Image from the film "No Other Time - The Pelagic Bell" (2009)
Note: Richard began experimenting with film as part of his quest for an immersive, improvisational performing environment. His notes suggest he was moving toward this aim as early as 1995. A Haiku Setting (1999) is the only film not found on Vimeo, his preferred channel thanks to HD capabilities. Beginning with Lux, Richard improvised live to his films.
A Haiku Setting 2:34 (1999)
RICHARD: A Haiku Setting is an animation of a poem by Joso, a student of the great Japanese poet Basho. This film won Honorable Mention awards for Best Experimental Film and Best Microbudget Film at the International Festival of Cinema and Technology Film Festival in Toronto in 2002. The film is only available here.
Dreamwood 9:43 (SD 2002/HD 2008)
RICHARD: Dreamwood is a wordless poem of a single line. I composed and performed the music (for electric guitar with computer processing) first and created the imagery to fit the music. The image is flowering dogwood branches, keyed, slowed down and processed in After Effects to create illusory motion and color. Dreamwood was nominated for Best Soundtrack at the 2003 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in New York.
https://vimeo.com/981999
One Year 7:54 (2008)
RICHARD: One Year is a year-long timescape of a maple tree in my backyard. The source imagery consists of digital photographs taken daily at 11AM which I then assembled in Adobe After Effects. I also applied additional image processing in After Effects to further stylize the source material. The soundtrack, of my own composition, is for computer-processed bowed vibraphone, played and recorded live.
One Year was shown at T-Minus 2008, the Time-Art Festival, in Brooklyn, NY; DIGiT2008, the Fifth Annual Delaware Valley Digital Media Exposition in Narrowsburg, NY; and at Dreaming A New Real: Loop Sanctuary IV, in Troy, NY. In December 2010, One Year won the HDFEST Deffie award for Best Experimental Film at HDFEST 2010 in Portland, OR.
https://vimeo.com/913617
Lux 19:38 (2008)
RICHARD: An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.
RICHARD: LUX was shown with a different live soundtrack at New York Soundscapes, part of the Ear To The Earth 2008 festival in New York City in October, 2008.
https://vimeo.com/940594
drift 9:58 (2008)
RICHARD: drift was created by processing many layers of abstract imagery generated directly in Adobe After Effects using a plugin called AEFlame, which uses the Electric Sheep algorithm to produce its imagery. Those layers were then composited with several different types of transfer modes between each layer, then the entire composite was processed with several interations of radial blurs. The total rendering time for the HD version was approximately 400 hours.
The soundtrack is a realtime improvisation for electric lapsteel guitar, processed with long delay and reverb plugins on a Macintosh laptop, then further processed using the Kyma System. In Kyma, the delayed signal from the Macintosh served as the input source to the Cross-Filter process, which convolves the source with an impulse response. drift was shown at the 2009 International Festival of Cinema and Technology's Visions of Movement, Art and Sound.
https://vimeo.com/940594
From an email dated September 15, 2009:
"On Saturday October 3, 2009, at Re:Soundings in Valley Falls, NY, Richard Lainhart will present the world premiere of 'No Other Time,' a full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics performance in four-channel playback and high-definition computer-animated film projection. Lainhart will be accompanying his cycle of four new abstract films, whose imagery is inspired by the organic processes of nature, with his Buchla 200e/Haken Continuum modular analog synthesizer system."
The four films that comprise 'No Other Time,' was a project awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Film and Media grant in 2009.
No Other Time - A Clouded Lens 13:08 (2009)
RICHARD: A Clouded Lens was animated in Adobe After Effects. The soundtrack was performed and recorded in realtime with a Buchla 200e analog modular synthesizer controlled by a Haken Continuum Fingerboard.
https://vimeo.com/9255441
No Other Time - The Pelagic Bell 13:31 (2009
RICHARD: The Pelagic Bell was animated in Adobe After Effects. The soundtrack was performed and recorded in realtime with a Buchla 200e analog modular synthesizer controlled by a Haken Continuum Fingerboard.
https://vimeo.com/9324101
No Other Time - The Line of Division
RICHARD: The Line of Division was animated in Adobe After Effects. The soundtrack was performed and recorded in realtime with a Steinberger electric guitar processed with audio plugins running on a MacBook Pro.
https://vimeo.com/9331228
No Other Time - The Edge of Meaning 15:43
RICHARD: The Edge of Meaning" was animated in Adobe After Effects using Trapcode Particular. The soundtrack was performed and recorded in realtime with a Buchla 200e analog modular synthesizer controlled by a Haken Continuum Fingerboard.
https://vimeo.com/9253585