Parallel Mode

Working on little soundtracks for my animation sketches. In this first exercise, I was trying to find a com­fortable work flow, leaving space to fill and cut, while working forth and back between video and sound time lines.
I tried to avoid hours of tweaking to make everything sit per­fectly in the mix and got away with a lower quality sha­dow to speed up rendering. However, hope you like the idea.
Mo’ Tunes to come …

 

MoTunes 01

Spot On!

An investigation of what to do with a video beamer and painter foil from the DIY store.
The semitransparent material turned out to have a nice built in glow effect. By twisting, folding, stacking it, parts of the pro­jection became sharp or blurry, which gave the pictures depth.
I was surprised, when I first saw some of the faces on a moni­tor – they looked like digital montages. Looking forward, to use the photos for an upcoming animation project.

 

Screen Shots

Mono is beautiful

The Font CP Mono is inspired by the letter style of British car plates. Initially, it was planned as caps-only in 3 weights.
Every character should fit in the same square, vertically too. Later, I sketched the lower case and based on the square prin­ciple, they got very short ascenders and de­scend­ers.
Over time, some of the raw, mechanical charm of the original got lost in order to keep formal consistency over the range of weights from thin to black and to support legibility.
The OpenType font features also a stylistic set without angled strokes, found in letters like A, K or V.
You can download and use the font as it is, or tweak it to your liking. Please note, that I’m too short on time to provide tech­nical support or implement further features.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liquitype

“Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.” [1] The statement reflects a way of dealing with type as solid matter: blocks, made of frozen lead, inherent dimen­sions and weight.
This in mind, I began a series of motion studies as part of my diploma work on the topic of digital type as a never ending molding process.

Time to Space

A scanner reads single lines of an image, one by one, to put them back together in a sequence which becomes your copy. This happens in a single pass, constant reading speed and the scanned object is typically fixed. One could also use a video camera as scanning device by covering the lens, except for a small slit. A video with a length of 500 frames becomes a pic­ture that is made up of 500 lines. The final result will de­pend on camera action like pan, zoom, rotation and/or the move­ment of the object itself. This can be simulated with a com­posi­ting software by masking the scene.
Some hours of experimentation and there was an after effects template project with several nested compo­sitions, where I could feed motion footage in, hit render and wait for some unusual motion graphics.
For more on the art of slit scanning, visit:
Slit Scan Video Artworks & Research

Luminance to Height

Displacement Mapping is a technique, to generate geometry by assign­ing a height vector to “flat” image pixels. Bright areas are raised up the most, black pixels are not effected. This function can be found in all major 3D Applications, it’s main purpose is to give artificial surfaces a more natural look.
The displacement studies are kind of a misuse by working with extreme displacement settings and low-res, animated textures.
The compressed web versions became pretty blurry, but the stills should give you a better impression of how they look in best quality.

 

 

[1] H. CARTER, 1969 in:
MALOU VERLOMME: “Technological Shifts in Type Design”

 

Words of clip 2 from
ROGER PENROSE, 1994 in: “Shadows of the Mind”

 

Clips

Stills

Slit Scanning

Meta News

For a students research project, I analyzed different types of printed media. I took a yellow press paper, a “serious” daily news paper and (of course) the holy bible. By the single pages, I inspected layout, typography and use of pictures. For better comparison and to pose a statement about the nature of the medium, I generated a meta picture of each.
The whole analysis is worth another article. It’s just to give another example of the meta principle as a tool for visual com­parison. The information of single pages, which are otherwise perceived one after another, is condensed in one meta page and certain visual characteristics become more obvious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meta News