progosk, March 14, 2008 9:18:25 AM CET
Michael Theodore - Color Dream N°246

oskar nomination?
mov here.
bonus vids: karbala (!); woolgathering.
(via the unparalleled anipages)
         
Give the man a Bravia ad
         
i wish i had some drugs on me
         
advanced beauty

unfortunately offline due to site maintenance, but the stills speak volumes; but as one who's seen the video, i can tell you it's a most beautiful CG shape-shifting cloudy daydream.
         
interesting in terms of visual fx (mov clip; dailymo), matey; however, since the motion is done automatically/algorithmically (seems by some soundsensor), it's fundamentally different: t'ain't animation.
         
Pretty but It doesn’t really get us anywhere does it.? This aesthetic has already been explored onscreen in "What dreams may come" so really this has nothing to say and just ends up looking like a demo real for some software.
         
@progosk
twaz exactly the randomness of human-computer interaction that made me appreciate it (this doesnt mean i dont like theodores work as well; their different approaches - trapcode vs script code? - nothwithstanding, i think the (hi) end results are pretty similar)
         
The Colors from "Color Dream N°246" are just "Esoteric". It's so ugly. I saw a painting from a footbalstar... that tries to be a painter.... an he drwas esoteric shit like this.
         
If this was all done by hand I say this is really good. But, it doesn't really go anywhere and stands as a completely abstract piece that seemed a bit too long for me. Get in there, wow us, and get out.
         
As the creator of this piece, I appreciate all of the comments, pro and contra. I look at all of the animation that I'm doing currently as works in progress. In a few years I'll probably start to have what I consider finished pieces.

This is largely because I'm still working out both the actual technique and a personal formal language. (There aren't a ton of models for what I'm trying to do, although Fischinger, Lye, Brakhage, et al. are obviously influences.)

I do many experiments to get to results that I'm interested in developing. There isn't any algorithm that spits it out for me (nothing against algorithms), especially with respect to color (and there I pretty much worship at the altar of Kandinsky, Matisse and Van Gogh). That said, I certainly make use of parametric things like (modulated) sinusoidal oscillation, etc.

A side note regarding Bravia--the best looking representation of this stuff is on a really nice flat screen tv, without question. SIGGRAPH projected this piece with a sweet 2K projector (using some custom codec, and starting from an uncompressed hi-def master), and while I liked the way it looked there, I usually like it best on the tvs that I can't possibly afford....

cheers, m
         
hi, m. just briefly, could you go into the hard&software you use, or your workflow at all?
         
sure--

i start with still images, either created on the computer, in watercolor (and then scanned), or some combination of analog and digital. then i usually use max/msp/jitter to "explore" the stills, and by explore i mean to make them move by rotation, zooming, split apart, displacing with noise, layering, etc. the final step is using synthetik's 'studio artist' as a quasi-rotoscoping tool. i spend a good deal of time creating custom paint patches, and using these to get the final texture.

so, the colors come from stills, the motion comes from jitter, and the texture comes from studio artist.

(some exceptions--sometimes i start with either particle systems, such as particle illusion, and sometimes i start with 3d stuff done in cinema 4d. of the pieces that are linked on this page, only karbala uses particle systems, and none started as 3d)...