The making of Skin Cells was quite a long process. It started projecting my Bunnies video onto me and filming this. I then took this and ran it through the What Glitch? sgi script to create a glitched version of the video, leaving me with two versions of the video.
When it came to merging the two videos together I took some inspiration from Tidepool by Tabor Robak. Putting the videos on top of each other I wanted to use chromakeying to reveal parts of the video at the bottom at the same time as really oversaturating the video. For this I employed the help of Pure Data:
By using [pix_chroma_key] and setting the [range( to random values the patch was constantly hiding and revealing random parts of the videos. Some wizardry in Gridflow gave the videos that oversaturated look.
If you want to try this patch for yourself go ahead and download it. Although it may work on other setups, I used the following:
To use the patch, first load a directory of videos, create the GEM window and then press the big red start button. A video is automatically saved (using PDP), though do be careful as these files get very large very quickly! If, for any reason, saving the video doesn't work just delete the line going from [#from_pix, colorspace rgb] to [#to_pdp].
If any assistance is required please direct your attention to this thread on the Pure Data forum.
Whilst I was in Venice for the Laptop Meets Musicians festival with BiLE I had the pleasure of (finally) meeting {rukano} who later showed me this really awesome way of displaying uncleared video memory with LOVE and LICK. I’m using Ubuntu 11.04 with LÖVE version love_0.7.2-0natty2_i386.deb.
Once you have downloaded and installed LÖVE and LICK (instructions for different platforms are provided on their websites) create the following files:
main.lua
require "LICK"
require "LICK/lib"
lick.reset = true
lick.clearFlag = true
function love.load()
fb = love.graphics.newFramebuffer(800,600)
end
function love.draw()
love.graphics.draw(fb, 0, 0)
end
function love.keypressed (a)
print(a)
if a == " " then
fb = love.graphics.newFramebuffer(800,600)
end
end
conf.lua
function love.conf(t)
t.modules.joystick = true -- Enable the joystick module (boolean)
t.modules.audio = true -- Enable the audio module (boolean)
t.modules.keyboard = true -- Enable the keyboard module (boolean)
t.modules.event = true -- Enable the event module (boolean)
t.modules.image = true -- Enable the image module (boolean)
t.modules.graphics = true -- Enable the graphics module (boolean)
t.modules.timer = true -- Enable the timer module (boolean)
t.modules.mouse = true -- Enable the mouse module (boolean)
t.modules.sound = true -- Enable the sound module (boolean)
t.modules.physics = true -- Enable the physics module (boolean)
t.console = false -- Attach a console (boolean, Windows only)
t.title = "live_testproject" -- The title of the window the game is in (string)
t.author = "Your Name Here" -- The author of the game (string)
t.screen.fullscreen = false -- Enable fullscreen (boolean)
t.screen.vsync = true -- Enable vertical sync (boolean)
t.screen.fsaa = 0 -- The number of FSAA-buffers (number)
t.screen.height = 600 -- The window height (number)
t.screen.width = 800 -- The window width (number)
t.version = 0 -- The LÖVE version this game was made for (number)
end
Compile all of this code into something like Glitch.love. Instructions for this may be different for different operating systems. Before launching the program be sure to first open lots of videos and images. Once you’ve done that, launch the Glitch.love program and press spacebar to cycle through your uncleared video memory!
Shoutouts go to Tilmann Hars, who first showed this trick to rukano and who maintains the LICK library.
p.s. I’m still trying to find out how to do this kind of stuff using Pure Data. If anyone knows how please let me know!
Ever since seeing Radio Dada by Rosa Menkman I’ve been forever trying to reproduce the style of compression/glitches it uses.
In my limited knowledge about the production of the video I do know what it uses compression artifacts found in the Cinepak codec. So, I set out to try and find a way of converting a video to a video that uses the Cinepak codec. If you’ve been following me you’ll that I’ve asked for help on manyfora and mailing lists for help with initially little success.
Hidden somewhere in the documentation for MEncoder is a page detailing how to use Windows codecs on Linux for encoding. The copy of the Cinepak codec (iccvid.dll) that came with MEncoder/medibuntu was a bit broken so I had to use Google to download a new version.
Once I had that I used MEncoder to convert a video to an avi with the Cinepak codec. (I’m using mencoder version 2:1.0~svn33951~natty):
Unfortunately for me this did not produce the compression artifacts that I was after. I tried reencoding the video using the Cinepak codec several times but this only just made the video darker:
Also, my attempt to encode the video using the Cinepak codec but with a low bitrate didn’t work as, at least when using MEncoder, the codec doesn’t have any encoding options. Drats! With that said, if anyone knows of a way of encoding using Cinepak with low/different bitrates on Linux using only freely available/open source software please do let me/the world know.
After this I felt very disheartened until I did a little bit of digging into the actual codec. I discovered that this codec is one of a few is based on Vector Quantization. I don’t know much about this but I felt that this must be the key. The video codecs that are based on Vector Quantization are Sorenson, Indeo and VQA.
I had no luck finding a way of converting to Sorenson and Indeo. However, I’ve had more luck with VQA. Wikipedia has a bit of information on the codec:
Vector Quantized Animation, known by its acronym VQA is a file format originally developed by Westwood Studios for video encoding in their game The Legend of Kyrandia and monopoly.
If you ever came across a Sega Saturn you probably will have come across videos encoded using VQA. As that Wikipedia article states, apart from the one used by Westwood Studios, only one VQA encoder exists. VQA Encoder v0.5 beta 2 by ugordan is the only known VQA encoder and luckily it works perfectly using Wine (I’m using version 1.2.3-0ubuntu1~ppa1) on Ubuntu 11.04. You’ll have to download some additional DLLs. Just do some research to find out which ones.
In order to use the software you need to convert your video to image files. I’ve had luck with converting the video to PCX files using FFMPEG:
ffmpeg -i infile.avi -sameq outfile_%03d.pcx
Then, in the VQA Encoder v0.5 beta 2 copy these options:
VQA encoder options
The program will automatically recognise that there are many images in the folder. After encoding has finished you should have a file called out_.vqa. In FFMPEG execute:
ffmpeg -i out_.vqa -sameq outfile.avi
You should now have a video that has similar compression to the Cinepak codec used with low bitrates:
For the What is Your Glitch? videos I wanted to build up on some of the extensive work that has already gone into the documentation, deconstruction and glitching of file formats. Rosa Menkman has already done a great job of documenting some of the more well-known file format glitches in the Vernacular of File Formats, which I recommend you all read. For this exercise I wanted to explore some of the more obscure file formats. Using open source software and Ubuntu has given me access to a wealth of programs that can still generate obscure file formats, such as pcx, pix and sgi. Through these experiments I also found inconsistencies in the way that different programs generate files, which is evident through my decision to use GIMP to convert files rather than Imagemagick in some of the scripts. Enough chit-chat, download the scripts!
Code hosted on GitHub
The method of glitching used in most of the scripts is the much-documented find and replace method. If you take a look in the scripts – and I encourage you to do so – you can change the characters that are being searched for and replaced. I’ve simply chosen characters that are sure to get results and are less likely to completely destroy the file.
Required Dependencies
Each script has its own set of dependencies, but to ensure you can run each one you’ll need the following:
Sed
GIMP – I use 2.71 beta available for Ubuntu from this ppa. Other versions remain untested
1. Make the file executable: In a terminal type chmod+x [name of script] (e.g. what_glitch_webp.sh)
2. Run ./what_glitch_webp.sh in a terminal window
3. Drop a video file into terminal window and press Enter
4. Get a cup of tea
Notes
The scripts have only been tested on Ubuntu 10.10. If you are able to get them working with other operating systems please feel free to share your techniques
These scripts seem to work best with avi video files that are 24 or 25 frames per second. Files that are 30 frames per second get out of sync with the audio
Make sure the name of the directory containing the video to glitch doesn’t contain spaces e.g. “untitled_folder” instead of “untitled folder”
The video needs audio order for this script to work. If you know what you’re doing you can edit parts of this script for it to work on files that have no audio
As these scripts processes each frame of a video file it will take a very long time to complete. It is recommended for use only on small video clips!
These scripts by no means even begin to cover all of the image file formats available. There were a few formats that were not as easy to batch-process or were simply too large to process, such as xpm and xbm. For these you’ll have to do it manually or explore other ways of batch processing. They’re also not the most efficient of scripts. Some way into processing 400 video frames the script would slow down a lot. I welcome any bug fixes or suggestions on fixing this
There’s still plenty of undiscovered glitches out there in the wild just waiting to be hunted down and exploited. I encourage anyone, everyone and their mother to pick from this long, but by no means complete list of image file formats and to find a way to glitch them!
