BLOG @ PLAYAWEDDINGS.COM

Video Mixbot - Movie Remix 1 on Vimeo

I've been experimenting with a program called Isadora.It's an object oriented programming tool for video processing. I've created a program that detects the relative volume of music, when the volume enters the top of the range it sends a trigger. This volume spike often happens on the drum hits so it makes it a halfway decent rhythm approximator. I divide these triggers are divided by 4, 8, 16, etc. to break them down into measures as opposed to beats. In this clip, every 8th trigger sends the video clip to a random spot.

The effect is to re-edit the film to the rhythm of the music. The film is broken into four parts so that it jumps around every 1/4th of the film, this maintains some narrative thread. In addition, the speed of the clip is directly tied to the relative volume. Louder passages go faster, quieter parts go slower.

My idea was to provide different ways to present content in social places like bars. The computer can be loaded up with whatever movies you like and it can play continuously, synched with an external sound source.

This clip is from the film is "For All Mankind," an excellent documentary about the Apollo missions. The music is Air, the cuts are all generated by the music.



Video Mixbot - Movie Remix 2 on Vimeo

Same concept as previous clip.

Here the first half of the clip is footage from "The Wizard of Oz." Can't miss with those images. The second is the Beatles movie "A Hard Day's Night." I love the cinematography of this film. It is beautifully shot and really dynamic. It's well suited for the auto-remix application.



Video Mixbot - Graphics 1 on Vimeo

This is a different module of the same program. The clips here are drawn from a bin of graphic clips that I've collected, some are mine, others I found on the net. There are two layers of video and the triggers are mapped to slightly different parameters for each layer.

When I go out I see big screen TVs playing ESPN with the sound off and the captions on and I'm always annoyed when I catch myself staring up and reading the screen. It just seems like such a strange phenomenon. So I created this to utilize these screens in more creative and interesting way. This is what I do when I don't have wedding work.