Drone Cameras: The Next Step in Video

OMCOPTER – Ninja shoot with Epic from omstudios on Vimeo.

From nature documentaries, including the pending USA release of Winged Planet, to the action sequence above, drones are the new hotness in video.  Drone cameras have far more mobility than boom cameras of the past, the footage is very stable, average people are buying and renting them.  Some companies and factory farms are getting busted for a major environmental violations when they get caught on camera dumping waste or polluting water sources.

Winged Planet: Spy Cameras Film Flamingos

Example of the general design: multiple copter arms and a RC movable camera.

The OMCOPTER gives wings to the Red Epic from omstudios on Vimeo.

3D Printing Pen Works Like a Manual 3D Printer

This is amazing!  Also, ThisIsColossal.com is an amazing blog to follow; they have blogged a free-form 3D printing pen that uses a single plastic filament like robotic 3D printers.

Forget those pesky 3D printers that require software and the knowledge of 3D modeling and behold the 3Doodler, the world’s first pen that draws in three dimensions in real time. Imagine holding a pen and waving it through the air, only the line your pen creates stays frozen, suspended and permanent in 3D space. Sound like magic? Well it certainly looks like it, watch the video above to see the thing in action. The 3Doodler was designed by Boston-based company WobbleWorks who recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell the miraculous little devices that utilizes a special plastic which is heated and instantly cooled to form solid structures as you draw.

Video

At this time there are 25 days left on the Kickstarter fundraiser for this invention.  They placed a goal of $30,000 and are holding at $1,936,802.  This is the best Kickstarter I’ve seen since Ze Frank went to re-start A Show.  If the MIT grad is carrying any student loans these days, those are history.

Mobster Looking Guy *IS* Bruce Willis

Okay, I’m an idiot!  ☺  I did not think to Google image search the negative I bought of the Mobster Looking Guy: it is Bruce Willis!  My friend Pam Batista actually stopped and looked it up online and found the movie: Last Man Standing in 1996.  I was laughing my head off.  Pam said, “You have a production photo from this movie!”  Well, actually, it’s a negative.  Here is the good photo:

Here is my digital clean up on the blurry negative:

This has zero open source, public domain usage but a higher Cool Factor now.  I have a negative for a film and it’s Bruce Willis! Or it’s a duplicate someone over exposed when copying.   Yippeekiyay motherfucker.

 

UPDATE:  My HBBF: texted me “I told you about Last Man Standing“!  But Pam actually looked it up.  Sorry former film major, the credit goes to Pam.  Duly noted that you did say that.

Mobster Looking Guy

In my ferreting around for interesting antique postcards, I branched into buying some etchings, photographs and other ephemera.  I made an odd acquisition of a negative.  I think it may be a celluloid or plastic-like material copy taken from a glass plate original.  Looking at the negative made me want to see the photograph it was of because the mobster looking guy also kind of resembles Bruce Willis.  I found all of these thoughts entertaining and wanted the challenge of converting the negative.

Part of why I wonder if this was a copy made from a glass plate is that the image on the transparent material is kind of crooked.  The other reason is that there are speckles all over the negative; maybe dust and debris was ruining a glass negative and a copy was made.  The photograph was pretty blurry, so I ran a few filters to sharpen the photograph.

Converting the image and sharpening it was easy.  I decided I did not like all the speckles and spots, so I went and hand edited them out.  I was not going for perfection, just enough of an improvement that the dusty stuff was not a distraction.

It may not be fair of me to imagine that this portrait is of some mobster looking guy.  He could be a car salesman or someone’s hard working father.  Is it my fault that the greater culture  for has reduced Fedora hats to an emblem of organized crime, even though countless men wore them?  I don’t know, but if the FBI comes around inquiring after Bugsy Lawless, I’ll play it safe and tell them he’s out for the day.

Google Homepage

 

 

My HBBF was recently touched by a Google homepage that honored Frank Zamboni’s memory by putting a custom game up featuring a Zamboni truck.  We both agreed it was cool.  I said “I wish I worked for Google!”  They do things like create games and different designs even though could just leave the homepage the same day after day and still get the same traffic.  Today’s design honored MLK is also great.

New Mail Art Category

I am adding a new Mail Art category to the blog for non-artist trading card items.  The mail art community is so huge and diverse with a wide array of gifted and traded items including inchies, twinchies, rinchies, altered Rolodex art, journal pages, artist post cards and more.  I greatly enjoyed my collage trade and will be a small painting trade later this month.  Meanwhile, a broad request is being sent out for a hurricane loss of a post card collection:

Can you help a friend of a friend out who lives in Brant Beach? One of the things that she lost, which can never truly be replaced but had a lot of meaning to her, was her extensive postcard collection from all over the world. Here is her message… For all of you who have asked me: “what can I do?” I finally thought of something! It may seem silly in the face of so much devastation and believe me, I count my blessings over and over. One of the things I lost was an extensive collection of postcards sent to me over a lifetime from every continent (including Antarctica!) maybe no monetary value, but they were written with love, some by people who have passed on that I will never hear from again. In the spirit of starting over and rebuilding, I ask that you send me a postcard (please no virtual ones, I’m talking with a stamp and postmark) my address is Laura Maschal 4603 Long Beach Blvd, Brant Beach, NJ 08008. Eventually there will be postal service again and I will receive it. Thank you! Feel free to share this post

Please spare a minute and a stamp to send a post card.

Meanwhile, I had been thinking about the loss of my antique post card collection.  Many years ago, I was feeding this teenage crack head who lived in the apartment above me.  She was not old enough to drive, had pale skin bordering on translucent, badly dyed blonde hair and pale cornflower blue eyes.  She would have looked pretty if it weren’t for the dark circles under her eyes and her gaunt frame.  I checked in with a patrol officer for my ‘hood and he told me the gang member that pimped her out was the real deal and would put a bullet through my head if I interfered.  I held out some hope for her and fed her a skeletal self good number of sandwiches and leftovers.  She was headed for a real cold place in the morgue and no one was looking out for her well-being.  No good deed goes unpunished, and I suspect it was she who robbed my place.  I lost all my gold jewelry and my antique post cards.  They were probably fenced on Water Street in Wilmington, Illinois.  I found the above post card, the century old Halloween greeting, in between the pages of a large art book.  It had been my last purchase before the crackhead girl robbed me and I used it as a temporary book mark.  My current apartment storage unit was robbed this October and I lost all my tables, chairs, steel cooler and tent foot tent for outdoor art fairs.  It was a terrible loss.

I was sad and angry over the recent robbery and was further reminded of the lost antique post cards from the prior robbery.  Those items were unique and irreplaceable.  Close to a decade has gone by since the post card loss and I stuck my nose into an antiques shop to learn that the tanked economy and lack of interest has rock bottomed the price of post cards.  I feel a lot better about these two hardships because I started a new collection this month.  Instead of just mourning the loss, I have moved on and made some great buys.

This also will be your benefit, since I am going to drop high resolution scans of the antique post cards I buy in this new category.  I cannot assure everything or anything is Public Domain; use them at your own discretion.  Please download them for digital designs, print them out and use them in collage art or make new post cards to send to someone.

LocktOberfest 2012

A few months back I came up with an idea for an event for TOOOL [The Open Organisation of Lockpickers] because they have the most popular ongoing classes at Pumping Station: One.  I thought it would be nice if they threw a party.  Also, I like dorky ideas and pitched it as LocktOberfest.  I made cuckoo clock graphic, a website went up, fliers were printed and an event was born.  Extra bonus for the donated beer from Revolution Brewing, the internally home brewed beer from the hackerspace members [used blowtorch to caramelize canned pumpkin for one batch] and donated bratwurst from Peoria Packing.  There were ongoing classes and contests all last Saturday and quite a nice turn out.  This looks like it will be an annual event going forward.

I felt I had to pull my weight, since I cook a lot.  Coming with a jar of Ingelhoffer mustard is a plus but not enough in my book.  Since I’m a nice ethnic overlap average to Chicago [Mickmackrautlimeyinjun is my complete ethnoslurrific break down] I had some old school off-the-boat grandparent education to put to good use.  I made a huge triple batch of home-made spaetzle, all lumpy and home-made like my grandma had made.  I was worried about it coming out right, since I have not made spaetzle since I was a child, and my grandmother is no longer around to confer with.  I did write down her recipe a long time ago.  I also lack a spaetzle board kitchen tool.  I asked a friend currently working in Germany to see if he could buy one for me.  It’s a wooden board and a cutting blade, but it turns out the Germans don’t bother making spaetzle anymore.  They just buy it in stores.  Where’s the love, Deutschland?

I strive to improvise my way through problems and wound up using my pizza peel and a bamboo spatula.  Actually it worked pretty good!  I spent a bit over an hour and boiled my way through the three batches of dough.  I’ve made linguine and pirogi dough before, so the spaetzle recipe is really simple.  You shove eggs into flour with a dash of water, essentially.  That’s most pasta, really.  I just hope no one was on a diet, because I fried the lot of it in two whole sticks of butter.  Happy LocktOberfest!

Digital Book Cover

Meinala and Demetrius and Enchiridia by Shellie Lewis, Adobe Photoshop

I am still working to grow my digital skill set.  I can’t even write “newly fledged skill set” with a clear conscience.  I’m still at the stage where my digital ability is like a baby bird: small, naked, ugly, lacking feathers, hanging out in a nest and no where near flight capability.  I made a book cover for someone who has a fantasy novel.  She is young and has no money to hire anyone.  I am bored and need practice.  Thus a collaboration was born!

The main character is a young woman traveling magical lands with her talking Fennec fox.  It’s a high fantasy and the main character is a magic user.  I got permission to modify the image of the main model to more closely resemble the fictional character and credit all my stocks on the posting for this work on deviantART.  All stock images came from dA or morgueFile.  I had to cut out, modify, color change and heavily manipulate each image.  I also dropped high res copies of the cut out gems into the dA stock folder for other people to use.  I put about twelve hours in on this illustration and the author is happy with it.  She’s submitting the book for a writing contest so it’s an online thing.  I slammed this 8.5 x 11 inches and 300 dpi so it can be shrunk to any size needed but was high resolution in case high res is needed.  I just better get an advanced copy of the book to read!

The Last Two Art Patch Project Designs

October 9th would have been the birthday for Chicago street artist and activist Chris Drew had he not died May 7, 2012.  No one took down his Facebook feed, so the stupid social media software was reminding me to wish him a happy birthday.  That was creepy, and sad.  I found the number of people writing not a memorial or commemoration for his former Facebook wall but wrote instead “Happy Birthday!!” bizarre.  I feel that the dead do not have birthdays; they are dead and had a birth date.  Birthdays are for the living.  If some factoid advises that today is Mozart’s 256th birthday, that is even more illogical.  No one lives that long so we should say it is the anniversary of the person’s birthday or something more sensible.

I never got to print these last two creations for the Art Patch Project.  Chris was in the hospital with the keys to the studio space.  We were out of photo-emulsion to burn silkscreens and he went into rapid decline.  The art works and greater action largely supported his cause in fighting his protest arrest for street vending art and the felony eavesdropping charge of audio recording his own arrest by the police on the sidewalk in public.

As is the case with all of the other Art Patch contributions I created from August 2011 through May 2012, these are open source, Copyleft and may be used in the public domain barring any appropriation, interpretation or extrapolation that promotes oppression toward others and attacks, insults or hate rhetoric toward any group, sexual orientation, gender, race or ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. 

I had been shopping out thrift stores for the sheets I liked to use for fabric patches and was looking for a nice floral pattern to print behind this art patch.  I liked working with the patterns fabric like here and here.  They were fun and this method was an easy way o print fast and get color in the work.

This is a Chicago thing.  There is a decades old folk song called “Lincoln Pirates” because the Lincoln Towing Company will haul your car off, even if it is not illegal parked or broken down somewhere.  They are notorious car thieves and were even caught stripping stolen cars in a police sting, yet strangely are still in business.  The time they got me, I stepped into a 7/11 store for about five minutes and the car was gone that fast.

Water Light Graffiti by Antonin Fourneau

This is an amazing interactive piece.  I want this!  Or I want the instructions because I would happily solder for a thousand hours to make one of these.

Water Light Graffiti by Antonin Fourneau, created in the Digitalarti Artlab from Digitalarti on Vimeo.

The “Water Light Graffiti” is a surface made of thousands of LED illuminated by the contact of water. You can use a paintbrush, a water atomizer, your fingers or anything damp to sketch a brightness message or just to draw. Water Light Graffiti is a wall for ephemeral messages in the urban space without deterioration. A wall to communicate and share magically in the city.
More pictures and details on Digitalarti : digitalarti.com/wlg

Water Light Graffiti is a project of Antonin Fourneau (atocorp.free.fr/)
Engineer : Jordan McRae
Design Structure : Guillaume Stagnaro
Graffiti performance : Collectif Painthouse
Assistant team: Clement Ducerf and all the ArtLab volunteers
ArtLab Manager: Jason Cook
Production Digitalarti (digitalarti.com)

Filming: Sarah Taurinya & Quentin Chevrier
Photographs: Quentin Chevrier
Music: Jankenpopp (soundcloud.com/jankenpopp)
Editing and titles: Formidable Studio and Maïa Boumpoutou

Support : Ville de Poitiers and Centre Culturel Saint Exupéry

Contact, exhibitions and artwork rental : services@digitalarti.com
More creations from the Artlab : digitalarti.com/artlab