From the monthly archives:

June 2009

RIP: A Remix Manifesto (with a pic of Gregg Gillis, aka, ‘Girl Talk’)

by Roy Blumenthal on June 27, 2009

Girltalk — Colour (After), originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

One of the movies on the Air Canada flight from Edmonton to London was Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A REMIX MANIFESTO. (Download a remixable copy of RIP 2.0 here: http://www.opensourcecinema.org/project/rip2.0.)

The documentary is a wonderfully immersive introduction to the Creative Commons movement. Well worth seeing.

One of the artists featured in the movie is a remix musician called ‘GirlTalk’. (Here’s an interview with Gregg Gillis, the dude behind the nom de plume: http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/7522-girl-talk/.)

I LOVE what he does. And I HAVE TO get stuff he’s done. Buttkickage of the highest order.

On the plane, I hit the pause button on a good shot of him. Whipped open the trusty li’l black Moleskine. And slammed some lines down with my Bic Intensity gel-ink pen.

So the black and white version is what I ended the flight with.

Girltalk -- Black and White (Before)

And the colour version is a high res scan brought into Photoshop CS3. The only thing I’ve done is draw various outlines, and use the colour adjustment tool to get some lovely smooth, flat colours going.

That’s made possible specifically because of the fact that I scan at high res, in full colour, with low contrast. This means that the paper texture is part of the black and white picture, even though it can’t be seen.

This picture is released under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution Share-Alike’ license. So remix at will.

Originated in black ink in an A6 unlined Moleskine. Scanned. Then tweaked for colour in Photoshop CS3 on my Rectron-sponsored Asus R1E tablet pc.

[UPDATE:] Here’s a link to the ‘Pay What You Choose’ download site for Girl Talk’s latest album, FEED THE ANIMALS: http://74.124.198.47/illegal-art.net/__girl__talk___feed__the__anima.ls___/

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by Roy Blumenthal on June 21, 2009

Roy Blumenthal Making the Amy Goodman Visual Facilitation Pic

Earlier this afternoon I caught the live streaming vidcast of the OPEN VIDEO CONFERENCE held in New York.

I liked what I was encountering. So I did a visual facilitation of some of the keynotes. You can see the pics I made in my Open Video Conference set on Flickr.

Amy Goodman spoke about Democracy Now, a free-tv station that seeks to put views across that aren’t curtailed by corporate influence.

I made a pic of Amy Goodman’s session.

I though it might be neat to show some of my process in speeded-up form.

So I zapped into www.artrage.com, started recording, and then hit ‘Control Y’ to redo everything right to the end state.

I brought the resulting AVI file into Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, where I sped it up substantially.

Once I had something that looked reasonable, I found some music. The track I settled on is sourced from the legally free jamendo.com. The track is called ‘Minimoonstra‘, from the album THE FIRST PSYCHEDELIC TRIP VOL 2, by the band Speedsound. The entire album is released for free use under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ license.

I converted the MP3 to a WAV file in Audacity. Brought that into Premiere. And did some minor editing to sync up the emphasis points of the vid with movement in the music.

This is the result. A short, condensed journey into how I do visual facilitation.

This video was made on my Rectron-sponsored Asus R1E tablet pc. I originated the pic in ArtRage 2.5. And did all video editing in Premiere Pro CS3. All streaming and uploading was courtesy of the free broadband internet connection in my hotel room in Union Bank Inn, Edmonton, Canada.

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ICLEI World Congress 2009 — How to Find & Download Roy’s Pictures — #iclei #yeg

by Roy Blumenthal on June 15, 2009

Hello! If you’re one of the delegates at the ICLEI World Congress in Edmonton, and you’re keen to download any of the pictures I’m making during the proceedings…

I’m posting all of them to my Flickr gallery. You can find them all in my ICLEI set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/royblumenthal/sets/72157619662919649/.

All of the pictures are high resolution. Which means you can print them out around the size of a sheet of paper from a flipchart.

o To save a pic, just click on an individual picture in the set that you’d like to download.

o You’ll see a little menu bar appear above the picture. Look for the magnifying glass which says, ‘ALL SIZES’. Choose that.

o Next, click on ‘ORIGINAL SIZE’.

o Once that picture has appeared in your browser, RIGHT-CLICK (PC) or CONTROL-CLICK (Mac) on the picture. A dialogue box will come up offering you a bunch of choices. What you want to do is ‘SAVE IMAGE’. The actual wording will vary, depending on which browser you’re using.

o Save the picture to your harddrive. And then take it off to a printing place. And you’ll have a poster from the ICLEI Congress!

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