Description
My idea of this project is to bring all my visual and acoustic elements to an old school style – 8-bit. I used Magic 8bit plug to work with FL studio for my sound, and Adobe Flash for drawing those pixel characters. The intro of my video remix is a shot of my student ID, and the student ID transfers to an 8-bit digital picture. I then used the structure of a kind of video game to remix my video clips. Furthermore, I used quartz composer to mix some effects like a broken TV, TV setup, and AV channel. For controller, I used a midi keyboard. The keys are for changing mixing video clips, and knob is for adjusting the effects, such as pixels’ size, brightness, X-Y axis etc. The reason I chose to do an 8-bit remix is because I quite like chipmusic and 8-bit graphics, also I’m really interested in pixel arts.
Development of idea
To develop my idea and to match my concept, the ideas of broken TV, TV setup and AV channel jumped to my mind.
I simply made this effect on flash and add this output movie file as a new layer on the top of my video remix.
I have tested those movie files for quite a few times, just wanted to get them played on the right tempo as my music files on quartz composer, but somehow quartz composer delays some of the video files, so I had to change the timing of the start points for the music files.
Flash
I have made 3 different parts for the soundstracks and 2 sound effects, and then I started to work on flash to get all the animations done.
It’s really hard to draw everything in pixel for detail, so I used line tool and rectangle tool to do some of the animations on flash.
Music + Sound
I started my project with composing the music and sound. I composed the soundtrack on FL studio with Magical 8bit Plug (http://www.ymck.net/english/download/index.html)
This is quite fun to do a music which is kind of like a old school style, I have been researching of lots of old games’ soundtracks and music to get inspiration. There is a really good website that includes almost all of the chipmusic information – http://www.woolyss.free.fr/chipmusic.php, and VGMusic (http://www.vgmusic.com/) is the website where I can download the midi files from.
Inspiration
There are couple of nice vj videos that I have found are quite interesting and related to my concept. Both of the videos are from a vj called VJ Lucid Dreams.
The first video is “FUCK DA PIXEL”, I think that’s what I wanted to do for the first part of my final video, except the dirty word. = =!
The second video is called “PROMO 2008″, it’s quite similar to my concept of the mosaic bit.
pixel graphic and digital sound
These are couple of experiments of breaking a video into pixel graphic. This patch basically breaks a video into small parts/squares and then rearranges them as a new form for a mixed video.
For the background music of this project, I would like to make a drum rhythm loop for the first layer of my music, and the second layer would be a live remixing soundtrack during the videos that are remixed.
This is a example of using cfxr/sfxr to make 8-bit video game sounds.
By following this instruction, I have found that Cfxr is what I wanted to use for improving my idea of the soundtrack.
http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr
experiments
The first experiment I made is about me testing the connection of a Wii remote with a MAC computer.
The second video is to show that I’m using a Wii remote to control a 3D-space.
story
My story is going to start with a pixel, and then it can be multiplied or transformed into different forms. After that, a character will be built up with a mount of pixels. Besides, the environments will be added into the video and transforming as a background as well.
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