Micah Walter

James Nachwey made his TED wish after receiving the TED prize this year. The wish was to have TED help him gain access to a story, and help him to use “photography in the digital age” to spread his message. This Friday his story will break and he wants you to help him spread the word. So, be sure to visit his TEDPrize site and add this same badge to your blog or website. I can’t wait to see what this is all about..

Nachtwey’s TEDPrize Site

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

I didn’t want to get too political on this site, but this video by Sarah Silverman is just too good not to post…

Under the JMZ Short from Micah Walter on Vimeo.

So, following up on my last post.. I spent some time today walking around my neighborhood. I brought the Tascam audio recorder, a shotgun microphone and my iPhone earbuds. For some reason the iPhone headset didn’t really work. If you want to isolate the sounds outside from the sounds you are recording you really need a professional set of headphones. So, instead I sort of flew by seat of my pants and just recorded blindly. I circles the fours corners of the intersection of Broadway and Myrtle two or three times, recording whatever I thought was interesting. I was really concerned about picking up the noises of my holding the mic, and little pops and things like that, but in the end the audio was pretty decent.

It’s interesting how MUCH audio you can record in a short walk. It’s very different from shooting stills. All of the sudden you have minutes and minutes of audio. The editing process for something linear like this is very different. But, so far I really like it.

Back at home, in Soundtrack Pro I spent a good deal of time massaging my audio. I first converted the audio to stereo. I then lowered the gain a little as my capture was a little high. I also added some reverb and used the Channel EQ to bring out the sound sI was really interested in.

It is sort of a shame that you don’t get to hear some parts of the recording I did as they were really cool. But this short film sort of proves to me that I can do this project. Basically I just need to go out and record more, catalog everything and shoot some great photos and HD video. I have formed a concept. These images will most likely not be part of the final product, but they serve as placeholders here for now….

Enjoy.
M

This weekend I am recording some audio for a project I am thinking about in Brooklyn. That’s right, I am still just in the thinking stages of this project. Recording audio is something fairly new to me. Not only are there new technical challenges, but the basic mindset is far different than shooting stills or even video. Since this audio isn’t directly tied to any specific still or video imagery ( yet ) I have to sort of think of things in a whole new way.

First of all what am I doing? Well, I am trying to record ambient audio from the neighborhood–specifically, a number of street corers below the JMZ trains. To get the idea of what I wanted to record I just walked around and listened. I tried to focus my attention on the intricacies of all the layers of noise around me. I tried to think of what it would be like to be blind. I got some ideas pretty quickly doing this and now I find myself doing it all the time while walking from place to place.

Second, I had to consider my rig. The Tascam setup is pretty awful. The unit itself is pretty bulky. I have it slung over my shoulder in a bag, but it requires a number of cables and a microphone. The Tascam, plus the cable and mic, plus the cable and headphones make for a pretty suspicious looking Micah! So, to thwart this I replaced the larger headphones with iPhone earbuds. I know this isn’t the best for isolating the sound, but it will have to do. The mic and cable will have to remain as is for now until I find something better.

The Tascam itself is pretty nice (technically speaking). It can accept standard XLR inputs for both left and right, as well as a number of other inputs or it’s own built in mic. It records direct to .wav format onto a CF card, and you can either use its built in Firewire connection to transfer the data or simply pull them off with a card reader.

It also outputs a few XML files that contain any marker/timecode data you may have recorded.

I think I would prefer to use the smaller Marantz unit that is becoming more and more popular these days for field work. It’s much sleeker and less obvious. It also runs on only 4 AA batteries and features the same audio inputs. I think the Tascam may have a better frequency range, but I think the Marantz is probably just fine in that regard. At this point I don’t think I can really tell the difference anyway.

In terms of software I will be editing this stuff in Final Cut Pro and doing the audio adjustments in Soundtrack Pro. Both apps work seamlessly together, so it’s sort of a no brainer for me. In Soundtrack Pro I can easily turn my mono recording into stereo and add all sorts of effects like reverb and surround sound. It’s pretty amazing what you can do, and I have only scratched the surface!

My basic plan is to try something a little different and record the audio, stills and video for this project on separate occasions. I think doing it this way will not only allow me to focus on each component more closely, but it should give me some results I hadn’t considered as of yet. We shall see how it goes….

I love me a good Jackson Pollock painting. In fact I have been thinking of making a “Micah-Pollock” painting for my apartment. Could be a fun experience. Anyway, searching around the internet I quickly came across this very cool interactive web app at Jackson Pollock.org

Have a go and see what you can create… feel free to upload your results to this site.

The one thing I didn’t like and couldn’t figure out how to hack was the authors signature and info label that gets overlaid at the end… yuk!

I was hoping to be able to post to this blog nearly every day. I have seen so much already and keep spotting things to post that are related to my work, but I just haven’t had time. These past few weeks have been somewhat of a whirlwind. Traveling up and down I-95 each week, trying to wrap up a pretty big programming project, and getting started at MICA have certainly taken their toll on my energy reserves. I am finding myself constantly in need of food and sleep. What is this, med school?

Anyway, I guess this is just how I do. I always have 8 billion things on my plate. I am pretty good at prioritizing them, but eventually some things get ignored or put off. I am hoping this blog won’t become one of those.

So, lets look at how my week is going…!

This week I got to do my first critique session. It went pretty well. The way it works ( for those of you who don’t know ) is each week three students sign up to show their work and have it critiqued. This was the first week, and only myself and one other student signed up. It’s really early in the game right now so not many people have something to show, myself included.

I ended up putting together a short film, and I showed some of what I call my visual notebook. There were even a few iPhone pics in there! I did a good amount of talking and we had a pretty good discussion. It only got derailed a couple of times and we were able to get back on track eventually. The whole thing lasted about an hour.

I would say that people were pretty excited about the whole experience. It’s not like I’m finished with my work or anything–far from it. But, I got some really good constructive ideas, we didn’t talk much about my personality disorders and although nobody clapped, I had fun!

Earlier in the day I had my Philosophy and Pedagogy Something Something class where the head of the sculpture department spoke. She was fantastic, and yesterday I walked over to Area 405, which happens to be on the same block as my apartment, and saw her current exhibit and listened to her give a talk. Very inspiring stuff. If you are interested, check out her site at Ledelle Moe

Tuesday I spent the morning working on my programming project and in the evening I gave a talk to a bunch of freshman about Aperture and non-destructive image editing. There were a few blank stares, but most people were impressed with what you could do with the software and I think it went okay. Yesterday I had another Core Practicum session. For some reason my Processing code wouldn’t load on the instructor’s notebook, but I was able to show how it looked on mine. I have to admit, the class seemed a little too rudimentary for me this time. I may have to find out about testing out of that one, or coming up with an alternative.

Welp, I am back in Bushwick today pounding out my programming project. I really hope to get it wrapped up today or tomorrow… So it will probably be another long night with pizza and diet coke, my laptop and Objective-C. Fun times….

Ahead of me I have to think about our upcoming show in October. I already sort of have figured out what I am going to do, but now I need to do it, and fast. This week in Brooklyn I have brought with me some high end sound recording equipment with which I will begin to collect the audio component of the installation. Oops, I think I just gave you all a hint! Shhhhhh.

Okay, back to programming….

This is a short “flipbook” style video I just produced for my first critique at MICA. A good deal was discussed about the choice of the audio, and I have to agree that it isn’t perfect. I am planning to do a lot more with video and audio in the near future. Just trying to get my bearings at the moment…

Flipbook from Micah Walter on Vimeo.

Mæve installation @ Venice Biennale 2008 HD from Maeve installation on Vimeo.
I was looking around the Processing Group on Vimeo.com and found this really, REALLY amazing installation. You sort of just have to watch it, but all the graphics were done with Processing… I might be hooked…

-m

I should start a series called “Made with Processing.” There is some really cool stuff out there. I’m still on the first chapter…. Check this one out, and be sure to click the button for HD.

Metamorphosis from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

I was really pleased this week to find out that we will be learning Processing instead of Java for our Core Practicum course with Andy Deck. This is pretty appealing to me as I want to learn this language, and I think it will satisfy the rest of the class in terms of a way to learn about programming.

So for our first assignment, we basically have to just create an image in code. The first task will be to decide what to create. I am thinking of playing with the dist() function. So, naturally I have posted my code to Subversion. You can watch my progress as I work out this first assignment over the course of the week.

If you are in the class and need help, have a look at the code I am working on, try it out, and feel free to comment away with any questions. In fact, now that I think of it, maybe I will set up a forum space to talk about all things “Processing.”

Ciao..
-m

Click below to see the code I am working on for the first assignment..

Assignment 1 - SVN