Light Warfare + Behind the Scenes

Freddie Wong and crew are back from their recent Realistic Muzzle Flare Tutorial with the newish Light Warfare. Click on the tag AEP posts on graffiti-light graphics and After Effects tutorials.

Slight delay... looks like fun but hell no:

Light Graffiti: 10 Masters of Light Painting Photography

TheCoolist has collected "10 excellent light graffiti artists from around the world, dating back to the days of Picasso... So set your shutter speed slow, grab a flashlight" and visit Light Graffiti: 10 Masters of Light Painting Photography.

Check out also previous posts on light graffiti from TheCoolist. Click on the tag AEP posts on graffiti and light graphics. A few After Effects tutorials were noted in Light graffiti in AE.

Update: Christopher Hibbert has a several resources on his website including a light-painting tutorial on his site (also on Abuzeedo), and more on Tumblr.

Graffiti Analysis

via the interesting twitters of _osa_ is Graffiti Analysis, a coding project by Evan Roth and several others that studies the motion of graffiti. Here's a video noted on r27's posterous and a fun one on GML, the Graffiti Markup Language:

Graffiti Analysis 2.0: Digital Blackbook from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Click on the tag for previous AEP posts on the subject. Here's more from the Graffiti Analysis project:

"Custom software designed for graffiti writers creates visualizations of the often unseen motion involved in the creation of a tag. Motion data is recorded, analyzed and archived in a free and open database, 000000book.com, where writers can share analytical representations of their hand styles. 

Influential graffiti artists such as SEEN, TWIST, AMAZE, KETONE, JON ONE and KATSU have had their tags motion captured using the Graffiti Analysis software. All tags created in Graffiti Analysis are saved as Graffiti Markup Language (GML) files, a new digital standard used by other popular graffiti applications such as Laser Tag and EyeWriter. 

Graffiti Analysis 2.0 is an open source project that is available online for free in OSX, Windows and Linux. Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. What Martha Cooper did for archiving graffiti on film, and Chalfant/Silver did for archiving graffiti in video, Graffiti Analysis intends to do for archiving graffiti in code."

Picasso's Light Graffiti from 1949 + Trek-Wars

Via the Wooster Collective is Picasso: Drawing With Light from LIFE magazine:

"LIFE photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso in 1949. Mili showed the artist some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates jumping in the dark—and Picasso's mind began to race. The series of photographs that follows—Picasso’s light drawings—were made with a small flashlight in a dark room; the images vanished almost as soon as they were created."

You can find some background links for light painting or light graffiti in the previous AEP post Light graffiti in AE.

Also fun is Star Wars Vs. Star Trek (includes Light Painting) via a Twittered blog, Design You Trust:

Starwars V Startrek from LICHTFAKTOR on Vimeo.

Other recent Star Wars vs. Star Trek action was posted earlier in Favorite Movie: Star Trek vs. Star Wars and in Star Trek vs. Star Wars! The Great Lightsaber - Phaser Battle.

'Wild Style' titles (+ Zephyr interview)

The Art of the Title Sequence looks at Wild Style and adds an interview with Zephyr.

Water purifies art

PrepShootPost notes that with a down economy the New York City art world is going back to the drawing board and links to a NYT article, The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! Looks like many people will now have time for art.

Via Images to Live By is Bill Viola: ‘Ocean without a shore’, where Viola combines analog and high-def digital video of people passing through a water wall, akin to a wall of death. More on this can be found at Images to Live By; other work (and background) by Viola was at SFMOMA, which has interactive and video of all sorts archived.




Also using water to purify and reveal is reverse graffiti; The Huffington Post explained last October in Reverse Graffiti: Activist Art Extraordinaire:

"Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime."

International Street Art

A graffiti resource, THE OVERSPRAY MAGAZINE FISHBOWL, was mentioned by Joe Mercer on the AE-List. It seems like a fitting repose from videos like Hilter as director/producer (I worked for a guy like that) or Hitler Plans Burning Man (he'd build the scariest art car ever if he lived in San Francisco).

Update: Overspray is gone, but other cool sites include FatCap, "the graffiti & street-art resource" and Graffiti Archaeology.

Light graffiti in AE

Over at Creative Cow Aharon Rabinowitz has a video that gets you started in using "AE to simulate the popular light writing effect seen in recent Sprint commercials." "Light graffiti" got way more popular since PIPS:lab debuted in the late '90s or so -- especially with those Sprint commercials (more) which also seem to end with Trapcode Particular whisps of light. As Aharon says you don't need to use actual lights (like PIPS:lab or MAKE), you can just write-on, wiggle, and glow with or without something to track.

Andrew Kramer posted somewhat related tutorials, 33. Graffiti Writing and a light streaks technique with Trapcode Particular at Creative Cow some time ago.

Light graffiti was also featured in the book Urban Calligraphy and Beyond and in recent articles like MAKE: Blog: Light graffiti, Painting with Light, Interview with LICHTFAKTOR: Light Graffiti Artists, and Architectural Light Graffiti: Projection Bombing Images on Urban Surfaces.

Update: Light Writing - Part 2 is up at Creative Cow.

Update: Mathias Möhl noted Writing a Light Graffiti effect (in frei0r format) at Kdenlive.

More AE video tutorials

These AE video tutorials have been released around the web this week:
Painting and masking in After Effects by Chad Perkins
Creating an animated DVD menu transition with Encore and After Effects by Bob Donlon
Expressions 101 by Harry Franks
Magic Glass from Andrew Kramer

Many recent tutorials can be found at the Adobe Design Center, which features this picture that reminds me the various 3D and installation stuff in Urban Calligraphy and Beyond, which for me is 2nd only to Broken Windows in graffiti books.

By the way, "light graffiti," also featured in Urban Calligraphy and Beyond, got way more popular since PIPS:lab debuted in the late '90s or so. Recent articles include MAKE: Blog: Light graffiti, Painting with Light, Interview with LICHTFAKTOR: Light Graffiti Artists, Architectural Light Graffiti: Projection Bombing Images on Urban Surfaces.

Graffiti Archaeology

Here's a gif made in AE from screenshots of Graffiti Archaeology, a site which shows how graffiti walls change over time. John Nack has more on this and related items.

Reel Pop: Idiocracy & Advertising = Graffiti

Steve Bryant's Reel Pop has good posts, including reference posts on "The graphic design of Mike Judge's Idiocracy" at SpeakUp and a review of documentaries on the DVD of 'Children of Men.'

Also good are the referrals to Advertising = Graffiti and Pixelator, unauthorized on-going video art performance revisions of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority and Clear Channel video ad monitors.

I noticed Steve's blog while looking at stories on the 7-Minute Sopranos and a German Defense Ministry video on invading the Bronx at the Screens blog of the NYT.

Light graffiti in AE

I first saw "light graffiti" posted by PIPS:lab as a Shockwave site. After graf experiments flowered further Wired did an article, and now Apple has a cool iPod commercial.

Andrew Kramer shows you a similar technique in AE with Trapcode Particular at Creative Cow.

Update: newer posts on these topics can be found under the tags graffiti, and light.