Here's a rendered sequence of a particles test I've been working on. Made in Houdini.

For my first project, the task is to create an artist work inspired by the pre-lingual imagination described by Jaques Lacan. In this space, nothing can be recognizable, because once we recognize an object, we immediately start making mental associations with it, or converting it into the realm of language and symbols.

I like to think of this stage as the first stage of perception, when the world outside us is merely electrical signals in our neurons, and has not been connected with the parts of our brain that makes meaning of what we percieve. Any observer of an artistic work, however, is constantly trying to make mental connections, trying to make sense of what they are experiencing. For this reason, I would like to create an artistic work that challenges the viewer's sense of perception by playing with combinations of out-of-focus forms, foreground-background reversal, cryptic soundscapes. and complicated particle effects. Additionally, the piece itself will loop so that it has no end and cannot be siloed into a discreet experience in the viewer's mind.

Visual References

I love the constant forward movement in this piece and the way that sometimes forms almost appear amidst the wisps of color. I wonder how he made this in 1974!?

In this video, I like the way that the discreet spheres are gracefully able to imply many different dynamic forms, almost like an array of 3 dimensional pixels. Their speed of movement is relatively slow, but also varies to add energy to the piece.

For the background, I've been toying width the idea of using audio renderings of EEG recordings made during REM sleep to drive parameters in a non-physical fluid simulation.

Links

• http://www.experimentalanimation.co.uk/
• http://spacecollective.org/fredjc/3081/The-Sound-of-Cosmic-Background-Radiation
• http://www.psfk.com/2010/08/the-sound-of-brainwaves.html

Fringe Festival Trailer

For Wesley's performance at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2011, we wanted to design an engaging, slightly edgy trailer that would appeal to any audience - not just the regular church attenders.

The Fringe Festival is a two-week theater exhibition attended by some 15,000 people where all the performances are chosen at random. Shows are completely uncensored (within the limits of the law) and audience members must pay to come see shows - often by performers they have never heard of before. For this reason, the trailer and reviews from audience members bold enough to risk buying a ticket are a huge factor to a show's success.

We must have done our job, however; the show opened to rave reviews, and Kate Hoff of the Twin Cities Daily Planet mentioned that "his preview and video trailer rocked." Few things give a video producer more satisfaction :-)

Another collaboration with Charakter Ministry of the Arts. Combining performance clips and interviews, we try to create a piece that captures the kinetic feel and emotional heart of this ensemble show about the ways in which God moves and inspires us to move.

An experimental film that explores systems of control and what happens when they break down or don't exist.

Official selection of the Texas Film Festival 2011.

Here's how the final project turned out! Everyone was asked to model and rig a head and then animate it with dialog that answered the question, "What happened to your body?" Here's my "dude" answering this question.

Little Miss Muffet like you've never seen her before...