USA. USA. USA

HAPPY FOURTH -- From ACB

SHOW TONIGHT- BRUAR FALLS

ASTRO CLUB BLONDE

TONIGHT @ 10:30 BRUAR FALLS

245 Grand Street

Williamsburg, off BEDFORD L

FREE T SHIRTS

FREE SHOW

DRINK----DANCE

NEW HIT TRACKS

DEEP SEA SKIVING

I know Banarama has been covered on this blog already, but this album might be one of my favorites of all time. If you haven't listened to it, I recommend it for this spring season.

Marco Brambilla

I recently saw the teaser video for Kanye's song "POWER", and I was blown away. I looked into the director, Marco Brambilla, and was really inspired by his work. Apparently, he directed Demolition Man, starring Sylvestor Stallone and Wesley Snipes, a personal favorite of mine. But, after Demolition Man, Brambilla turned to more experimental installation pieces. His work is really incredible and you can even see one of his installations, CIVILIZATION, in the elevator at the Stand Hotel in NYC.

DATAMOSHING II- NIGHT SHIFT

In my previous post about datamoshing, I mentioned that I was working on datamoshing a music video. The video, posted below, is for Astro Club Blonde's latest single, NIGHT SHIFT. Astro Club Blonde has their next album, BLUSH, on the way and we thought this video would be a fitting time to give everyone a sample. Make sure to check back for leaked tracks from the album in the next few weeks.

NIGHT SHIFT was shot on both the Canon 7D and on the Canon 550D. Our DP, Joel Neville Anderson, shot our exterior scenes in Upstate New York on his 7D. The rest of the video was shot in Brooklyn and in Adolfo Vargas' photo studio in midtown. I want to thank Adolfo Vargas for his kindness in letting us use his space and Tom Perry who waved a flashlight around at me while I ran in place.

DATAMOSHING

Recently I have been working on a music video that is incorporating a glitching technique called DATAMOSHING. Datamoshing is kinda 2009, but whatever, Wikipedia has this to say about datamoshing...."

Datamoshing occurs when the I-frames or key-frames of a temporally compressed video are removed, causing frames from different video sequences to bleed together."

Basically datamoshing takes advantage of an aspect of compression in encoding. To make the videos smaller, encoding creates Key frames (or I frames) and it references other frames based off that, to make the file smaller. So, it takes one frame, and says hey, these next 30 frames are pretty similar, lets base the video information off that frame and use it as a reference. So what datamoshing does is take out those keyframes and leaves in the P-frames, and p frames reference I frames for information, the main ingredient in a p-frame is motion information. So, you take a video with an i-frame and couple it with a video with nothing but p-frames, it makes the second video work off the first video, applying its motion information to the other information of the clip..... thats datamoshing.

Here are some examples.....

and obviously...

Chairlift - "Evident Utensil" Music Video from Data Mosher on Vimeo.

I think its amazing that datamoshing works as well as it does, but I am surprised no one has created a plug in yet to mimic the results. I feel like there is whole world of glitch manipulation out there that is completely uncharted, and is being hindered by programs like Final Cut and Avid, which make everything work properly...... But hey.

Now, it just takes a while and it has really made me alter my workflow. Here is a really nerdy explanation of it...... Basically what I do is I line up my clips that I want to datamosh in Final Cut , then export the seperate .movs . I then encode the clips in FFMPEGX, which pulls out all the i-frames and creates an .avi file. You then have to take those two encoded files and put them into a basic editing program (one that won't put the i-frames back in), then you pull out the remaining i-frame and export it as an .avi. And then you see what it looks like, you can kinda guess what the final product will be based on the videos motion content, but its really trial and error. You then convert the .avi back to an .mov and plop it back into Final Cut.

Here is a great video with a tutorial and all the links you need to start datamoshing. I think this guy does a great job explaining how to do it. It's 3 videos in total, but he makes it pretty entertaining and datamoshes the whole tutorial.

When the music video is done I will post it up on this blog.

KOBROWSKI

Millennium Blonde recently completed shooting its short film "KOBROWSKI". The film is co-directed by Michael Borowiec and Nathan Rogers-Hancock. KOBROWSKI has been in the works for some time and after six days of shooting in Schenectady and Valatie, NY the film moves into the editing room. We threw out script after script until we landed upon KOBROWSKI, which is co-written by Nathan Rogers-Hancock and Michael Borowiec. We wanted a great story, but more so, a great character, that we could work with in other films and stories. Also, we really wanted to bring a strong, action-hero-type character to independent films. The story of KOBROWSKI goes......

"KOBROWSKI- the boy-genius detective who joined the force at 16 years old. KOBROWSKI instantly became a media and tabloid sensation, inspiring American's across the country, becoming a legend in his own time- an American hero. But, at 23 years old, involved in a turbulent court case, he found the public scrutiny too much. Facing a quarter life crisis he retired from the force and moved from New York City to Upstate New York, where he goes into retirement. But, even in this small town, he could only avoid trouble for so long...."

The film stars Michael Borowiec as KOBROWSKI, and Camille Balsamo as MARIA. (below). The film also has appearances by Mike Oshins, Zach De Sorbo, Paul Ruth, Robert Nevulis and many more.

We were fortunate to have a great crew on this film, which was small, but incredibly efficient.

We had Logan Olberg (line-producer), Steve Levine (director of photography), Darcie Wilder (assistant camera), Alan Lapointe (Sound), John Hogan (grip), and Joseph Borowiec (special effects). Check back for more KOBROWSKI updates and photos from set.

Check back for more updates on KOBROWSKI.