Lumen-Second

BBQMS

2008-12-02T22:51:00.000-08:00

The final track recounts a badly damaged festival environment, put on by an overbearing and delusional CEO of a small tech startup, demonstrating labour exploitation in the high tech sector since its early 2000s deregulation in British Columbia, a crucial factor in our local tech/social media boom over the past several years. However, as this is poetry or theatre of a sort, the license to exaggerate has been also fully exploited. Here developers sign contracts in blood, get actual strings attached to their fingers so that their keystrokes will not deviate from what their bosses and clients desire, and are eventually cannibalized in front of their children, invited for a special Saturday 'hot dog day' in the plaza outside the commercial high rise.

With that we bring you "BBQMS", the tenth and final track, concluding the album Embers with the full-on Arrival of Late Capital, washing ashore with its Colonial overtones in Act One, rapidly dehumanizing and hyperindividuating through Act Two, and eventually eating its own means of production, workers, or tail. Don't say we didn't give a fair, accurate and timely account of the utter demise of Western Techno-capital. Hope you have enjoyed the party.

Arts & Entertainment

2008-11-25T08:03:00.000-08:00

The social media divide rhetorical styles and common understandings as much as they mash us together into the same stylesheet. Here we have an example of dialogue gone wrong at the edge of the chasm, an argument going nowhere, as no one is listening. Instead we are diverging, multiplying, becoming dialectic, polar, weird to each other. And with this comes apathy. Depressing, isn't it?

Track Nine from Embers, "Arts and Entertainment".

Remote Controls

2008-11-19T17:40:00.000-08:00

…and the logjam of higher education breaks, recalling an ennui of gargantuan proportions.
Besieged by youthful desperation on one side, and blank faced bureaucracy on the other,
you better take it in your hand before you lose control, or get trampled under the
Airstream Trailers of God parked outside the community college campus…

Track 8 from Embers, "Remote Controls".

A Spectre Is Haunting Europe: Live @ The Balmoral

2008-11-17T19:51:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 5th
The New Balmoral
159 E.Hastings
$10 cover

A Spectre Is Haunting Europe will be playing their first show since 2006, with a new lineup and new slate of material culled from their latest album Embers, along with old favourites.
Guests Rotten Fiends are over from Victoria.

Insomnia Film Festival

2008-11-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

Apple's Insomnia Film Festival is open for registration until November 13th.
The festival will begin on the 15th, when Apple will post the required elements. Teams will then have 24 hours to complete and upload their completed three minute short films.

A Spectre Is Fucking Europe

2008-11-04T11:42:00.000-08:00

Commemorating 4 November 2008, we give you new music about corrupt rulers. The Bush Is Dead. Long Live The Bush. & A Spectre Is Fucking Europe.
Our paranoid, quivering speaker, who here opens up Act Two of Embers, believes that this whole Erection business is for real.
Such is the self-made pomo victim-subject as mediated, cut up, cut off, chewed at the roots.
Next week we'll try and escape this gloomy situation.

The Incredibly Useless Machine Contest

2008-11-03T22:15:00.000-08:00

I came across this on VFX Talk. I don't think I'm going to have time right now to enter, but I thought that it was worth sharing:

Realflowforum.com - an independent digital fluid simulation internet forum is proud to announce its 2008 contest:

"The Incredibly Useless Machine"

Build the most incredible machine you can, that performs an everyday mundane task using the tools provided within Realflow.
These machines are known as Rube Goldberg machines and are... "A celebration of the most mechanical, complex and absurd way of performing an everyday task. There's nothing quite like watching a cuckoo clock set off a bowling ball that rolls into a pie pan which lifts up some guy's pants before he gets arrested for exposure-again." (from Gizmodo). For more inspiration see rubegoldberg.com or Wikipedia.

* The competition is open to Realflowforum members worldwide either as individuals or teams

* The competition commences November 1st 2008 and closes December 15th 2008

* You can use any version of Realflow including the demo version along with your favourite 3D application

Getting Ready To Start Haunting Again

2008-11-03T22:10:00.000-08:00

We had our first proper rehearsal with the new full lineup of A Spectre is Haunting Europe this weekend, and it went really well.
Back at Faceplant, and now as a quintet. My cousin is Ciaran is on drums, and he's picking the material up really quickly.
The three of us who wrote and recorded Embers; Jean, Quinn, and I, are settling into our roles, and coming together on the new material more easily than we expected as well.
Jean has a new cream flying-V, it looks like Quinn might be trying double duty on keys and guitar, and I've dug out my old EHX rig again.
I'm really looking forward to getting this show up on stage soon.
The second half of Embers will resume it's weekly release schedule later this week.
So download the new songs (and the old ones) and let us know what you think!

Mr.Pixel and Mrs. Grain

2008-10-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

In this brilliant series of shorts, the analogue/digital debate is represented as a married couple in counseling. I found these on the always interesting Fresh DV.
enjoy.

Night Class

2008-10-09T23:19:00.000-07:00

The fifth song from Embers, entitled “Night Class“, is frigid poesy accompanied by the return of the frenzied chorus motif to remind you that this is a sedate tragedy, one of feigned deception and exhaustion from the toll of relentless desire. It can do one in completely. Let’s now watch our wallets; there are thieves about. And they typically have been made that way by being thrown in a dunce chair or bamboozled into seeing ghosts, etc. So yes, it’s the ghosts again, too.

So concludes what appears to be Act One of Embers. It neatly divides into two halves of five songs each, thematically. During Act Two all artifice is shed, and all truly dark and ruthless things start to percolate up that could never have been even remotely anticipated during the first Act.

All Is Vanity

2008-09-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

From the sublime to the sardonic - the cosmopolitan to the local, Embers, with All Is Vanity, zeroes in on faux despair and includes the voices of the dead in the sound of clopping horses. It's a song in love with its own satirical defeatism, and is carefully constructed out of obsolete pop tropes. A recipe for topping the Billboard charts, to be sure. Comment allez-vous?

Τσπος γεννησεως

2008-09-19T18:46:00.000-07:00

Upon dozing in the ambience of this strange modern city we begin to dream, taking in all that's ancient and buried and recognizing all of the wormholes between the dead and the now, the crumbled and the negotiating. Like limestone or oil, the dead are a midden from which we and our ideas and actions spring continuously; the symbiosis between decay and renewal are built under any city that's truly alive and magical. Let's party it up, all of us.

So continuing on from last week's Track Two from Embers, ("Filoxenia"), we give you "Τσπος γεννησεως" (Greek for "Place of Birth"). Oh he seems poor, but oh he seems old. Or so it seems.

New Website

2008-09-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

I've just finished up a new website. there are a few things I still want to add to it, but it's pretty much there now.
This is my first try at building a site with Flash, so there might still be some bugs, but it's a lot smoother and better integrated than my old html one.
Take a look here, and let me know what you think?

click image to enter

Filoxenia

2008-09-11T00:35:00.000-07:00

Last week we introduced you to "The Arrival", our Astonishing Tale of the Sea, ending with an urban shipwreck at nightfall, and the enticing new possibilities of a modern city.

This week we bring you Track Two from Embers, "Filoxenia" (Greek for "love of strangers") to describe the digs you're in for once you've stumbled ashore.

For those just tuning in, this is the second track from ASIHE's newest album, digitally released for free, creative commons licensed (non commercial and attribution only). Enjoy!

Embers Unleashed

2008-09-05T21:47:00.000-07:00

At long last, A Spectre Is Haunting Europe is proud to release their third full length album, entitled Embers. We're be releasing it one song per week over the next ten weeks. The album is free to download, creative commons licensed (non commercial, attribution only) for your re-use and mangling.

The lead-off track, "The Arrival", is available now for free download on Last.fm, and soon everywhere else, too.

For those of you who pre-ordered the vinyl, stay tuned, as we're working on that. Thanks for your patience!

A tumultuous, thorny, and highly idiosyncratic sociology-via-music of bodies and cities, rights & regrets, cadavers, intellectual decline and ancient pieces of knowledge scrambled by a contemporary techné that's explosive, brutish yet graspable, bearing a glint of possibilities for those fortunate enough to be curious about it enough to crack it open.

It is 10 songs, released sequentially, on a weekly basis, from September 5th for ten weeks. after that the album's yours and everyone's.

1. The Arrival

2. Filoxenia

3. Τσπος γεννησεως

4. All Is Vanity

5. Night Class

6. A Spectre Is Fucking Europe

7. 2M07-2010

8. Remote Controls

9. Arts & Entertainment

10. BBQMS

Simulacre Media
SIMDA-000

the band:
Jean Hébert
Matt Sheppard
Quinn Rusnell

Music written and performed by A Spectre Is Haunting Europe
Lyrics written and performed by Jean Hébert

While we're releasing it one song at a time, this digital album is ultimately meant to be listened to in its entirety, from end to end. When it's all available together, don't interrupt the sequence.

And again, this digital album is also a creative commons project, so, really, you can do whatever you like, for noncommercial purposes, so long as you attribute the original artist. For any commercial licensing of this material, please contact simulacre at simulacre dot ca for permission.

New Reel

2008-08-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

Matt Sheppard VFX Showreel from Matt Sheppard on Vimeo.

Digital Grunts

2008-08-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

This pretty much sums it all up perfectly...I especially like the part where the client freaks out about a single pixel during dailies/finals

Stiff Valentine

2008-08-02T19:54:00.000-07:00

My friend Chris has an excellent band (self described as "disco-metal") called Stiff Valentine.
They have an album out now on the Trafik Records label and were recently interviewed at Fabryka.
It's a good interview, and hey look at that...they used one of the photos I took of Chris on stage at the old Pic Pub (r.i.p)

A Spectre Is Haunting Europe: Embers Update

2008-07-03T00:10:00.000-07:00

cross-posted from A Spectre Is Haunting Europe.com

ach. slight delay on the LP due to unforeseen issues with tech - digital release will be available by the end of July 2008, and the vinyl shortly thereafter.

But it’s going to be good. It’s some very exciting music -different from what you’re probably expecting. As you know, we’ve rearranged our membership and hey, 2006 (Flames) was a long time ago - global food crisis, subprime mortgages, google android. Lots to articulate, lots to murmur to you.

Happily, we’re now open for submissions for our participatory video project. Send us an email indicating your interest. Explain why you think you can make a video for one of our songs, and we’ll bring you into our hug club. You then get to make a video for one of our songs, and we will distribute that-azz everywhere. No money involved, and you sign away all your rights (except attribution, which is guaranteed) in this “let’s go krazy” mixed up copyleft world.

check back soon…!

This is what it's about...

2008-06-30T02:17:00.000-07:00

Big flashy hero shots, where visual effects are shown off as a centre piece have their place (and that place appears to be about 1725 kilometres (1072 miles) due south of Vancouver...just kidding)
Creative, imaginative, and heavily stylized use of effects are one of my main interests in this medium, and are to me, incredibly inspirational.
There is another very important, and more and more prevalent use of visual compositing effects and computer graphics though. You see it every day in movies and tv shows that you would never think of as "effects shows" ...and if you don't notice it, then it's done it's job.
The transparent effect is, in my opinion, one of the more difficult effects to do well. I think that it's also one of the most important, as it facilitates what film or television at it's best really should be doing: telling stories.
Here is a perfect example. First a look at the finished work:

And here is how it was done: A handful of people, very little equipment, and only a week or so of work (the clip says 3 guys and 4 days, but that doesn't include the photographer and the time spent in post production, which would have probably doubled the overall time invested...still pretty damn good though)

This may be a BBC production, but it's still good old guerrilla film making, which is something I find very exciting.

tip of the hat to Stu Maschwitz

Open Call For Videos

2008-05-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

Here's some info about the band/project:

The band is called A Spectre Is Haunting Europe. ( A Spectre Is Haunting Europe - you can listen/download its music for free at last.fm ).

The band is releasing its newest 'album' on July 15, 2008, and would like to start pushing out videos on a weekly basis, one for each of the 10-11 songs that will be on it (we're releasing everything for free, and each song comes out one at a time, in a quazi-blog format). The videos will be timed to be released on youtube, blip (etc) along with the release of each song (there's also going to be a limited release vinyl pressing afterward, but that's another thing).

So we're requesting interested video producers to submit something for one of our songs. We're starting with people we know personally, then widening the request outward.

There's no money involved (we don't ever earn any, sorta by choice), and you would need to agree that we have the right to distribute the video everywhere - you will always be attributed as director, and we will only ever mash it if you give prior permission.

Videos are accepted first come first served, though we will screen them for hateful or illegal content before accepting them.

We will keep a tally sheet on our blog (precise location TBA) to keep live track of videos that have been spoken for. In the event of multiple submissions that are more or less simultaneous, and acceptable, we reserve the right to use one of them at our discretion for a follow-up campaign (after the initial 10-11 weeks of the release).

Send an inquiry to spectre@simulacre.ca to find out how to submit (format, address, and other details).

Free Music

2008-05-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

To promote their new album, ACEDIA, English cross-genre punk-industrial-goth-electro-goth -rockers History of Guns have released a new 2-song single called Empty Eyes for free.
You can download it here.
Both tracks are quite good in my opinion, and certainly worth downloading. It's the same overall sound and feel that first turned me on to them with "Obedient Servants" (which made Mick Mercer's top 30 goth singles of all time), but with a huge improvement in production, and slightly better fleshed-out song writing.
Take a listen for yourself!

Alive...

2008-05-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I first wanted to get into more advanced 3D, and photoreal work, was seeing what was being done by Neill Blomkamp and Vancouver's The Embassy.
The Tetra Vaal, and Alive In Joburg shorts are a couple of my favourites.
Most people know them from their advertising work, specifically these Citroen C4 "Alive with Technology" commercials:

And this leads me to the actual point of this post. I recently came across this excellent pdf article: The Art of Robotics on ComputerArts.co.uk
While it is listed as a technical tutorial on the site, it actually doesn't go very in depth in that respect. It is a nice straight forward overview of the workflow, and the thinking behind some of the creative and technical decisions involved in the production.

Orphan Works

2008-05-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

So, this is the first post on my new blog. This isn't about the area of copyright law by the same name, although I'll probably go into that subject here eventually anyway.
This is about work, specifically digital work, which has literally lost it's parent; it's source files.
I am coming to the end of my current contract soon, and need to start looking for a new job.
To this end I've been sporadically working on small projects on my off time to put together a new demo reel.
I've been a little short on HD space (yes I know large hard drives have become incredibly cheap, but I've been lazy and cheap...lesson learned) so I backed up some shots I was working on a few months ago to DVD to make room for another project.
Now that it's time to start putting together a reel I went to reload the archived material so that I could finish it off, only to find that the disc was corrupt.
Thanks to Gmail's search function I was able to recover a couple of single frame test composites that I suppose could be used in my online portfolio, but without the accompanying clean plates they aren't really much use in an actual reel.
More importantly, without the source files there is nothing more I can do with these shots.
They are all that they will ever be now.

click to enlarge

The shot on the left is a matte painting over footage of Vancouver's west end. This is the one frame I have, but the full shot was also rotoscoped for live birds flying in front of the buildings, and I had planned to add some particle smoke emanating from within the city.
It isn't bad as it is, but without the original layers I can't really change or improve anything.
I could still add on top of what's there, but without the original image sequence, or at least a clean plate, I have nothing to go back to as a breakdown to show what I've actually done.
The second shot is a bit more of a disappointment, since I probebly could have used the 3D assets for a lot more.

I had something similar happen with a music project a few years ago.
I had a hard drive die on me without an external backup (yeah I know...my own damn fault) right at the end of the project. Luckily I had just sent the mixed tracks off to be mastered when this happened, so the timing couldn't have been better. Once again though, those songs are now all that they will ever be.

Obviously, nothing can really be done once something like this occurs, so it's no use dwelling on it. Still, it's quite frustrating. Anyone else have any similar experiences?