The Crucible - Oakland, CA
Classes in welding, metalwork, and the fire arts.
Shop space and equipment are available.
TechShop - Menlo Park, CA
An open-access public workshop full of power tools, plasma
cutters, CNC mills, electronics, powder coaters, laser engravers,
welding gear, a Dimension SST 3D printer, and much more. TechShop
offers many classes at reasonable rates.
Coil - Oakland, CA
This site.
Radiant Atmospheres - Oakland, CA
A long-established SF Bay Area design collective renowned for its
site-specific art installations and entertainment lighting. Coil's
official partners and key collaborators for many years.
Vintage Light Effects
This Dutch website is basically a museum of the most bizarre effects,
disco lights, and centerpieces from the recent past. Be sure to search
YouTube for the model names of
these fixtures.
You may find some unbelievable home movies.
Optifanatics
The finest source of reliable new and used Optikinetics effects,
accessories, and fixtures. These guys are also LDs, and they love
crazy lights.
Production Advantage
The cheapest serious online retailer of lighting equipment. Professional and knowledgeable.
Lightbroker
A cornucopia of used gear.
The Art of Light and Color
by Tom Douglas Jones
The quaint subtitle says it all: "Featuring Mobile Color Expression,
Lumia, Kinetic Light, with Instructions for the Creation of Dramatic
Color and Light Instruments." This is one of the few technical books
written during the early seventies about what was going on in the
heads of lighting effects designers.
Light Fantastic: The Art And Design of Stage Lighting
by Max Keller
A Method of Lighting the Stage
by Stanley McCandless
Written in 1932 (and updated through 1958), this book lays out
a basic design philosophy for modern electric forms of stage
lighting. Contains remarkable foreshadowings of present-day control
boards, moving lights, and mechanical animation systems. Plenty of
fun, but not to be taken too literally.
Live at the Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir
by Amalie Rothschild
This book contains many great photos (some in color) of the old
analog light shows at the Fillmore. Best of all, there
are many detailed backstage shots, where you can see just how far down
the ol' rabbit hole they went.
Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance
by Golan Levin
An MIT M.S. thesis from 2000. This is a free PDF download.
Entertainment Rigging
by Harry Donovan
Essential reading for the hangman.
Umfeld
In 2007, Scott Pagano and
Jochem Paap produced this intensely weird, hour-long
motion graphics and surround sound experiment under a Dutch art grant.
You can download the DVD for free. We do recommend
paying for the complete package, which includes another long
piece, Region Free 77. Umfeld is basically a fine art techno
brainwashing tape for the extraordinary rendition of animators and
visual designers. Everyone should have a copy.
Neither-Field
Mr. Pagano's portfolio site, full of strange and unique
animated visions. Be aware that many of the items on this site are
aggressively compressed, so they don't adequately represent the
quality of the originals. Fortunately, Apple has begun posting 720p
versions of these inspiring works in the Quicktime HD galleries. See,
for example,
Parks on Fire and
The Antikythera Mechanism.
VJ Culture
Grant Davis, prolific projectionist and pro VJ. Formerly of SF, now in Los Angeles.
Jon Schwark
Jon Schwark, VJ and post production director out of SF and Tokyo.
Lightrhythmvisuals
One of the rare VJ DVD content labels. Home of former SF VJ, Ben Sheppee.
C-TRL Labs
Successful commercial motion designers with roots in the SF VJ scene. They
still make tasty artistic clips, which you can get from their website.
Emmet Feldman
Another good motion graphics designer from SF. His classic VJ clips
are worth collecting. You can find them in the LRV catalog.
Spotworks
Developer of Electric Sheep, inventor of the Fractal Flame, and author of Dreams in High Fidelity. Catch the HD Dreams if you ever get the chance.
D-Fuse
Pioneering VJs and projection designers.
depthCORE
A prolific online design collective devoted to the abstract genre.
They periodically emit curated thematic portfolios of high quality and
great stylistic breadth.
Robert Rich
Acclaimed ambient music composer. Co-creator (with Daniel Colvin) of the film
Atlas Dei,
which they integrated into the set design for one of RR's tours.
Mr. Rich generously supplied much of the soundtrack for our 2005 installation in the Black Rock Desert, and we featured his live acoustic/electronic act at SFtA in January, 2010.
Good news: Mr. Rich's voluminous works are at last available as Amazon MP3 downloads.
United Visual Artists
Lighting design collective from London.
United Visual Artists
Lighting design and performance group from the UK.
Blender
Open-source 3D modeling and animation environment. Blender also
includes physics modeling, lighting effects, modular compositing,
video editing, and a game engine, mostly implemented in OpenGL.
The tiny distribution and simple command line mode make farming easy,
and there's even an embedded Python shell. Highly recommended,
especially with its newly improved UI.
VDMX
Modular show controller for VJs. Includes, among other things, a compositor and a nice librarian UI.
Well-integrated with Quicktime and MIDI. Extensible using Quartz Composer. Recommended.
Resolume
A popular motion graphics generator for live performance.
Max/MSP/Jitter
The classic visual programming language for sight and sound.
Processing
Open-source procedural graphics interpreter written in Java,
with a vigorous and well-organized community of users.
Gimp
An open-source raster graphics editor and compositor. (Worth
comparing to
Photoshop.)
Inkscape
An open-source vector graphics editor. (Resembles
Illustrator.)
Apophysis
Free fractal flame renderer.
Quartz Composer
Apple's free modular visual programmer for creating OpenGL
content. Supports easy programmatic integration with Cocoa and
puts a UI on OS X's core services APIs for audio, MIDI, and graphics.
Mostly discontinued but still compatible with many VJ programs.
After Effects
Adobe's 2D compositor, editor, motion graphics engine, and fx
plugin host. Some 3D paradigms are supported. An easy-to-learn,
high-productivity authoring environment.
Final Cut Pro & Motion
Apple's editor and motion graphics engine.
Native Instruments Reaktor
Although Reaktor is primarily a high quality modular softsynth, its
support for MIDI and OSC make it a viable control center when you
need to synchronize sonic and visual aspects of an installation.
SketchUp
This CAD tool makes the 3D design of sets and plots fast
and fun. Very useful within its limits.