Nati Frinj 2013 - part 1

The dust has settled on the 2013 Frinj Festival and, after a week of being gut-wrenchingly,  head-poundingly, bed-riddenly, ill I'm starting to feel vaguely recovered (both from the festival and subsequent sickness). Almost human.

Lots of good bike powered things this year (if I do say so myself). No single big show as in years gone by, but rather a whole suite of smaller things. This was part of a deliberate attempt on my behalf to avoid another high stress all or nothing moment like the final showing Highly-Strung show of 2011...

Basically just spreading myself so thin I couldn't possibly fail at everything.

Genius, or idiocy?

Only time will tell.

Right now my gut response is that it was more of a juggling weasels experience than a pushing a rhinocerous into box type experience but not really less stressful in any meaningful way.

Still a few good things came out of it. A few things I'm really quite pleased with.

Such as the dueling unicycle puppets, concieved by me and realised by Anthony Schellens. Its a race and these larger than life-sized puppets get propelled around their course by two punters pounding away on their respective stair-masters.

And then there were the games, a series bike-powered virtual reality machines, my first experiment with the Oculus Rift and still very much a work in progress. With the help of an arduino (and another big learning curve), I managed to take a bike covered in sensors and hook it up to the rift to give festival goers their first taste of Virtual reality (in exchange for a pint of sweat). It really feels like there's a lot of potential for this and its definitely something I plan to flesh out in the near future.

And last but by no means least... "Somethings afoot in the dead of the night" a performance event and LED lighting spectacular with 8 Foot Felix where the entire energy needs of the show were created by just four bikes with the audience being invited to step up, take a turn on the pedals and help to make the show happen. It was really create to have the band throw themselves into this so completely and embracing the spirit of experimentation and risk taking that has always been the strength of the Frinj. I'm really happy with what we managed to achieve with a whole bagful of unknowns and not a whole lot of time to bring it together.

I'll come back and revisit each of these three bits with loads more photos, videos and a bit of behind the scenes type stuff but just wanted to get something out there for now,  just to prove to myself that it all happened.

Thanks so much to the Frinj folk, the committee and the volunteers for all pulling together and making this the most action packed festival yet. And thanks especially to Callum and Anthony for stepping in to pick up all the pieces I'd scattered so widely and helping to turn them into something better than I could ever have done on my own.  Thanks also to the funding bodies VicHealth and Festivals Australia for having the vision to back us in the development of these ideas.

The Rhyme of The Ancient Merino

The Rhyme of the Ancient Merino...

...In full...


 
The Rhyme of the Ancient Merino from dave jones on Vimeo.

The story is based upon the 50 year history of the ACT (Arapiles Community Theatre) and the recent influx of new arrivals and the changes that has brought about. The puppets were constructed life sized from local farm machinery and filmed in-situ where possible the wheat-fields surrounding the town, the local grain silos and the nearby mount Arapiles.

The film was made in memory of Tim Beohm who, amongst many other things, was the president of the ACT for most of its existence.

With its life sized puppets made of old farm machinery sometimes film haing off the side of the nearby Arapiles or the grain silos, bringing this film is probably still the hardest thing I've ever tried to do.

Hats off too to Ian Van Gemeren too for an fantastic score. And everyone else who helped with the animation, there were a lot of long days and late nights that went into this one.

Enjoy

Feed Development Video

Here is a 5 minute edit from some of the Feed development workshops (mostly from the Natimuk workshops).


Feed: Development from dave jones on Vimeo.


Currently working towards the next Nati Frinj Festival. We've been extremely lucky with our funding applications this year and it looks like a lot,lot, lot of good things are starting to come together. Worth another blog post in its own right.

soon...




....no really!

Disembodied heads - Feed Development Part 5

Nina.

The voice of the Feed.

She is Violet's personal Feedtech assistant. Benign at first, then increasingly less so as the story goes on and Violet's situation worsens.


We still haven't decided if shes the manifestation of someone in a remote call center or computer generated entirely.

The mouth responds to an audio Feed, generated by one of the performers on stage with a microphone.

 

Full control of the head, eyes, mouth, eyebrows, blinking etc, controlling Nina's face was the most complicated of all the tasks as I'd set up.

Sometimes two hands just weren't enough.

TouchOSC is capable I think of sending up to 10 controls simultaneously but my brain starts to melt once I try and think about more than three things at the same time. Ultimately Ill probably set up a bunch of buttons that just trigger pre-composed sequences but for now its all hands on deck.

 

Ricochet - Feed Development Part 4

The characters play a game called Ricochet near the start of the story that basically involves slamming into one another and trying to rack up points by hitting the bouncing glowing bits. Again, not really a scene that was pivotal to the story but an opportunity to really try and get the tracking sorted out.

 

We did two tests one with  the players being tracked with a kinect and the other just with me tracking them manually on the iPad and all this was hooked to an actual working game so that the actors could just try and play the game rather than trying to act like they were playing a game. The still images don't really do justice to it but the difference between the quality of the actors movement when their bodies were actually being tracked and and when they were just pretending to play the game was startling. When they were actually being tracked you could see them crouching, ducking and moving with much more of a sense of purpose than when they were just pretending which mostly involved spectacular leaps. The problem for now is that when they were jumping around and crossing over  each others paths, the tracker would get confused about who was who and the players would find that they were suddenly scoring own goals. This was a problem that I could avoid when I was manually tracking but, when I did that, the whole cause and effect sensation was broken. It might be possible to mount the kinect in the roof looking straight down on the players so they never cross over but my feeling is still that some kind of RF/WiFi tracking where each player has a unique id is the way forward. The game visuals could do with a bit more tarting up too really, I imagine something like plasma pong that you jumped around inside of would be absolutely mind blowing for actors and audience like.

UpCar™ Blues - Feed Natimuk Development Part 3

I think the UpCar™scenes were one of my favourite experiments thus far. Not all that pivotal to the plot, more of a means of getting Violet and Titus from one scene to the next but I was really keen to have a go at updating this...

(image source movietom.wordpress.com)

The old rear projected screen behind the stationary vehicle was a classic staple of 50s and 60s cinema and I was itching to try it in a theatrical setting and put my own twist on it, not just projecting the background, but the car as well. Unlike the old cinema version, the car in Feed is free to turn in 3D and move about the stage depending on which way its facing the background stream. The two passengers are seated on the moving table. The actors, with only their faces, are seated on the moving table just behind the sharks-tooth scrim as bright colours in the projection obscure them except where the windscreen which has been left black to reveal their faces. 

Theoretically it would be possible to track the passengers as they moved around and update the projections accordingly but for the time being I was just tracking them manually with the ipad.

I could control the rotation, left right up down and tilt as well as the X Y and Z position of the car in space and it was pretty easy to keep up with the performers who were moving the passengers around on the stage. It would be possible if you wanted, to have the car do a complete 360 withthe passengers inside it. The background would just recede into the distance based on the direction the car was facing and the whole scene is rendered in real time so there is no need for the actors to have to try and move the car to exactly the right spot at the right time which would have been almost impossible.

It was one of those things that seemed like it ought to work but really, until we set it up and actually tried it, it was impossible to know it if was going to be convincing enough for the audience to be worth doing. It was a lot of work to get this scene all set up and when we first tried it at the Horsham workshop the scrim we were using was too transparent and the effect totally lost (Below is the extremely lame looking Horsham first take on the whole car thing).

I almost abandoned the idea at this point, so it was quite a relief to see it looking just so much more convincing with the sharks-tooth. Very pleasing after all that to finally see it working as well as it did.

The Stagecraft of Feed - Natimuk Development Part 2

Violet's father (Craig) delivers his speech

One of the things we have been experimenting with was how we could assemble these few elements and combine them with projections to build a range. The idea was to work with a set of basic but versatile elements and reconfigure them to construct all the elements we need for the show. As well as the semi transparent white sharkstooth scrim across the front (for the feed and text messaging), we had three other elements, a table and two screens (roughly 3x4meters), all on wheels.  The two moveable screens actually had projectors mounted behind them so that they could be continuously projected upon even as they are being moved around the stage regardless of what angle they were facing (originally the plan had been to track and project onto these surfaces but it just made so much more sense to just mount the projectors on them and be done with it). 

For simplicity I kept the controls for the two mobile screens on a separate controller so that someone else could operate it if the backgrounds needed to change whilst I was needing to concentrate on the foreground animation.

At various points the two screens form the internal corner of a seedy motel, the external street corner corner of a building a flat wall with an open doorway and a range of other combinations besides. To compliment this the mobile bench served variously as bed, UpCar, kitchen table etc (and will likely also be used as an additional projection surface in the final production).

Titus and Violet (James and Libby) at the hotel.

One of the goals of this development phase was to experiment with the way the transition from one scene to the next could work as a theatrical moment in its own right, taking the audience on a mental journey as the elements of one scene transform into the next. There's a moment of confusion as peoples brains struggle to comprehend what they're actually seeing, still trying and hold onto pieces of the old scene as it falls apart and then the payoff and a wave of comprehension as the new scene drops into place. When its well done, its something I've always enjoyed in animation (both watching and striving to create). Its even more exciting trying to make it happen live on the stage.

The scene below is a good example, the kitchen walls drop away into darkness and the table  transforms into an UpCar™ and suddenly we are on a joy flight through the city.

Domestic Bliss™ with James Craig and Naja

Titus and Violet (James and Libby) in the UpCar™

The UpCar™scene was pretty much my favourite thing we attempted this time round so Im going to save it for a whole post of its own...

coming soonish...