Film Maker, Designer

So I haven’t really blogged in awhile but rest assured that doesn’t mean I’ve been getting lazy (even though it does). I was able to get together with a few friends of mine to create an animation to enter to the Run Rabbit Run video competition. It is an open video competition to all moviemakers, animators and slaves to the moving image medium. The idea was to interpret the theme “Run Rabbit Run”. I had been playing around with the idea of in my head of creating a perfectly synced animation piece with each layer of the animation corresponding to every sound with in a song. I managed to get a great song of my good friend John McSweeney and spent a few days pulling apart and rendering each layer of the song so that we could animated to each layer separately. After some great concepts done by Heather Walker and Maree Fletcher we were able to start the painful animation process. After 3 straight days of animating over a weekend we were able to put together a perfectly synced audio visual piece. Each layer of the animation was rendered separately in the hope that it could be played using VJ software (with the audio as well) to preform a live AV set. Allowing each layer to be manipulated along with its corresponding audio. With time constraints and the deadline looming I didn’t have enough time to get this part completed. Although I must say all things considering I’m still really happy with what we have produced! A big thanks to Maree Fletcher for the awesome drumming rabbit and Heather Walker for the wicked style, ideas and animation. I would thank myself, but they deserve it more then me!

A very interesting use of conductive body ink, to remake the track “Ready for The Weekend” by Calvin Harris. Using the conductive body ink 15 bikini-clad ladies are turned into a giant Arduino-powered synth capable of playing track, though Max/MSP and Ableton Live. Its like a giant human powerdered midi controller and seems to work quite well.

Water Colour 2.0 from Luke Brooks on Vimeo.

I was invited to submit my video “Water Colour” into a German video artists festival, but unfortunately could not get permission to use the music that I had chosen for the original piece. I then decided it would be a good opportunity to create some relaxing music to accompany the video piece. Here is my new and improved Water Colour video with music and visuals by me, Luke Brooks. (music contains samples from ccmixter, Antony Raijekov – Night Watch)

So I decided to spend some time doing an expiremental video of food colouring dropped into a clear acrylic box of water. I wanted to see what would happen and the different effects that could be created and how good it would look when filmed. The effect was much better then I ever thourght it would look, please check the video to see for yourself.

In order to film it the camera was placed to look through one side of the clear arcylic box as I dropped different colour food dies into the water. I did multiple takes with different colour 1 red, 1 blue, 1 green and one take with many colours together. I then did a rough edit layering the videos together and put it all to some music.

I shot the video in 1080i and have uploaded a 720p version to vimeo, in order to watch it in HD you’ll have to head on over to the vimeo site. (links below)

The set up:

Water Colour from Luke Brooks on Vimeo.