In some recent posts I have explored the creation of motiongrams and average images, multi-exposure displays, and image masks. In this blog post I will explore different ways of generating keyframe displays using the very handy command line tool FFmpeg. As in the previous posts, I will use a contemporary dance video from the AIST Dance Video Database as an example: The first attempt is to create a 3x3 grid image by just sampling frames from the original image.

Researchers from AIST have released an open database of dance videos, and I got very excited to try out some visualization methods on some of the files. This was also a good chance to test out some new functionality in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab that we are developing at RITMO. The AIST collection contains a number of videos. I selected one hip-hop dance video based on a very steady rhythmic pattern, and a contemporary dance video that is more fluid in both motion and music.

My PhD student Cagri Erdem developed a performance together with dancer Katja Henriksen Schia. The piece was first performed together with Qichao Lan and myself during the RITMO opening and also during MusicLab vol. 3. See here for a teaser of the performance: This week Cagri, Katja and myself performed a version of the piece Vrengt at NIME in Porto Alegre. We also presented a paper describing the development of the instrument/piece:

I am happy to announce the publication of a follow-up study to our former paper on group dancing to EDM, and a technical paper on motion capture of groups of people. In this new study we successfully managed to track groups of 9-10 people dancing in a semi-ecological setup in our motion capture lab. We also found a lot of interesting things when it came to how people synchronize to both the music and each other.

I am happy to announce a new publication titled How still is still? exploring human standstill for artistic applications (PDF of preprint), published in the International Journal of Arts and Technology. The paper is based on the Sverm project, and was written and accepted two years ago. Sometimes academic publishing takes absurdly long, which this is an example of, but I am happy that the publication is finally out in the wild.

Working with choreographer Mia Habib, I created the piece Laser Dance, which was shown on 30 November 1 December 2001 at the Norwegian Academy of Ballet and Dance in Oslo. The theme of the piece was “Light”, and the choreographer wanted to use direct light sources as the point of departure for the interaction. Mia had decided to work with laser beams, one along the backside of the stage and one on the diagonal, facing towards the audience.