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New work on You Tube and Flickr



Hi folks,

I posted a new video titled "Barely Branching on You Tube at

http://www.youtube.com/Tobenfeld#p/a/u/0/Ng3wQGeaHhU

Barely Branching is a visual music piece based on images of bare 
trees, with music by my frequent collaborator, Mike Marino.

I posted a new photo essay titled "Instant Cubism" on Flickr at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22231918@N06/sets/72157622545592177/

Instant Cubism is a sequence of still images treated to somewhat 
resemble cubist paintings.

Enjoy.

More notes on the work below:

Barely Branching is a visual music piece based on images of bare 
trees. I've long been fascinated with the abstract patterns seen in 
bare trees, and had generated a lot of video material by processing, 
animating and combining still and video images of these patterns.

I asked composer Mike Marando to generate a short soundtrack based on 
these images, without showing him the specific images and sequences I 
was working with. After a couple of iterations, he came up with the 
ambient soundtrack used in the piece. Here are his words about the 
process.

Dr. T sent me an email that he was interested in making a piece based 
on the theme of "Bare Trees." When I read this, I immediately thought 
of the guitar as a tree with strings on it and wondered what the 
instrument would sound like with "wind" blowing past the strings? I 
set up an acoustic-electric guitar on a stand and began 
experimenting. A regular fan blowing across the strings did not 
generate much signal, so I put in earplugs and dragged out a Shop 
Vac. After playing around a bit, I found the best results were to 
blow the Shop Vac's exhaust across the fretboard from the high string 
to the low string at different locations along the neck. I tried 
acoustic-electric and electric guitars tuned in standard tuning and 
in Rober Fripp's revised standard tuning of CGDAEG. I also did the 
same for a bass in standard tuning and in CGDG tuning.

I made several passes with the instruments and mixed them in a 
variety of ways. After some discussion with Dr. T, I had the idea of 
processing the signal through pitch-shifters, delays, and chorus. So 
I recorded three versions of one of the original tracks, each version 
with different treatments. Some of the pitch-shifting was in 
even-tempered intervals. Other pitch-shifting was in a well-tempered 
system that Terry Riley used on a piano to record, "The Harp of the 
New Albion." I selected the best parts of the three tracks and mixed 
them for Dr. T.


The images in Instant Cubism were all processed by a Photoshop filter 
called Cutout. This filter can take a photograph and convert it to an 
image that resembles a cubist painting. The effect can be accentuated 
by use of other Photoshop filters before or after applying the cutout.

I've become fascinated by this technique over the last couple of 
years. This photo-essay contains 64 photographs of a wide variety of 
subjects that I've modified with this technique.

Notes for Photoshop artists: After I apply cutout to the image, I 
usually apply Find Edges, and then Fade the effect setting mode to 
Multiply. (I use a Photoshop action that allows me to apply these 
steps with a single keystroke.) This accentuates the lines that 
separate the solid areas created by cutout. Sometimes I repeat this 
process, which produces a 'coloring book' kind of effect.

If the file name has the word Cut in it followed by 3 numbers, those 
numbers are the settings for the 3 controls in the Cutout filter.



-- 
" Practice makes perfect, imperfect is better."  -- Paul Bley

                Emile Tobenfeld, Ph. D.
Video Producer                  Image Processing Specialist
Video for your HEAD!                    Boris FX
http://www.foryourhead.com              http://www.borisfx.com