I went back home a while ago and picked up a few of my old toy ray guns. These must be from around 1980-1985.
I had three that I can remember and I brought back two of them with me. I don’t know why I didn’t grab that third one!
These ran on batteries and were not of the friction and sparks variety, although I am sure I had a bunch of those too.
These old ray guns are cool because they are all analog in their design. No cheesy lo-fi sampled zap sounds here. These guns generated pure sine waves and all sorts of chaotic mayhem with discrete components. Ahhhh ………. the good ol’ days!
I plan on sampling all of their sounds and wrapping them into a virtual instrument somehow … tonal … ambient … I don’t know…
Thanks to someone over on this website, I was able to convert a clicky pen into USB shutter release. It is designed for and works great with my CHDK modified A640.
With some electrical tape, my soldering iron, some tin foil, a few batteries and a push button switch, I was able to get this thing working in about an hour.
[Note - you have to use a metal pen that conducts on the inside]
I cut the “computer” end off of the USB cable and soldered the black wire to the negative lead of the battery. I smashed some tin foil down in the end of the pen so that the positive side would make contact with the inside of the metal body. This was conected to one side of the push button switch. The other side was connected to the red lead of the cut USB cable.
Now I can shoot controled single frame animation with my 10 mega pixel camera!
I also got my little bunkers and tanks for the “Combat” shoot which is coming up soon!
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.
~ 2mb
(This is not live action video - it’s time lapse. I’ll try some robo-dolly video soon).
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.
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”:
More progress for the music video for my new song “Combat” of the album “Bits”.
I rigged up a moving propeller for my 1/72 scale model airplane with the help of my sister Shandra. I cannibalized the motor and electronics from a tiny remote control car.
The electronics are too big to fit inside the plane. I’ll need to run some long wires through the body and down the mounting bracket to the electronics and battery and mount them on the camera rig I made a few days ago.
Here’s what it looks like:
(shot with no additional lighting on my HV20)
