I spent this rainy day at home playing with Max, slowly getting somewhere finally after a lot of trial and error. I tried making a 3 or 4 channel video mixer in various ways with the jit.fade and also other preset mixers in the Vizzie section, but for some reason it always either made Max crash immediately upon trying to use it or made the video glitch (probably due to some signal mixing that I am not aware of). I decided to just stick to two channels and play with some basic effects to avoid crashing and to get the hang of that at least, and make something with some limitations first, and hopefully add Touch Osc before next Monday to control some parameters with. I also took out the random factor on the fader and turned it into a basic mixer dial which blends the two channels, and added an extra "jit.slide" module from the presets to blur one side more, which essentially does the same thing but has dials built in. I would also like to add dials to the jit.brcosa and other functions to have everything be manipulatable that way, but was wondering if there is also a way to make it change within a certain range (like 0 to 1 for brightness, instead of 0 to 500, etc.)
I am thinking now that I will just play with the video clips' audio and do a collage with the videos I made for week one, incorporating both audio and video together to sequence through ~7 stages in a sort of humorous chakra journey (which is also something I am working with in general as a concept--if not the traditional chakras then some kind of sequence like that with different sounds and colors). It will be incorporating people making tactile (non-computer) art and the music they were listening to, and what they were talking about, sometimes chopped and screwed. I may or may not also sync it with 3 minutes of a backing track that helps to sonically demarcate where the changes happen. I also experimented with adding the jit.op math operations to blend layers which does similar things to the blending layers function in Photoshop, but decided that I will not use them at least now, though am glad to know that option exists!
Realizing more deeply that everything behind art and music (at least that is made on the computer or with electronics) is directly related to math. Also I guess everything in the universe probably. Wish I was better at math but am also just glad to see the underbelly of this whole world and know what it is made of a little more intimately!
My abandoned 4 channel mixer..
Next I will narrow down and edit the video clips I want to use, and experiment with adding audio/music of my own, then try to go through a demo sequence and record it.
My current set up - back to the 2 channel video mixer with some modifications.