Friends and collaborators Hecuba are playing at the triple canopy launch party tomorrow night at SiteLA, and I’ll be doing some processing-powered live visuals during the show. If you’re in LA and looking for something to do it should be a great night.
Photo: Pitchfork
So everything went pretty well the other night. A few places wrote about the show and the band’s “unique” choice of fashion accessories. It was a difficult task of showing images from Lauren’s forthcoming book, many of which feature Devendra, while not showing too many pictures of him projected behind him which is just weird. We did our best and tried to pick the strongest shots that allowed for some fun animation potential. At one point, Devendra got upset about his image on the screen, but in the end I think it all worked out.
For the animations we used a combination of manual work in After Effects and procedural elements from processing. The procedural elements were fairly simple, some image averaging to blend faces together, some perlin noise to make images flap in the wind, a few particles, a little bit of random walking lines, and — in perhaps the most bizarre code I’ve ever written — recursively packing the space around Devendra and Greg using images of the prosthetic penises they wore for a Megapuss photo shoot with Lauren.
The entire animation lasted about 40 minutes, so I’ve compressed all that into a quick 1 minute video showing all the vignettes back-to-back. Something is definitely lost since we were going for a thick, slow, molasses-y feel to the whole thing, but who has 40 minutes on the internet?
On June 18th, Megapuss is having their debut performance at the Hammer Museum. To accompany the performance, and in celebration of her forthcoming book, Jon Beasley and I created a series of animated vignettes based on the photography of LA artist Lauren Dukoff.
More information on the Hammer Website.