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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