A 3D masterclass with Hexstatic’s Stuart Warren-Hill

August 15, 2012

Last weekend I found myself at a fascinating talk by Stuart Warren-Hill, founder of Hexstatic and Holotronica, where he demonstrated his work in the field of 3D filmmaking and offered up advice as part of a Nintendo competition to inspire budding auteurs to take advantage of the 3DS to create very short films.

(The above was actually me trying out a new bit of software myself – the gif generator Flixel on my iPhone – my efforts are not going to set the film world alight but it does show you a little bit of what the talk was like!)

Warren-Hill’s back catalogue proved a tiny bit disorienting but hypnotic – a lot of time was given over to watching graphics pulse and move in accordance with the all-encompassing electronica and, in a darkened air-conditioned room I pretty much lost all sense of how much time had actually passed.

The most interesting ideas (to me, anyway) were slightly outside the pulsating electronica box, though, and dealt with the music being shaped by the visuals rather than vice versa. The first was the track, Timber, created by editing video footage to distill music from speech, background noise and natural sounds. The second was an answer to a question of mine about the creative process wherein Warren-Hill described Pulse – a track where a set of sculptural digital rings dictated the sound by their form.

Those two more than anything else fitting with the phase I’m going through at the moment looking to join the dots between sensory experiences, ideas and emotions, aiming at broader and wider experiences. It’ll be interesting to see the competition entries too with that in mind, although presumably the 3D aspect will be lost in online viewing