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Here are some photos from our latest Tagtool session.

Taking photos directly off the big screen with my small digital camera  doesn’t result in very good quality images unfortunately.  But I am very interested in the range of effects that can be achieved by superimposing  black and white Tagtool drawing over our film footage processed through the Edirol mixer and  I intend to do some more of this.  In a later posting I hope to have some better photos and also some video clips of this work.

Last week Dima was away from home and without his input I found it quite distracting having to switch between setting up the video clips, operating the mixer, doing the drawing and using the gamepad all by myself.  But it was interesting to work alone and I took some photos of these sessions from the TV screen which of course gives a completely different quality of image.  The first photo below was taken from the big screen to show the difference between the projector and TV images.

These photos are from the same sessions but captured directly from the computer.

Here is the latest piece we have made combining my Tagtool drawing with video captured film clips. It is in two sections but is intended to be seen as one continuous piece.

The film clips come from our collection of Super8 found footage and the music is from the CD, HEX, by the Orkest de Volharding, a Dutch orchestra which specialises in performing contemporary music and regularly commissions new works. The track that I chose to use is entitled ‘Air’ and is by the Polish composer, Hanna Kulenty. This piece was commissioned by the orchestra in 1991. (I wrote to the composer asking her permission to use this music but did not get a reply so I hope that if she sees this blog she will not object to my use of her work.)

Here are three black and white tagtool drawings I did yesterday.  In the first I set the transparency slider about half way down while in the other two it is set at total opacity.  This made an enormous difference to the quality of the drawn line and although I was aware of this from earlier experiments, I think working in black and white makes it more pronounced.    ‘Corrections’ in the second two drawings were made by setting the tagtool to black removing lines I didn’t want and drawing into the white areas,  which gives almost a woodcut or lino cut print effect that I quite like and will experiment with more in the future.

Here are a few still images from recent drawing sessions. Some of the footage that I have used to ‘draw over’ is from a 16mm black and white film we shot last summer and we have also used some found footage, in both colour and black and white, from our Super8 film collection.  All of the film footage has been put through our EdirolV4 video mixer and colourised and in these studio sessions we always work with music to accompany the drawing process.   We have been using CDs given to us by friends who are musicians.

Our latest experiments have been to draw with the Tagtool over some of our film footage.

Dima played loops of  film through an Edirol V-4 video mixer while I supplied the drawn images.  We still have a lot of work to do to get the movement of the film sequences to work with the speed of the drawing.  Also finding the balance between the drawn and film image so that the two mesh together hasn’t always been successful but here are a few stills and the first video clip of this project.

When we got the projector hooked up I  had a few sessions testing out all the various sliders and the operation of the game pad.

The colours at full saturation on the big screen are really eye-poppingly brilliant! I spent ages just making rainbow squiggles,  stripes and circles, then pressing the release button,  spinning them, altering the scale and bringing different parts of the drawing to the front or behind.  But apart from all this intense colour, the subtlety of tonal variation that is possible using the plus white and plus black sliders is really amazing.   I did some black and white drawings too, exploiting the full range of the line thickness tool which, combined with the pressure sensivity of the Wacom pen, allows you to do everything from covering the whole screen with a few really thick strokes to making the finest of lines.  I  took a few screenshots of these experiments to my memorystick using the release buttons on the game pad but these were rather distorted and I got much better results by taking digital photos from the projected images.

Here is a picture of my workstation set up for our live drawing projects.   I’m mixed handed but usually draw with my left hand, so I operate the sliders of my tagtool with my right hand and draw with my left, on my (old, battered but much loved!) Wacom pad.   I have the table positioned so that I can see what I’m drawing projected on the wall as well as on the laptop screen.  It has taken some practice for me to be able to locate the sliders and move them to give the colour, line thickness, opacity etc that I want while at the same time keeping the drawing going and looking continuously between the computer screen and projected image.  One slight problem that Dima has so far been unable to resolve (and is technically way beyond my comprehension) is the mismatch that occurs between the  laptop screen and projected image aspect ratios.   I haven’t found it too difficult to cope with the slight differences in colour (and of course in intensity, depending on the amount of light present from other sources) between laptop and projection.  However, the distortion that occurs in the projected images if I  base my drawing only on the laptop, or the ‘stretching’ of the drawn images on the laptop if I draw only with reference to the projection is less easy to cope with.  If anyone reading reading this has met this problem to and knows how to resolve it, I would welcome some advice.  In my next post I’ll put up some images from our recent sessions.

Recently we did a  performance by videoing and simultaneously projecting my ‘live’ computer drawing directly from the monitor.  This worked quite well but Tagtool with its animation potential looked like just the kind of thing that I had been looking for.  I only do the drawing; Dima is the one with the technical know-how so, following the instructions from the website, he built ‘our’ Tagtool.

The sliders, arduino and gamepad he ordered online.  The rest of the materials were salvaged from our big box of  dead electronics in the basement.  Here are some photos of the various stages in the building process.  Dima assures me that, ‘it’s not difficult to build one of these’ – all the info is available from hhtp://www.tagtool.org

Wow!  The very first squiggles!  It all worked perfectly first time!