email interview excerpt with peter hall

from an email interview of peter hall with sebastian oschatz about the video for "dowhile". it was held during the preparation of the book "Pause :59 Minutes of Motion Graphics"

What inspired the images and colors?
green is the colour of nature; the human eye is most receptive to the different hues of green; also green is the brightest colour in relation to the energy needed. for that reason the colour of nature is also the colour which is best suited to technical processes (think early radar screens and monitors). its still wonderful to work with, much friendlier than black and white. the nature/retro tech was was a nice twist, then.
for some reasons the videos i did were mostly monochrome; the blue video (microstoria); the brown video (textuell); another green video (sd2). probably the music didnt left enough space for colour.
the imagery used in dowhile is (apart from some random dropouts and some other bits and blits before and after on the master tape) generated out of martins design for the ovaldiskont cd (the silkscreen printing on the cd; not the cover). the individual layers for the printing inks were converted to bitmaps; put into the 3d software, warped, animated, viewed from different angles; overlaid; overlaid and postprocessed. actually a kind of joke using the design of the cd as the only source for the video.

How was the piece made?
During my work at the institute ("institute for integrated publication and information systems", see www.darmstadt.gmd.de) back in 1995 i developed a software for generating virtual television studio sets (where you have a moderator in front of a blue screen, and key in a background with a weather map; the difference then that if you would move the camera, the background would move also due to some clever position tracking of the camera). for that reason the institute had one of these extremely expensive silicon graphics machines and i had a software which was able to do video rendering in real time. i combined that with long and cheap cables (lots of rf interference) and some bedroom consumer video equipment and got a setup which was able to produce digitally very interesting shapes which matched nicely the analogue generated artifacts. in fact all the material for the 3 oval videos was recorded in one session at one evening at the institute. i also didnt really had much interest in doing another session with the same concept since then, since there is still a lot of unused material from this day available.
the hard work started later at the avid, when we selected the material and sequenced the different pieces to the music.

Do you have
any general thoughts
about the use
of abstract animation
to interpret music?
the process of making the music for oval was so abstract (and the resulting sounds as well) that it seemed natural to put that into an abstract animation. kind of a conceptual help for the making of the video.
i think a video should ideally reflect the conditions in which the music was made (in terms of precision, macro and micro-level-complexity, amount of randomness, etc.) to get a perceivable whole. juxtaposing different levels of detail doesnt really interest me; since there cant be learned much from in the long term, or one part will be lagging behind.
ideally the editing process of electronic music can be quite similar to the processes available in digital video editing, and vice versa. unfortunately still most authoring environments tend to stay in one world, and dont take enough insprirations from the other side.
there is always the problem with the output devices: showing abstract animations on a tv is always a little like trying to play techno on a small transistor radio. it just dont work. you will get neither the interesting frequencies nor the intensity i always wanted to have a display where you would be able to set the pixel to a brightness that you would have to turn your eyes away. i think this display-hardware would turn out to make this kind of questions fully academic.

back to oval


	from an email interview of peter hall with sebastian oschatz about the video for "dowhile". it was held during the preparation of the book "Pause :59 Minutes of Motion Graphics"
What inspired the images and colors?	green is the colour of nature; the human eye is most receptive to the different hues of green; also green is the brightest colour in relation to the energy needed. for that reason the colour of nature is also the colour which is best suited to technical processes (think early radar screens and monitors). its still wonderful to work with, much friendlier than black and white. the nature/retro tech was was a nice twist, then. for some reasons the videos i did were mostly monochrome; the blue video (microstoria); the brown video (textuell); another green video (sd2). probably the music didnt left enough space for colour. the imagery used in dowhile is (apart from some random dropouts and some other bits and blits before and after on the master tape) generated out of martins design for the ovaldiskont cd (the silkscreen printing on the cd; not the cover). the individual layers for the printing inks were converted to bitmaps; put into the 3d software, warped, animated, viewed from different angles; overlaid; overlaid and postprocessed. actually a kind of joke using the design of the cd as the only source for the video.
How was the piece made?	During my work at the institute ("institute for integrated publication and information systems", see www.darmstadt.gmd.de) back in 1995 i developed a software for generating virtual television studio sets (where you have a moderator in front of a blue screen, and key in a background with a weather map; the difference then that if you would move the camera, the background would move also due to some clever position tracking of the camera). for that reason the institute had one of these extremely expensive silicon graphics machines and i had a software which was able to do video rendering in real time. i combined that with long and cheap cables (lots of rf interference) and some bedroom consumer video equipment and got a setup which was able to produce digitally very interesting shapes which matched nicely the analogue generated artifacts. in fact all the material for the 3 oval videos was recorded in one session at one evening at the institute. i also didnt really had much interest in doing another session with the same concept since then, since there is still a lot of unused material from this day available. the hard work started later at the avid, when we selected the material and sequenced the different pieces to the music.
Do you have any general thoughts about the use of abstract animation to interpret music?	the process of making the music for oval was so abstract (and the resulting sounds as well) that it seemed natural to put that into an abstract animation. kind of a conceptual help for the making of the video. i think a video should ideally reflect the conditions in which the music was made (in terms of precision, macro and micro-level-complexity, amount of randomness, etc.) to get a perceivable whole. juxtaposing different levels of detail doesnt really interest me; since there cant be learned much from in the long term, or one part will be lagging behind. ideally the editing process of electronic music can be quite similar to the processes available in digital video editing, and vice versa. unfortunately still most authoring environments tend to stay in one world, and dont take enough insprirations from the other side. there is always the problem with the output devices: showing abstract animations on a tv is always a little like trying to play techno on a small transistor radio. it just dont work. you will get neither the interesting frequencies nor the intensity i always wanted to have a display where you would be able to set the pixel to a brightness that you would have to turn your eyes away. i think this display-hardware would turn out to make this kind of questions fully academic.