked about them playing/mixing/performing at greenbelt this year. it's by no means in the bag but they are keen and we are keen so it'll probably happen which would be great. the alt worship venue new forms has had plenty of visual projections and so on but it's time there was some more of that spilling out across the festival... was also good to catch up with shannon.

in the morning i met chris and kerry (i think) who are training to be episcopal priests in the US and are over trying to learn about what's happening in mission, emerging church, alternative worship and all that. it's encouraging to meet young episcopalians with a vision for that. so we chatted about fresh expressions, mission shaped church, alt worship, ReSource and so on. i was chatting with paul (a friend at cms) and i had a similar conversation with karen ward a while back - maybe it would be worth a small get together of episcoplians into this stuff with a few brits?... and paul suggested it should be somewhere else in the world.

then this afternoon i met with jim curran who has taken over the role as secretary of the GFE - this is a partnership group that has done some really good stuff over the last few years, especially with support for rejesus and initiatives in mission and spirituality .

VJ superstars - worship trick 31 [second series]

the bbc have come up trumps (again)...

i contacted the bbc a while back to enquire about using their archive video footage and the price i got quoted was frankly absurd. so it's great to see that they have developed a route for making archive footage available for non commercial use.

it's a trial with the creative archive license. 100 clips have been made available to download and use free under terms of the license. it seems that VJs have been uppermost in their thinking... the only bit of bad news is that the terms of the license are restricted to the UK only. (i can feel the groans coming from downunder and across the atlantic).

it's brilliant news (at least for those of us in the uk). and i'm making VJ superstars worship trick 31

Technorati Tags: vj, worship tricks, alternative worship

arkaos upgrade

arkaos 3.5 is out. i have upgraded (free if you have v3). not time to try it out but VJ village has...

processing also looks interesting but no danger of me having time to explore that either...

vj loops

solotanz | raser | paint - all from eyetrap

recycled tv - from ben hanbury

(thanks craig and vj village)

following the vj trail

VJ village and marko - two blogs i have added to my list...

following the vj trail i restumbled across trigger motion which has a file sharing section i referred to back at worship trick 58. anyway worth a revisit as there are plenty more flash files. i liked turntable and these crosses which i think i may have blogged about before. i never could get the flash texts to work in arkaos. i have since realised that i needed to publish them as flash 5 files and then they do...