I have spent a huge chunk of the last two years learning how to use touchdesigner. When I came to Alfred I knew of touchdesigner but had never really dove deep into how to work within that program. I had tried a couple of times but I was definitely out of my comfort zone. I was someone used to working with my hands and making primarily physical things. Even with my video work I was using hardware to produce my videos with the exception of editing within Adobe premiere. Plugging cables and turning knobs makes sense to me and once I saw the similarities to programing in touchdesigner to patching, the application made a lot more sense to me.
After a year and a half of doing tons of various tutorials, I became more and more comfortable working within Touchdesigner. Throughout my progression in touchdesigner I kept attached to the aesthetics
achieved via Analog video processes, never truly satisfied with the combination of the digital and analog images I was achieving. Fortunately I was also taking a workshop outside of school which revolved around constructing my own sync generator and color encoder from scratch. This workshop turned out to be super vital to my research and the eventual achievement of my thesis show. I wanted to have a better understanding of the inner workings of analog video and this research helped me with that. Now I wasn’t just creating from a purely ignorant position, experimenting until I stumbled upon something I found intriguing. I had a deeper understanding of the simple complexity involved. This deeper understanding eventually led me to the decision to try and replicate a video synth within touchdesigner.
43 Scans from my sketch Book Explaining how an NTSC signal works. (2021)
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Early breadbord design of a sync generator and color encoder. (2021)
45 Early breadbord design of an oscillator at video rate. (2021)
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Quick sketch of a
potential Add/Multiply in touchdesigner based off
the Sandin Ip.
(2022)
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Initially I constructed the patch utilizing Audio Oscillator CHOPs and CHOP to’s to generate the horizontal and vertical scan lines but as I progressed and the system evolved it became apparent that there were many limitations to the Audio Oscillator operator.
The Audio Oscillator CHOP in locked to the frame rate of the patch which made both the speed at which the Oscillator scanned and the amount of scan lines (cycles) were forever intertwined, which for authenticity sake is true to the original but it also made it massively more difficult to achieve the desired parameter for either. The feedback I received from my first iteration was that the patterns generated were often too fast making it hard to appreciate the layering of patterns achieved. The issue was exacerbated thanks to how constrained I felt due to the limitations of those two parameters being connected.
After playing around in touchdesigner I stumbled upon the Patterns CHOP. This was the solution I was looking for.
The Patterns CHOP is very similar to the Audio Oscillator CHOP with one big exception, It wasn’t tied to the frame rate of your project. Instead I used the LFO CHOP set as a
ramp to drive the phase setting within the Patterns CHOP.
Now we’re really getting into how the sausage is made.
Using the frequency of an LFO CHOP to control the phase I could now adjust the Cycle and Speed independently making what I was building much more versatile.
With that issue resolved I turned my attention to how I was colorizing these Oscillators. My initial colorizor was designed around a three layer luma key separating the Dark, Mid and Light tones of the image and compositing A Switch TOP connected to 4 Constant TOPs going from Red, Green, Blue, Red. This sort of worked but it still definitely left more to be desired in the colors. I added the Mid tone colors into the mix with Magenta, Cyan, Yellow, which definitely improved it but Andrew mentioned something when I showed him that made a connection to a tangential thing. He mentioned the idea of a colorizer that wasn’t constrained to RGB which triggered me to remember a video on youtube by Retro Game Mechanics Explained (https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=zjQik7uwLIQ) which breaks down how the battle screens in the Video game Earthbound were
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created. Earthbound is a massively important game to me as it reminds me of the nights spent over at my Aunt Beth’s house. I was very close to my Aunt Beth but unfortunately she passed away from cancer almost ten years ago now. The background in the video game in hindsight was massively influenced by the early video artist but I had no context of that influence growing up. Even without the art historical context to the battle screens they always remained present in my mind.
Retro Game Mechanics Explained breaks everything down so perfectly I won’t waste the time here regurgitating what he described completely. That said, the most reinventing aspect to this video and my struggles with the colorizor would have to be around 0:50 when he talks about palette Cycling. Palette Cycling is when you have a set color paletteI of 2 to around 8 colors that cycle through a grayscale image. Within Earthbound, this technique was used typically on a still image to save the vram on the system while giving the illusion of a moving image. I realized that this was similar to what Andrew Deutsch was trying to get at. Working with Eric Souther,
we were able to figure out how to replicate this effect in touchdesigner by using Consent TOPs into a Lookup TOP into a Transform TOP driven by an LFO CHOP. Instead of mixing RGB to achieve a desired color I could choose any color I wanted with ease making it even more versatile.
Continuing off from the inspiration from Earthbound I added other features like the Displace TOP which helps replicate the Horizontal and vertical Oscillations explained in the video. Ultimately what I achieved was a very powerful video instrument that was a hybrid between replicating the aesthetics of an analog synth and replicating the visual effects used in Earthbound.
Since Earthbound was a huge influence on the resulting instrument I decided to adorn it with the name VideoDrugz, a reference to a quote Shigesato Itoi (the creator of Earthbound) made jokingly when referring to the battle backgrounds in an interview.
With VideoDrugz newly built I was left to figure out what the possibilities were for this instrument.
49 Early plan for a five channel video created with VideoDrugz. (2022)
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five channel video created with VideoDrugz. (2022)
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Six single channel videos created with VideoDrugz projection mapped onto the back wall of the Turner Gallery. (2022)
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VideoDrugz Running at 11520 x 2160 natively in the immersive Gallery. (2022)
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I entered grad school struggling to figure out how to reproduce images created with analog video synthesis and signal processing. I was in a phase of painting full room murals drawing inspiration from the patterns I was generating from my simple analog setup. While at Alfred I tested various ways of trying to replicate the images created in the analog video realm. I initially tried upscaling an NTSC image from 480p to an image 200x its original size trying to make a custom wallpaper using photo tex. However, the upscaling created tons of unintentional artifacting. After that I took a step away from trying to reproduce images with large scale print falling back onto painting until I could figure out a better way. I spent that time learning touchdesigner and bending neon tubes.
When I decided to create a pattern generator to replicate/simulate the aesthetics of an analog video pattern generator I knew I needed to design it in such a way that the image can be set to any desired resolution;
within the hardware limitations of the computer running it of course. Doing this created a whole new world of possibilities. The images were no longer constrained to a predetermined resolution. I was enabled to seamlessly go from SD to HD to 4k and beyond while maintaining the same parameters for the patterns being generated.
Having the Resolution unlocked is especially useful when wanting to export stills for print because it enables you to have a much higher pixels per inch (ppi) then what is normally available when taking a still from a video. An image taken from a video is typically only 72ppi, whereas