Geek Chic

I like this.  Like a first-person-shooter but without the violence:

The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Thanks FormFiftyFive

Check this out:

It’s a strange interactive Ikea ad where music makes the actors/dancers move around (mostly backwards as far as I can tell).  It lets you choose from a couple of pre-selected tracks and use your keyboard for some midi-style canned drum samples.  The most fun thing I’ve found with it is to upload something from your music library and have them dance to it.  They seem to especially like TV on the Radio.

Kudos to whoever designed this.  I can’t imagine it was easy writing a Flash program where a video track responds to the amplitude of sound waves…

Thanks VSL

How awesome is this Puma ad:

Not that this is uncharted territory (it’s building off of Michel Gondry’s work, and most likely countless others before him), but it’s definitely pushing the boundaries further than I’ve ever seen them pushed before.

What’s amazing about this, and the kind of work that Gondry does in ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground‘ is that the spectacle itself is theatrical in nature.  It’s not something that could only be done on video and edited together in post.  It’s something you could experience live — but which you happen to be watching on film.

This ad takes the theatrical paradigm a step further — it’s a very post-modern interaction with video, complete with Noh theater style invisible stage hands (Kohken) moving the projection surfaces on and off the stage.

This is the kind of work I want to do in terms of using projections and video in theater.  It seems like a pretty limitless frontier.

Now I just need a little bit of money… and I should be all set. :)

Thanks DesignNotes for pointing this one out.

UPDATE: I just changed out the video embed code.  For full effect, switch to HD and watch it in full screen.  It’ll blow your mind.

I came across a post on CrunchGear about some University of Washington students experimenting with a new video manipulation technique using still photographs to enhance or alter video.

The results are unreal.  Check this out:

Did you see the part where they used a layer mask to remove a No Parking sign?  That would usually take forever to do in After Effects.

Amazing.

Amazing. Jacob Seidelin took the data from the Radiohead House of Cards video (made using lasers and data points rather than filmed) and made a JavaScript based visualizer using the Canvas object.

Even if what I just said was all Greek to you (I barely understand it myself), you’ll have fun playing with the visualizer.  Check it out:

couresy of Jacob Seidelin via http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/radiohead-meets-javascript/

Thanks to Ajaxian for the link