All Videos Tagged trance (The Visual Music Village) - The Visual Music Village

ROM (Reboot Our Minds) ~ Gen Thalz

2013-12-04T10:00:56.051Z

Another analog session

with live circuit bending and DIY kit

feat. the voice of Mr. Terence McKenna (shaman, psychonaut, ethnobotanist)

*This is the second part of his speech in the video:

Catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what has never been seen. To draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance and act what has never before been done. To push the envelope of creativity and language and whats really important is, I call it, the felt presence of direct experience which is a fancy term which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture.

Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time, where you are now, is the most immediate sector of your universe and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, you are disempowered. You are giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.

That is all cultural diversion and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, and your fears... and we are told no, we're unimportant, we're peripheral, "get a degree", "get a job", get a this, get a that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?

Scroggins Beach (Film and music by Jim Ellis 2008)

2010-08-12T06:25:01.000Z

A while back I made a song for realtime animation pioneer Michael Scroggins to listen to while he practiced his liquid lightshow.

Then a few months later, I was playing around with Touch Designer, (doing realtime animation experiments) and I created a lot of cool footage in a short amount of time.
I decided to edit it together, and the song I made for Michael Scroggins seemed to work perfectly.
The intro resembles an electric beach, and since Scroggins is a Psychedelic creature who used to "live to surf", and the song worked... so came the title: "Scroggins Beach".

This has a 3d effect (about 1-2 minutes in it starts) so follow the directions at the beginning of the film if you want to see the effect. Dark, non-polarized sunglasses work best.

BTW: this is 100% in computer created visuals. No video from reality was used.

Enjoy.

Eternity (Film by Jim Ellis. Music by Mudville. 2007)

2010-08-12T06:13:15.000Z

This film has a 3D effect (most visible towards the end).
If you want to see this effect, you need to get a normal pair of dark sunglasses (the darker the better) and tilt them so that they COVER ONLY YOUR LEFT EYE. Non-polarized work better. There is a test screen at the very beginning of the film to see if the effect is working for you.

Ben Rubin begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting is a swell fella... and he's 1/2 of the band Mudville.
They had a new album coming out,
so I made this music video for them.

I made it in Touch Designer (version 66 I believe).
I performed the animation live in realtime, and multi-tracked the results.

whisper (by Jim Ellis music by Aksak Maboul) 1997

2010-08-12T06:05:52.000Z

search
bright
blinding
try to speak
apologies
thanks
ashamed
proud
can't speak of it
one word
of many
to loved ones
to strangers
this whisper

This is a short film that I created out of a series of loops (made in Softimage) for a one night art installation that originally took place at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions back in 1997. The loops lend themselves to lengthy repetition. This was the best manner to perceive the seemingly impossible geometry shifts that took place. I decided to make a short film from the loops, even though by do so, I felt I compromised the trance element a bit for the sake of brevity. When it came time for me to compose an original soundtrack, I was inspired by the song "Scratch Holiday" by the band "Aksak Maboul". Rather than try to compose an original song, I decided to go with the main source of musical inspiration. So "Scratch Holiday" was used. Check out and go buy their music, it's well well worth it. crammed.be/crammed/101/index.htm

The basic animation for this was made in about 2-3 days of me being awake the entire time. I was working on about 15 SGI computers at once. I was frantically dashing between the computers in the CalArts lab, jiggling the mouse, and previewing the animation. The other students thought I was bonkers. It was really about trying to capture a moment of inspiration in the traditionally very slow and tedious creative realm of computer animation. Rather than hit on an idea, and then spend months/years trying to hold onto that initial spark to make a film, I made the work when I was still directly influenced by that moment of inspiration. This was really the start of me realizing that I had to go real-time with CGI. In fact, I did make a real-time version of this (in about 2001) in the real-time software "Touch".

I wanted "life", "mood", and "inspiration" in the piece. In the end, I think I got "ghost in the machine". It became a very personal piece to me, as it was the first time I felt that I had really created a film that accurately reflected aspects of my inner head space. It also became a bit of "see this what I've been trying to say, but was unable to put into words". Guess I had to make a film to say it.

enjoy

Jim Ellis

Drift/Hypnagogia (music/anim Jim Ellis 2006)

2010-08-12T05:58:35.000Z