All posts in: Animation

Inspiring Auteurism in 360° and VR Film

Recently whipped up a new talk, based on my work at Facebook, designing tools for immersive media creators. Delivered the talk—titled Auteurism in 360°—at FITC‘s 2Spotlight AR/VR 2017 conference in Toronto. “Film cannot be art, for it does nothing but reproduce reality mechanically.” — Rudolf Arnheim in 1933, opening his book “Film as Art” by quoting criticism from his contemporaries. By the early-mid 20th century, the artistic merit of film had yet to be fully realized. This mirrors the present state of 360 media and VR filmmaking: we have yet to find artistic equivalents to classical cinematic techniques (framing, montage, transition, zoom, synchresis, etc.) in immersive filmmaking. “Auteurism in 360 Degrees” will unpack methodologies for translating the styles...

Audio Software Mirror Redux

The audio software mirror has evolved yet again, becoming a … The Conversation Cloud Generator is a wearable device that generates on-screen word clouds by listening to conversation and surveying syntax and volume. The interface is concealed within wrappings of wireform mesh (a thinner, more pliable version of the material that covers standard microphones) and sewn to a waist belt. The innocuous wearable contains two microphones and an Arduino. On microphone takes volume readings via the Arduino while the second sends four second audio clips (wav files) directly to the computer. Via Processing, the audio data is sent to Google Speech and the returned result is saved as text to a data file, accompanied by its corresponding volume readings (by four...