SELEM 2011 - Show Suggestions?

[Laserchik]

Those are someone elses ideas. My idea involves industrial music.

Like they play at the underground Goth clubs? If so, then I am VERY intrigued.

[JohnYayas]

Like they play at the underground Goth clubs?

That's pretty much all I listen to.

[Laserchik]

Ok, very cool. I am very intrigued to see what you will bring to SELEM. Even if it is just us ex-Goths sitting in one of the classrooms...lol

[laserist]

To be honest. After about 10 minutes of watching shows I get bored. This isn't because laser show are boring but because they are all basically the same. Cartoon graphics, moving shapes, time tunnels... sigh. In my opinion, LEMs should be an opportunity to show off what is new, not what is old. I challenge you all to come up with something new. Instead of just another cartoon show to a different song or the same old shapes moving in different ways to a different song, try adding some spice. That spice is your imagination... maybe incorporate some live control into the shows, maybe some ParCan mood lighting, video sequences that are intermixed with the lasers.. (well these are what I plan to do so don't go steal my idea ). I am sure you can think of other things. After leaving LEM I want everyone to say, "WOW, I haven't seen that before." Some of you pros probably won't be impressed but I think the average hobbyist still has not seen a lot that can be done.

Am I totally off base here? Thoughts?

Not totally off base, it's just you don't always get a more interesting show by adding more stuff. Someone who is really talented can blow you away with a penny whistle.

You know you have reached perfection in design, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to be taken away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[mixedgas]

This year you will be seeing a 1992 Brewster Award winning beam show,"Learning Curve", done as a partnership between Rob Mudryck and myself. What's shocking about it, is it uses no animation commands, everything is done with manipulated still frames, and no section of it repeats. 4 minutes and 40 seconds of "different". We also used up all the timeline cues, so it stretches across a couple of modules. There are something like 760 events in the first two minutes.

It was our first show, and we got 2nd place right off the bat for something programmed in three 14 hour days of programming. Hence "Learning curve".

One module in the show is called "Thanks Hayden" because we woke up Pangolin staff, including Bill, at like 2 AM in the morning to learn how to get past the cue limit.

Really not your modern "canned" beamshow, and if I had to do it all over again, it would be way different in technique.

In all honesty, it won because, in a strange quirk of fate, it was ran upside down, thus shooting the above the zero line, hot, beam arrays into a voting audience bored to tears with the same old European audience scanning. A room full of people cheered because the beam spacing in a few hot white effects lined up with the rows of chairs in the dining room. It nailed them in the face, one by one.



Since Showtime did not come with a manual or demo movie at the time, you may safely assume we missed a certain tiny but useful , pretty much hidden, Icon until the last minute. This means it looks, well, different..

So that will be one small "different" effect, a "dense" show set to upbeat music you have not viewed 127.9 times before.
Steve

[Laserchuck]

To be honest. After about 10 minutes of watching shows I get bored. This isn't because laser show are boring but because they are all basically the same. Cartoon graphics, moving shapes, time tunnels... sigh. In my opinion, LEMs should be an opportunity to show off what is new, not what is old. I challenge you all to come up with something new. Instead of just another cartoon show to a different song or the same old shapes moving in different ways to a different song, try adding some spice.

John, I was going to have a problem with your statement here and question what you meant and why you were doing anything with lasers if you didn't like the art UNTIL I saw some animations that were the main focus in two song. Not only were they the same animation, but a very long one, and directly ripped out of their source song that they actually fit.

I used to joke at AVI that we were an environmentally friendly company because we recycled imagery. Reusing a rotating earth or something simple incorporated into a show is a convenient solution, but broad reuse is absurd. I've joked for years that I was spoiled at AVI with 2 animators, 3 digitizers, and 4 producers, ahh the glory days.

It is certainly possible to reuse content between songs if they are not both seen by the same audience, but that is tough to do in a crowd of people that all access the same library of clip art. We still see it today from the pro's too.

That spice is your imagination... maybe incorporate some live control into the shows, maybe some ParCan mood lighting, video sequences that are intermixed with the lasers.. (well these are what I plan to do so don't go steal my idea ). I am sure you can think of other things. After leaving LEM I want everyone to say, "WOW, I haven't seen that before." Some of you pros probably won't be impressed but I think the average hobbyist still has not seen a lot that can be done.

Am I totally off base here? Thoughts?

This year I used DigiSynth to perform live abstracts to Metallica's Nothing Else Matters at ILDA for judging and award purposes. Conveniently, I was the only entrant in that category, so I took home another 1st place award.

I've said for years is that the biggest limitation is your own imagination. While it can take some time to produce detailed content, there have been songs that have flown through the studio because I was very inspired to work on that piece. One of those was YYZ by Rush, which was primarily a live capture, and was completed in just a few hours. It took 2nd place behind Pink Floyd's Keep Talking, another song that I submitted. Yes it is still possible to impress with Pink Floyd!

I can't draw, so from me the best imagery will be abstract, which really is a limitless art, so long as the tools used are limitless.

The coolest laser and video that I ever saw was the thing Lightspeed did with video and laser rendered from 3dsMAX where it looked like the laser images were solid objects masking the video. Raster laser looks like 1990's internet video. If you want to do video use a video projector. I've tried to avoid it for that reason. A tasteful combination of lasers and video would be cool to see, and would have been my next project at AVI back when Patrick Murphy was president.

maybe some interesting nuggets in there?

-chuck

[JohnYayas]

Everyone is different. I used to be more entertained by laser shows even if they were just a bouncing ball. But between then and now I have spent 100s of hours staring and images on my wall while working on my laser show software. So, I recognize that others are probably easier to entertain than I am with the normal stuff. But still, most of us attending LEMS have seen the normal stuff over and over so I don't think raising the bar and trying to incorporate new ideas and technology is uncalled for. At least, it is something to shoot for.

But to answer your question of why I am into if if it doesn't interest me... I am very interested in the technical aspects of making it work. Maybe some day we can work together. Who knows.

[Laserchuck]

yeah, you know what is funny is that I had a friend back when we were seeing shows in 90-91 and we would joke that the worst show is like 4 colored circles floating floating around the dome. Then one of the first shows I ran when I was hired by AVI started with... you guessed it, 4 circles floating around.

The fun part was that it worked because it was starting out slow to sort of "teach" the audience what a 3-D lasershow was and how ChromaDepth worked.

You are not out of line, I was looking around PL a little while ago and I see lots of threads about how to make the technology work but nothing really about lasers as an art. Maybe I'll start one.

-chuck

[JohnYayas]

I went to a show way back before I even knew what a galvo was. My girlfriend, at the time, was helping to run the show because she worked at the planetarium. After the show I told her my favorite part. It was the most awesome thing I had seen and I figured it must be really awesome how they made it work. When I explained what I saw, she explained to me that it was just a laser shining through glass. The coolest part of the show, to me, was a lumia effect.

[dsli_jon]

Instead of just another cartoon show to a different song or the same old shapes moving in different ways to a different song, try adding some spice....

..Three 'words' for ya, dude: "Lumia / FX Projector'... turns even a 'relatively mundane' / 'same-ol-graphix' show..into 'majik'... zap....

ciao for now...
j

The coolest part of the show, to me, was a lumia effect.

...and yo, Chuck, we gotta talk... I'll be able to 'come up for air' after ~ Nov 7th-8th... *blitzed* till-then...