Ochre

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Last year San Diego-based games developer Psyonix got in touch about licensing a couple of tracks in a tech demo/game called Whizzle, showcasing the Unreal Development Kit. Being a demo, it’s just a single level (for now, at least), but I’m glad it came to fruition nonetheless. Here’s a short vid of Whizzle in action:

If you’re interested in learning more about the UDK and fancy dipping your toes into the world of game development, then this video of Dave at Psyonix gives you a quick intro to the platform. The UDK is free to download too, so given a little free time there’s nothing stopping you from crafting your own titles.

Ochre – Lunar Suburbia on a HDD Speaker from Ochre on Vimeo.

The track is ‘Lunar Suburbia,’ taken from the next Ochre album, ‘Like Dust of the Balance,’ playing through an old hard disk soldered up to the headphone outputs of my sound card.

Yep, it sounds terrible. But looking at the little drive head vibrate and bob in time with the music perhaps redeems it a little.

If you fancy making your own hard disk speaker, there are a few articles dotted around the net documenting the process, step-by-step, such as the one at the ever-handy Instructables.

The ever-productive Knellotron (Chris Larkee) created a video for my vintage track Esign a while back, and so I thought I’d give it another mention now that I’m here on the new site. Chris created the whole thing from start to finish using nothing but open-source software, and you can read more about the video’s history on Chris’ blog here. I’m pleased to learn that Chris’ work hasn’t gone unnoticed, and he’s managed to bag a well-deserved ‘Best Animation Artwork’ award at the 2005 Blender Conference, as well as securing screenings at various film festivals. Good job mate!

I’ve embedded a YouTube-hosted vid below, but if you want a warp-free high quality version with AV timing intact (grr, YouTube!), you can grab a .mov of it from Knellotron.com, or an mp4 and DVD quality mpeg from archive.org.

The audio track itself was created using Ross Bencina’s Audiomulch program, while it was still in its freeware beta stage.

Recently, I’ve been working on editing and remixing the audio for one of the VJ collaborations to be featured on Need For Speed: Carbon, EA’s latest installment of the popular gaming franchise. Six visual artists were commissioned to create short animations inspired by the game, and were supplied with suitable raw materials (videos, images, models etc) to use, should they wish. A friend of mine and long-time Ochre collaborator Patrick Ehrlund was selected to create one of the animations, electing to create a 3D animation from scratch rather than remix the supplied media, with me editing and remixing the existing project audio to fit the animation more closely. It’s a shame YouTube totally throws the tight audio-visual timing out the window, but here’s what we came up with:

All six animations will be included on the collectors edition of Need For Speed: Carbon, and are also doing the rounds on TV ad breaks (at least here in the UK). Keep an eye out for the ad and press the red button on your Sky remote to check them all out.