Haven’t posted anything in a while because I’ve been working on a bunch of stuff. That and raiding ICC, shh.

Anyway, lately I’ve been checking out 2MANYDJS, the dj-alter-ego of the group Soulwax. Now, I love their music, mixes and remixes, but what really caught my eye is their VJing. What is VJing? The same thing as DJing, but with visuals. One problem that a lot of DJs have today is how to make their live shows interesting. VJing gives the visual interest to complement the music, usually tied into and mixed alongside the sound tracks.

During a live performance, they are mixing music on the spot, more or less making the song as they go, similarly to a regular band performance. However, it’s not nearly as interesting. At a DJ show, you’re looking at a guy behind a sound panel, turning knobs, pressing buttons and scratching digital records. You might as well just be sitting in front of a speaker. So, the trick is making a show that stands out. Daft Punk does a great job by having trademark costumes, sets, and crazy ass lighting they use during their shows. Other less inspired groups simply use fog, lasers, dancers, and windows media player visualizers to try to keep the audiences attention.

Which brings me to 2MANYDJS. Basically, they’re now my heroes as far as visuals go. What they essentially do is take the album cover to the song you’re listening to and bring it to life! Literally. They take the art and animated it. For example: If there’s a guy on the cover, you can bet that he’s gonna dance and bob his head. Some work better than others, but they all become extremely entertaining to watch, and you sometimes forget you’re at a DJ show.

This doesn’t work simply because it gives you something to watch while listening to fat beats being laid down, but because because it plays WITH the music, instead of just something on top of the music. What I mean is that they don’t simply play a video when the song pops up. Anyone who’s listened to DJ mixes will know how the artist can hint at a song before it really starts playing. You might hear a tune or bass line or sound that is recognizable, which strikes anticipation in the listener, and drives the crowd wild. Just like with the music, the album art starts to vaguely come into view, and just as the song hits its prime, the album cover is complete and brought alive in its full glory.

Enough talking, check out the video.

Im totally going to try to make some of these myself…

Just wanted to share this sweet awesome badass video. You really have to watch it several times to catch everything.

My thoughts exactly.

There’s something to be said about the design of advertisements compared to that of… well… designs that aren’t graded on their ability to bring in money.

There are some spectacular advertisements around the world, both in print and video, that spark the imagination, and give you a sense of awe that you just can’t get anywhere else. Being 30 seconds long, or a single page in a magazine, these advertisements have to grab your attention, hold it, and make you remember the ad later. Some commercials, to be honest, are pretty horrible. Not just from a technical standpoint, but they either aren’t memorable at all, or they try so hard at being memorable, most people make fun of the brand instead (I’m looking at you, Geico Gecko!)

On the other hand, some companies have found the sweet spot for these commercial spots. One brand I want to show you in particular is Johnnie Walker, with their slogan of “Keep Walking.”

Most recently, they have been showing their commercial spot usually simply called “Keep Walking” or “The Striding Man.” Featuring great feats mankind has done in the past 100 years, the commercial calls you to wonder what kind of things we will do in the next 100. One reason, I like this commercial so much is the use of Karl Jenkin’s In Caelum Fero, which I have been listening to recently. (Once I heard the opening of the peice, I was like “I’ve heard this before…”)

The other commercials of note are The Man Who Walked Around the World, (which is not so much an advertisement as a short history of the brand, but don’t let that dissuade you), Android and Fish. All three are amazing pieces of film making, not just advertising. The first two are shown in their entirety, embedded below.

Another group that has some outstanding commercials is Sacred Noise, which is known mainly for the music they provide the spots. One to check out is the ad they did for worldchanging.com.

More like LAMESHOP for the LAMEMAN!!

ok, actually, this is really cool:

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

“We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple
freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture
is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement
with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching
the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate
results, our system is able to automatically select suitable
photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering
scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel
image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition.
Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find
an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results
show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using
the results from two user studies.”