A few weeks ago I scored a Robotix kit online. I had no idea they had gone wireless at some point during the 90’s. Actually … I had no clue they were even still making them in the 90’s.
I used some Robotix in 1998 to create a robotic prosthetic arm/fishing pole in my early film Humanidad Aterrorizado.
After I got them in the mail, I combined them with the set I had when I grew up. Here is the remote control dolly I constructed out of them:
I modified one of the small Robotix pieces to hold the camera thread. It can go forward, backward, left and right. I can put the camera on a crane and have it rotate on a variety of axis.
I will be using it in some capacity while shooting the video for “Combat”.
Here are some tests shots done in single frame animation (shot with a Canon A640 is continuous burst shooting mode). This is the slowest I can get my footage to look given the shooting rate of the camera. I need to work on stabilizing the camera and getting some motion timing issues figured out.
The soundtrack for the video experiment was all done with a beta version of my new VSTi - SK-crooner. It is a human vocal synth based on samples from the 1980’s 8 bit sampling keyboard, the Casio SK-1. I worked on it for a while today and it’s starting to come together.
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(This is not live action video - it’s time lapse. I’ll try some robo-dolly video soon).
I decided to do some singing today. Seeing how I want to shoot the video for “Combat” in the next month, I figured I better start recording some scratch vocals and focus on some lyrics.
I got these little army men today for my video shoot so here is a quick shot of them with a tank. Filmed with my firmware hacked Canon A640 and my focus wobble script. They are all the wrong scale to work at the model railway club — too big.
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Double click to play:
I spent a couple hours working on the song and finished up a decent rough mix to check the lyrics. I’m giving myself two weeks to finish the tracking of “Bits” in June, so it was reassuring to know that I could blast through a song in a couple hours and feel good about it.
We have had record heat here in Portland today — 94 degrees. It feels good to get cooked. I’m sure I’ll be sick of it by the end of the summer, but it’s fun now.
I have been working on computational physics all day. I am using a language called python. It is melting my mind. Graphing orbits … electric fields … and finding something called the Lyapunov exponent. Hacking away at code. Piecing found scraps of scripts together with broken loops … sewing it all together like Dr. Frankenstein.
… help … left … brain … over … load …
How can I give my computer a little pay back … ? How … HOW!
I am formulating a plan to exact some revenge on my computer …
I think a fitting revenge will involve making a new virtual instrument. This time, I will give my computer a voice … a simulated human voice. The opposite of Harlan Ellison’s disturbing tale “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in which a demented computer rules the world and turns the last human into a puddle of flesh with no mouth (hence the “I can’t scream”).
A tortured computer vocal simulation … my computer sings with an aliased … bit crunched … “I’ve got digital strep throat” voice.
A good friend of mine has been listening to some rough cuts off of “Bits”. He likes the song “Demons to Diamonds” in particular and he keeps asking me about the lyrics.
My whole process for “Bits” is so inverted that I’ll probably publish all the words before I finish recording them … then change everything and have to come back and re-edit them…
So here they are:
Demons to Diamonds
you’ve had your success
the laughter begins
and everyone’s thrilled
but let’s just say
they’re not all gone
they’ve all changed form
to something so undefinable
they’ve taken you in
you’ve offered consent
a trap that’s so isometric
there
a fractured edge
we might see in
discovering what control remains
an image reflected
the material objective
you’re safe if you don’t look hard
in the mirror there’s a little flaw
a demon with a big heart
cut shape this form again
and deliver it
do it if you want too
cut shape this form again
be a prisoner of beauty if you want to
and I wonder
what this will become
It may be the mathematical expression that he was curious about (I have it inverted in the version I gave him).
I spent a good part of the day working on the guitar for the song “Combat”. Everything is sounding good and I feel like I figured out a way to divide the tracks and tones up so that it will sound the way I envision it. I’ll be using my Bitmo modded Blackheart amp.
A few months back, I helped Jeremy Bird shoot a video at the Columbia Gorge Model Railway Club. I’m thinking about returning there to shooting my miniatures. It is a fantastic place, filled with an amazing amount of detail. Not to mention thousands of little people. I can’t recommend it enough to local Portlanders.
Unfortunaltey, it’s all HO scale and I will need to get some HO scale military vehicles to match the set. Well see …
I’m also planning on taking a couple weeks off in June to finish tracking “Bits”.
Once upon a time … in 1994 … I had this pink plastic Barbie phone. When you pressed its buttons, it would say things like:
“Let’s have a party!”
and
“I like the beach!”
I was in the incredibly strange band “Krusters Kronomid” at the time. I would plug the phone, and various other electronic devices, into my electric guitar - the K1. It was quite theatrical.
Rafe Wadleigh, the other guitarist/bass player in Krusters, picked up the ingenious whammy pedal and we used it quite a bit back then. Mike Seilo, our singer, called it the “red freaker”.
I ended up sending Barbie through the whammy pedal and “scratching” the sound effects and phrases that it spit out. I would trigger the sounds from its keypad while dropping the pitch with the whammy pedal.
Alas, the Barbie phone is nowhere to be found. Maybe she is in a trailer somewhere gorging herself on AA batteries and having triplets with a G.I. Joe talking backpack.
We did record it in the song “Moth on Bass” at Avast Studios in Seattle. It broke while setting up to do the take and Stuart Hallerman (the owner of Avast) threw it on the repair bench and fixed it for me.
We ended up recording the Barbie phone, bass and drums all at once, so the performance you hear isn’t an overdub … pre protools … 2″ 24 track … recorded and mixed by Kevin Suggs.
Talking Barbie Phone solo in the song “Moth on Bass”:
For my personal project in my computational physics class, I have decided to create a new VST instrument based on the atomic spectra of the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen is the most fundamental physical element in the universe (not including photons - whatever they are).
I plan on including the Lymann, Balmer, Paschen, Brackett and Pfund series of spectral lines. The user will be able to switch each line on/off in any combination. This will amount to over twenty tones.
The VST might be oscillator based and contain a certain amount of built in instability or granularity in the pitch to account for the slope up and down on each side of the spectral line.
It will not be a “keyboard style synth”. It will be an ambient sound-maker that may have tempo synch elements in it.
I am writing a program in Python to translate the wavelength of each spectral line into the neighborhood of the western twelve tone scale (27.50 - 4186.01 Hz). Using linear pitch space, the notes will be dropped into our chromatic scale according to the equation:
