[sound+vision]

Cinema 4D 2011 Roundup

jeremylk — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:50:28 +0000

After two years of freelancing, I’ve managed to land a nice, stable 9–5 gig which starts in less than a week. Knowing your free time is about to become a very precious commodity is great motivation to finish up the odd project you might have sitting around.

Result? I cleaned up, finished, and edited together this reel of miscellaneous Cinema 4D projects from the last few months. Everything that was cool but didn’t warrant uploading to Vimeo on it’s own. We’ve got 300 fps flying Legos, a few idents for imaginary movie studios, a spot for an SF Weekly column, and lots of neon lights. Fun, random stuff.

Tools used :

Cinema 4D, Realflow, Grey Scale Gorilla HDR Light Kit Pro, After Effects, Premiere, & Boris FX.

Music : Washed Out — Feel It All Around

Have the Relationship You Want

jeremylk — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:42:40 +0000

I’ve always been a fan of “talky” house tracks. The kind that just have a tight, locked groove that moves along underneath some random long-play sample. House tracks that sample MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech are a pretty classic example. So is “My House” by Chuck Roberts. Most recently, “Do Ya Thang” by Oliver $ was my favorite track in this genre.

I came across Rori Raye by… actually I have no idea. But this sample was on a video introduction on her site, and it begged for the “talky” house treatment. So that’s what it got, and the results are, admittedly, ridiculous. Ridiculous but fun.

Made in Abeleton Live with a lot of bits from the always excellent freesound.org.

Type-F Survival Guide

jeremylk — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:24:00 +0000

Type-F is a Tyra Banks branded beauty and fashion site featuring, among other things, video “tips for camping, sporting events, and more style situations”. Branded their “Survival Guide”, it’s an ongoing series of videos that went live today, and that I was was an editor on.

What is typeF’s Survival Guide? — powered by typef.com

Unlike other projects I’ve worked on, I had virtually zero creative license with this. I came in to take the rough cuts and assemble them with alpha-channel graphics. I also mixed sound for most of the videos currently featured here, which included some fancy EQ and Altiverb settings to get some audio recorded in a car to match the big-room sound of the set they did most of the work on. It was all mostly a case of “make this look and sound as good as humanly possible with the time we’ve got”.

Not having creative license doesn’t mean it wasn’t a little fun. I really like all the swoops and fast pace of the whole thing. This is definitely the most up-to-date commercial thing I’ve had the pleasure of working on, and I certainly wouldn’t mind doing more.

There will be more of these released over the next few months. If this is your thing, stay current @ typef.com/featured-videos/survival-guide/.

A Day In Berkeley

jeremylk — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 03:11:23 +0000

Never really got over to the Berkeley campus to take pictures until today. Definitely mean to go back soon.

Olympus EP-2 micro 4/3rds with 17mm f2.8 kit lens. Was preoccupied with shadows, reflections, and lines.

Meeblip

jeremylk — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:22:08 +0000

After getting over the fact that my boyfriend and I got each other the *exact same thing* this year for Christmas, we got to putting them together and playing around with them. Which was awesome because they were Meeblip DIY Synthesizer kits. This little 16bit digital synth kit is super easy to put together, and really fun to play. Here’s a short video I put together documenting the build and some of the sounds it’s capable of :

What is the Meeblip good at doing? I would say it excels at certain kinds of bass sounds (like the two-tone electro bass in the video above), noise runs, and even can pull off a decent wubwub. The LFO is great to play with when routed to the filter.

That said, I wish it had a little more range. The filter can be hard to dial in, it wont self-oscillate, and the envelope is really tricky to get *just* right. It’s hard to get a good distorted Acid bassline out of this thing, for instance.

That said, for 100 bucks and a little hard work, the Meeblip is a wonderful little piece of kit. I had as much fun building it as I have playing it, and I’m not really one to get off on soldering. It’s opened the door to other possibilities in terms of DIY synth building (808 clones and PAIA Fatman, watch out), which in itself is a great gift.

More info here : meeblip.noisepages.com

Look Both Ways — A DJ Mix for the End of the Year

jeremylk — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:27:21 +0000

Happy New Years Eve, everybody!

Sitting around in my pajamas this morning, listening to some of my favorite tracks from 2011 (and a few from other years, maybe) and decided to share with the rest of the world. Not a super technical, surgical affair, mind you… more like a “mix-from-the-couch” sort of thing. But don’t let that dissuade you!

It’s a mix looking back over 2011 musically, while turning to face the rising sun of a new year. Hope you enjoy, and hope your leap into the future tonight is filled with light.

Download through Dropbox here (right-click “save as”) : Jeremy Blake — Look Both Ways

Stream through MixCloud :

Look Both Ways by Jeremy Blake on Mixcloud

Tracklist :

01. Toro Y Moi — Freak Love
02. A Gap Between — Orange Horizon
03. Jacob 2–2 — Nanny
04. Washed Out — Before
05. Vacationer — Trip
06. Neon Indian — Psychic Chasms (Anoraak Remix)
07. Stars — The Black House, The Blue Sky (Stars vs. Montag)
08. Lusine — Gravity
09. Dusty Springfield — Song Of A Preacher Man (Holtoug Bootleg)
10. Young Galaxy — Peripheral Visionaries
11. Eliot Lipp — It’s Time To Leave (Pretty Lights Remix)
12. Matthew Dear — You Put A Smell On Me (Breakbot Remix)
13. Onra — Change Of Heart
14. Com Truise — Iwywaw (Teeel Remix)
15. Erlend Øye — Lullaby & A Place in My Heart (Acapella)
16. Young Galaxy — We Have Everything
17. Gotye — Somebody That I Used To Know
18. Tycho — Dive (Radio Edit)

Barry Goldberg — Soothe Me (Savage Beast Edit)

jeremylk — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:46:24 +0000

Barry Goldberg — Soothe Me (Savage Beast Edit) by jeremyblake

I found Barry Goldberg’s self-titled album (produced by Bob Dylan and Jerry Wexler!) randomly a few months ago. It’s got a lot of good stuff going on. This track particularly caught my ear and demanded a little re-rub action.

The whole thing sort of fell together on it’s own, actually. I had been building a session in Ableton Live for manipulating a bunch of vintage jazz and space-funk, trying to create an on-the-fly re-edit playlist. “Soothe Me” fell into line so well with the baeleric disco thing that it got it’s own session.

I used a bunch of Kontakt instruments to get this where it is now. The bass, claves, guitar, and organ are all Kontakt. I used variable side-chain compression to get the track to fit with a new, punchier, kick / snare. One of the big challenges was marrying the distinct vintage production of the original with something more modern, but a bit of creative compression and EQ helped a lot.

So here ya go : a disco-slow-jam re-work of a 1974 “classic”.

Check out the original “Soothe Me” on Youtube

Watch this video on YouTube.

New Pics from CODE @ Bootie

jeremylk — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:08:31 +0000

Animals with Cameras (Brian Martin and myself) made it over to BOOTIE, San Franciso’s world famous mash-up party, last Saturday. Our good friends over at SIXANDCANDY.COM were keeping the upstairs of DNA Lounge hot and heavy for the whole night, and we we took the pictures to prove it. Head on over to ANIMALSWITHCAMERAS.COM check out the whole set.

C4D Experiment : TOKA Logo Treatment

jeremylk — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 03:41:49 +0000

I needed a little project to refresh my C4D skills up to this point before jumping into some more advanced stuff, and this is what I came up with. It’s a pretty simple exploitation of the Explode and Bend deformers and a series of simple camera moves to go from particles to the logo. It was rendered with no real textures, and a few lights to, including a spot attached to a target camera to make sure the subject stayed lit throughout the sequence.

The sound design was actually almost more fun to work out. After watching the animation a couple times, I realized it would work with that famous THX sound effect you hear at the beginning of theater movies. You know the one.

Of course, I couldn’t just drop it in there unmolested. It had to follow the animation on the screen somehow, so I dropped both animation and sound into Ableton live and started tweaking. I ended up using a couple different chopped-up versions of the sound, most of them heavily time-stretched with different warping modes. A flanger, auto-pan, filter, and redux were used with automation to achieve the slippery wobbly stuff during the intense transformation section.

Finally, the whole thing got a sheen of video post-fx in Final Cut Pro using Magic Bullet Looks and a few stock filters, all automated to help give the piece vibe.

Definitely a fun little project to clear the cobwebs out and make way for something more ambitious.

Lana Del Rey Remix

jeremylk — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 03:11:16 +0000

Lana Del Rey — Blue Jeans (Alternate Reality Mix) by jeremyblake

I discovered recording artist Lana Del Rey through a blog post over on Gorilla vs. Bear, a video of a live performance of “Video Games” on Jools Howard’s show. It had a lot good stuff happening : vibe, melody, lyrics, and mystique. I’m not constantly keeping on new music, so I can’t tell if her style is aping something else, but I really dug her stripped down arrangement and the rawness of her presentation.

Poking around, I found this video, a supposedly live version of her track “Blue Jeans”. I liked it even better than the first, and even before the video was done I knew I was going to do some sort of remix of it.

Initially, it was going to be dance. Lucky for me, it didn’t turn out that way, because Penguin Prison did about a good a dance mix as I could have hoped to achieve.

Instead, I ended up bumping the tempo up just a little bit, and, with the help of Kontakt 4, did what I consider an alternate studio mix. It’s “Blue Jeans” if another band had been in the studio when it was recorded.

I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Since building a PC powerful enough to handle multiple instance of Kontakt, I’m giddy with the possibilities of really good sounding and playable multisampled instruments. Abbey Road 60s Drums, Scarabee Bass, Akord Guitar, and the orchestral instruments all played big roles in making a grand, organic sounding bed that lent itself well to the already live tone of her video performance. It was a blast to play drums along with her and the guitar track, and the whole thing fell together in about 2 days.

Looking forward to hearing more from Lana Del Rey and seeing what Kontakt can do for more organic sounding compositions.