I've been feeling unusually sleepy and restful over the past few days, I see this as a positive reaction to the anxiety of the programming time with Argus.
Yesterday I started on a video for The Eternal Dogma, one of a pieces of music that Argus is ideal for. I always envisaged the 'sacrifice' sculpture for this, with a flickering light, then lots of eyes which appear in tandem with the booming piano intro. This involved, at first, filming my eyes, then chopping the film into a small square section of individual frames to feed to Argus. I then applied a mask to all of the frames and saved them out in DDS format.
Then I extracted a MIDI version of the piano themes in Prometheus, deleted a few notes, then saved out a list of frame numbers as a CSV file, which can be imported into Argus, a way to place a new eye on each piano sound.
I photographed the sculpture, and lit it in many ways, creating a 7-frame full-screen animation, and this was shaken by applying a noise modulator to the X and Y coordinates. The film starts with a very slow zoom out, which is essentially the object moving backwards. The closeup looks really good, lovely and smooth, with a sort of analogue grain that AviSynth completely lacks. The zoom was one of the smoothest and most beautiful digital zooms I've ever seen.
Lots of mouths were filmed for the vocal parts, which were snipped and added like the eyes. These looked better in black and white, a little too horrific in colour, too Francis Bacon.
A good test, but a few features need to be added I think. Placing the mouths made me wonder if having a track that is essentially linked to a 'costume' is a good idea - it might have been easier to specify the costume number during the Start command rather than fixing them to a specific track... yet what about modulators? Putting these in the costume design seems inefficient, as we might want to use the same design twice in different contexts.
I still feel tired and of low energy. I also feel very disconnected to the world and society. I seem to have little in common with the humans I see or encounter and often think of others as a different animal species. Common people seem to consider having children or grandchildren an achievement, when animals generally feel this way. If children are an achievement, it's one even rats master with ease. I see such things as a huge failure, an admission to the rank of rats and flies, a capitulation of intellect over the most base emotions; yet I'm being harsh. Small things are cute, baby animals, baby plants. Human children are no better or worse, but for anyone to regard them as important or some sort of hard-won prize seems like the paragon of stupidity.
