Art-and-Technology

Hans Zimmer Interview

2012-01-28T15:36:00.000-08:00

Hans Zimmer Interview April 2011 is filled with interesting comments. Only the first 30seconds are not English of part 1. Parts 2 to 4 are just English.

There is a very interesting comment made on his monitoring environment. He doesn't use a sub woofer as it must come across well without one, but loves surround sound. From the recent SOS magazine studio rescue he also explained that he doesn't use a center speaker. Adding that channel is for the mastering and sound stage mixers.

When doing our own mixes, we are most concerned on how it comes across on normal systems. On ear buds, in the car and on small PC speakers. I think it is just another indication that the world of hi-fi is long gone....

But it is at 2:30 in Part 4 that I really like..

"It did have a quality about it, and I don't think it was just luck, you know.

People are talking about the sonic quality of a series III Fairlight while forgetting the output stage of that thing was the same filter , and I "think" the same VCA , as was in a Jupiter 8 or Prophet 5. I mean they ran through those, you know what ever... SSM chips and that was the filter on that thing, ..um… so there wasn't a reason really it should sound THAT much better than something else as everything else was using the same stuff , but I think there was a design aesthetic, and it is the guys building it.

I think the people that built our instruments, I see them as much as artists as I see them as scientists."

.. as I was the guy that designed the audio producing sections of the Fairlight CMI III.

Digital 7 TV Reception Issue and Fix

2011-12-31T17:04:00.001-08:00

Recently had an issue with poor Digital 7 (and 7mate and 7TWO) reception, and this post is about what the problem and solution was.

We live in an area in Sydney Australia with very good TV reception. Only need a cheap internal antenna, on the top of a piece of furniture. Very classy. The signal strength shown by the set top box is 100%, except the 7 channels which were 85~90%.

A few months ago we started getting drop outs and image friezes on any 7 channel when it rained, but signal strength was still showing good. Now Digital 44 TVS always has good reception and always indicates less signal, closer to 60%. So what was going on?

On investigation and looking back at when the problem showed up, I came to realize it started to happen after putting an Ethernet switch and some cables near the same piece of furniture. It didn't rain till days or weeks later, so the correlation wasn't obvious, as the reception hadn't changed at the time of install.

The switch was leaning against the antenna cable going to the set top box. The solution was to move the switch all of 20cm away to behind the furniture and not have the antenna cable run along the Ethernet cables.

Also used some CO CONTACT CLEANER on the telescoping rabbit ears joints, but that wasn't the fix. It has now been perfect for 3 weeks, and we have had some almighty storms that caused no problem at all to reception.

It even though the TV signal strength was high, when the antenna was near the switch, that interfered with the received digital signal, causing the error rate to go above that which was recoverable by the set top box.

Music Video Cartoon Funny Car Rock

2011-12-28T00:15:00.000-08:00

A 2:34 minute instrumental rock music video using drag racing sound effects from a Nostalgic Funny Car meet. It is at a slow 120BPM but does have a double time feel verse, and a heavy guitar sound.

It has a Black Sabbath or Metallica approach to composition, with several different riffs butted together. It has several one bar sections as transitions between verses as well..... and of course the 3000+BHP engine sounds are not your usual song ingredient, so it doesn't conform to a typical song structure.

The video itself looks like end credits. Blue tinged cartoon drag car illustrations fade in and out and have scrolling text over them. They aren't credits though, but bits of info and comments about the car, drag racing, the crew, the sound effects and music production. Mostly tongue in cheek.

The music was recorded and produced in the DAW Reaper with real guitar and bass, ezdrummer for the drums and Mastered using Ozone 5.

Designing Bumper Stickers

2011-10-31T23:07:00.000-07:00

A typical bumper sticker is 11" x 3". Generally you want the person in the car behind, while driving or waiting at the traffic lights to read what you want to say.

The simple way to do that is use a simple big text message.

That may be OK for "Save The Whales", or "I love any shit Apple makes!" but is that all you really want to show and say?

The images here shows 2 of 8 options we were working with recently. If you just want to show the URL and a message of what that business does, then the top one may be fine. It will be easy to read from a distance and get a message across, but would it get someone to actually visit the site and look at the style of graphics samples?

Now the bottom image is more complicated, not so easy to read, but also has some visual samples and the URL. Would it get a second look? Would it possibly get someone to actually remember and look up the URL when they get home or to the office?

We have used the very affordable zazzle to make this bumper sticker to try out.

We don't have hard facts to support that one is better than the other, other than a bigger sign than a bumper sticker is better for business advertising on a car!

Megacurve Productions

2011-08-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

Megacurve Productions built as a simple Google site.

Animated History of Cool Stuff #2 - Turbocharging

2011-08-20T22:24:00.000-07:00

The same format, this time on car turbocharging. The animated blackboard illustrations were put together in After Effects, but it could have all been done directly in Movie Studio, as all the images are full frames generated from Photoshop.

It is supposed to be humorous and educational. It also demonstrates a cost effective method of producing an animated technical presentation using narration.

Animated History of Cool Stuff #1 - Car Aerodynamics

2011-08-12T23:01:00.000-07:00

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Basic animated narrator and black board illustrations. Additional frames drawn in Photoshop and put on the Vegas Movie Studio time line by hand….. more Anime than Disney.

Car Aero Dynamics Animatic

2011-08-10T20:29:00.000-07:00

This is the first stage of producing a 2 minute edutainment video episode on race car, and other, technology. This is a series of story board images put to music and narration. The narrator being someone combining characteristics of Jeremy Clarkson and Stirling Moss. Hopefully combining humor, cool music and historic information. The information is carried in the "black board" diagrams and narration.

The next stage is to animate and lip sync the narrator and animate the black board drawings.
This format is for producing a series, with the mobile phone being the target platform. A series of different topics with different music soundtracks.

Holden V Ford

2011-07-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

Olden v Furd is the age old rivalry in V8 Supakar racing downunder. Customizable posters of Olden V Furd are now available at the online store.

Car, Kart Caricatures gifts Cards and Postcards

2011-07-02T19:47:00.000-07:00

Customizable Car, Kart Caricature gift cards and postcards at Art & Technology as well as t-shirts and stickers.

Megacurve - Heavy Metal Garage

2011-06-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

Heavy Metal Garage by Megacurve

Instrumental track avaliable for download.

The Loop Portfolio

2011-06-12T21:55:00.000-07:00

Have a Portfolio on The Loop and haven't seen much activity from it. It seems to be for Creative Advertising Types, after whatever it is I am not doing.....

Car Caricatures Cartoons Logos

2011-06-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some samples from our Car Caricatures Cartoons and Logos.

Art work for personnel use as well as for marketing, t-shirts and signage.

Google Jumped The Shark July 2010

2011-05-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: August 2011
In the last week, the google access seem to have gone back to what they were, after 12 months or so. If this continues then Goggle has unjumped that shark.

The original article...

The Google Analytics Dashboard Graph shows the date Google Jumped the Shark for useful web searching from our own monitoring and research. Despite their recent publicity, saying they had fixed the problems, we still find their search does not return what we actually want, compared to before this date.

In the last month or so, somethings are better. If you search for a datasheet from a major semiconductor manufacturer today, you may actually get the original site, and not some scrapper with nothing useful, trying to sell information that is freely supplied by the actual manufacturer.

A terrible shame, and we are still hoping they get their act together. Image search is still very very broken. The webmaster forum Google hosts is full of examples. They are always changing the algorithm, and you can see two massive cycles after the JTS date, until settling to their "un-impressive" state at the time of this post.

Try the image searches in google, bing, yahoo and any other search engine yourself and compare. You need to.

Car Caricature T-Shirts Store

2011-04-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

Business Logos and Graphics

2011-04-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

I am amazed at the number of people that have contacted us to do some logo illustration work as graphic designers cannot draw. We usually do some illustration part of a logo, but have no trouble doing the lot, contact us for details.

And to not ignore Warhol's Mustang, giving this fine stallion the same treatment as Marilyn. Fine Art A3 prints available, as well as this 38.5" x 24.5" wall pee l.

Bumper Sticker Design 10" x 3"

2011-04-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

A 10 x 3 inch bumper sticker design for Megacurve, featuring a modern hot rod flame pattern.
Also features Soundcloud url.

This is a vector based design, contact us about your graphics design requirements.

Movie Poster Advertisement

2011-03-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

Movie Poster for a product that isn't a movie...Megacurve by Megacurve Productions.

Gift Stores

2011-03-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

We have been attending the Reed Gift Fairs in Sydney for a few years and find it amazing that these exhibits are way larger than just about any other industry here. Way larger than Cebit or anything electronics related.

We have a Cafepress Gift Store and you might find something interesting there.

Car Caricatures, Logos and Cartoons

2011-03-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

We have been doing this type of commercial illustration for over 20 years. Been on the Internet since 1995 and it is recently a shame that the Car Caricatures, Logos and Cartoons page isn't coming up in google searches like it was. It is great that we have some customers that keep coming back because they like what we do, and they don't need to find us!

"hot rod caricatures logos" search

2011-02-26T22:31:00.000-08:00

Bing v Yahoo v Google.

Google is fighting SEO campaigns, spammers and scrappers. To counter it they are trying to work out what sites are "poor quality", and it isn't working, at least for the last 8 months...

Try the search "hot rod caricatures logos" in the image search of Bing, Yahoo and compare the results to that in Google. Bing and Yahoo give better results. Most people still use Google, myself included, but for the tests that I know what the answers should be, Google is broken. It isn't smart enough to have the context for keywords right..... it really is nothing to do with the leader of North Korea, or Oakland Raiders caps!!!

If Google does show something of ours, it is not from the original site, www.artandtechnology.com.au, but from a forum or scrapper site. That just isn't right. Not right at all.

Who Broke Google?

2010-12-27T14:41:00.000-08:00

This is the last 12 months of our website bandwidth. It had been steadily growing for 5 years, then google changed something, such that in August, we now cyclically drop out of the first few top search results.

Makes a huge difference. It isn't just me either, but many illustrators. The Google webmaster forum is full of cases, and after posting about it several times with our findings, haven't had any positive results yet.

Basically Google broke the search for many things, especially image searches. I assume it was trying to stop the sites that just contain links to other sites and contribute nothing, but it is more than that. When searching for any of our illustrations around August, you would find our images on a few such sites, and not the original source. They seem to have fixed that, but broke it in a different way.

A two word search can significantly reduce the significance of one of the search terms. Can only assume this has significantly reduced the usefulness of Google for searching for everyone, but unless you actually test this, you wouldn't notice.

It would seem "All good things...."

An Industrial Design Ending

2010-11-20T17:48:00.000-08:00

Car Styling, a leading car, design school and product design reference, has ceased publication after 37 years. Issue 196, May 2010 was the last.

This seems indicative of a global trend, and the changed economics of product development, sales and manufacture. At least for the time being.

Zero Billion Dollar Business?

2010-11-19T19:38:00.000-08:00

I attended Steve Jobs Tokyo introduction of the NeXT Computer, around 1990. It was very cool and inspiring.
The guys at ID Software trudged threw the snow to get a NeXT computer and soon after came up with DOOM. The first web server was developed on a NeXT computer. The NeXT Computer was some kind of catalyst.

Around that time Steve said multimedia was a "Zero Billion Dollar Business". He meant there was no money in it. It has a different meaning today. But, in the last week or so "Call of Duty: Black Ops" (a modern DOOM like game) has become the biggest grossing first day release of anything of all time.

We call computer based stuff like that multimedia. I think history has shown that Steve's interpretation of what multimedia was, wasn't correct. Apple for longest time hadn't thought the game market was significant either.

If it had been, would the NeXT Computer still be around? Would many more cool things have been developed, by people that have since been sidetracked posting trivia from their iPhones to Twitter and Facebook?

ReverbNation Rocks!

2010-11-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

ReverbNation sets the bar higher for band promotion websites.

Demo Soundtrack Playlist

2010-07-31T21:56:00.000-07:00

AV Demos by Megacurve

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

2010-03-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

Wow, what perseverance and hope!

Heavy Metal Illustration Demo Reel

2010-02-20T21:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YdTtD67twY

Screw the Economy

2009-04-10T23:38:00.000-07:00

Screw the Economy, is blazed across the current issue of Topgear Magazine here. It is about lets have some fun anyway. In their case, racing two very expensive cars. I was thinking something along the same lines around Christmas 2008.
Did this track, Let's hope it is going to be A Really Good Year with a similar sentiment. Despite all the gloom from the media and politicians, lets have some fun anyway.

Been told my vocal sounds like Rorschach from Watchmen, but it isn't too removed from Batman either. We are still planning an animated video for it where the band is Voodoo Dolls or Little Cute Demons.... been working with Anime Studio Pro and Flash. But no delivery date.

The Silent Home Recording Studio

2008-09-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

AUSTRALIAN guitar vol 68, has an article on THE SILENT STUDIO, page 56. Among other things, they mention using the Behringer V-AMP.

On our Boutique Guitar Pedals and Effects page we have a guitar amplifier dummy load and phantom powered speaker emulator to achieve the same result, using your own amplifier, and sound. A guitar amplifier's speaker is replaced by the load, then the emulator produces the cabinet sound that is DI'ed directly into a pre-amp for recording. Same approach is used by the Marshal SE100.

Green Cars, Green Car

2008-04-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

Those are, today, the most common search keywords that get people going to the Art & Technology web site. An interest in cars that don't kill baby seal or cut down rain forests. And it leads to this Caricature... Jeremy Clarkson would be proud!

New wave of Australian Dance and Electronica Music

2008-04-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

Band Cut Copy represent the new popularity of OZ electronic music, with a N0.1 spot in the Australian Charts and N0.35 in the American Itunes chart. Similary the Presets are doing similar things, mostly overseas.

Great to see.

VST: All you need

2008-03-23T15:34:00.000-07:00

Relaxing Over the Easter break. And here is another little 1min 47 sec Techno ditty here:
AdrianBruce-Come_With_Me.mp3

Other than the vocal, everything is PC Software and free VST instruments and effects.
The list being: GTG Drum Sampler II, Alpha Free(LinPlug), Synth1 , Endorphin compressor, Classic EQ(Kjaerhus Audio), Polyblit (Andreas Ersson), Ambience (Reverb), Stardust (Arguru Software). All great. ASIO4ALL and Reaper make any PC with on board sound into a low latency multi-track music production system. Technology triumphs over talent (and Art), yet again.

This was pretty much just played into Reaper with an old Roland PC-180 Midi Keyboard Controller. Took about an hour, everything just off the top of the head... Recycled the drums from the track below.
Musically very simple, but then so is Smoke on the Water, Paranoid, Living After Midnight and a million other tracks.

And for some Distortion that may be illegal in this state, try guitar based:
AdrianBruce-After_Midnight.mp3

A short version of a Judas Priest classic, but the vocal sounds more double tracked country than metal. Just Intro, verse, chorus, short bridge, solo and ending.

Software Quality

2008-03-14T15:42:00.000-07:00

Software Quality for a shrink wrapped commercial product is serious business. Proving enough feedback to software developers is tough. We currently work with a great QA Lead, Phil. Everyday is Fabulous with Phil.

To encourage reporting bugs and to make the 'we found one' not so stressful we have a robot Chicken toy that signals big ones.
Here is a musical skit (a very compressed arrangement) about this in our techno-metal : AdrianBruce-QA_Phil_the_chicken_is_on_standby_3.mp3

Software is serious business.

And for the few who want to know, the lyrics are:

We've got our build
Phil's feeling fabulous
This time for sure
Today could be the best day of his life
feeling fabulous

And the Chickens on standby
And the batteries have been replaced

And the Chickens on standby
And the batteries have been replaced

Phil's feeling fabulous
I think we've got a problem
Hey guys, hit the Chicken

OZ Industrial Grunge Techno Metal Politics

2007-12-27T20:15:00.000-08:00

A FREE mp3 track of a work in progress: Lets Hope it is a Really_Good_Year

It is the outcome of playing with the Reaper Audio/Midi Sequencer, with a few free VST instruments for drums, bass and backing, and real guitar over that.

And for a different all electronic instrumental sound try: AdrianBruce-stratos.mp3

Google Ranking

2007-11-03T18:46:00.000-07:00

Like many others, I noticed the drop off in visits before the stories about Google changing their page rank algorithm hit the tech media and tech blogs.

In my case there seem to be a few scrapping sites that have content from, or links to, Concept Design Sketches at wwww.artandtechnology.com.au The affect of the change seems to hurt the page rank of even the originator of the content.

It does seem to indicate that if Page Rank is that important to you, whatever your doing is way too dependant on the whims of the Google Programmers!

Fairlight CMI Artist Videos

2007-08-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

There is a moderated group for users and fans of the old Fairlight CMI. As one of the developers of those machines I think I was too busy to notice a lot of the stuff that was happening around them at the time.

On YouTube there are lots of Artist videos using the machines. This is a You Tube Special with Sakamoto and others discussing Electro Rock and demoing the system.

It was very high tech at the time, honest!

Nethanderal vs Nerd

2007-08-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

There was a news story last week about a guy that drove half way across America and set fire to a guys trailer park home after he called him a nerd on an Internet Website.

The guy charged used the expression "of dealing with a Nethanderal". I read that and thought, he must have seen my cartoon here...

Art & Technology

2007-08-04T00:07:00.000-07:00

This is a link to the Art & Technology website, where you will find many how to articles related to technology and creative endeavours .

Why start a Blog too? A good question.... We can run editorials, RSS and run a forum on our site, but don't know if it is worth doing. A Blog seems a simple way to experiment, indpendant of the main site. Will anyone visit this Blog? Don't know... maybe MySpace is the place to be this week, or is that Second Life? Or was that last months next big thing?

Will we get any comments about Caricatures, Car or Political Cartoons, Music or Animation, Sculpting and Technology, or those applied to each other? 3D Graphics? Video Editing? Could any just be about Funnycar or Topfuel Drag Racing, or maybe bathroom design or restoring old Audio Equipment or Musical Instruments?

How about the Sci-Fi themes in Joe Satriani instrumental rock? Or that Metallica and Judas Priest have some really great rock tracks? The combination of Techno and Metal, ala Filter doesn't come up often, or is that just me?

Concept Art and Design Sketches are interesting when you get a chance to do them, but that isn't that often. There aren't that many customers who need them. Same for StoryBoarding, at least in our part of the world. Ron Cobb lives here, but doesn't work here.

I had an email to the website asking for two tutorials on Design Sketching. One on the technical part of plans and views, the other on getting inspiration. I'm still thinking about them.

Will the response be different from what the Website attracts? It will probably take 6 months to be able to tell.

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