A blog about animation, filmmaking, and the VOP project.https://www.jmalmsten.com/enhttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/VOPv070/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/VOPv070/Quite a big one here. Most notably, the **VOP**, the Video **Optical Printer** now actually accepts video. So it can do... optical printing. Like ye olde J.K. Optical Printers. Please do remember. Prereleases like these seem to work on my end. But I have yet to do a full deployment run. Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:57:39 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/underconstruction/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/underconstruction/Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:09:23 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vop-release-notes-v0-6-2/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vop-release-notes-v0-6-2/v0.6.2 – (20260406) Added Added run\_vop.sh to simplify starting the vop Added the DVD-screensaver for when the VOP is idle Added drop-zones to file uploads to circumvent any browser-related hangs when a folder disappears.”Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:17:03 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/teasing-the-vop-screensaver/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/teasing-the-vop-screensaver/Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:51:57 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vop-release-notes-v0-6-1/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vop-release-notes-v0-6-1/V0.6.1 – (20260404) – “Changes to for the installation tutorial Added Created ‘Documentation’ directory for project tracking. Added tutorials to the wiki both for first installation of VOP and fullRGB fix. Changed Moved the force\_full\_rgb.sh script to CaliTools/FullRGBFix/ to clean up the root Added ffmpeg\_metadata.txt to .gitignore to clean out unnecessary file. FixedSat, 04 Apr 2026 18:51:25 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vop-v0-6-0-release-notes/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vop-v0-6-0-release-notes/Believe it or no, The VOP has finally been updated! I have gone through and painstakingly rebuilt it so it has BOTH the SSS and MDS modes. I have also removed some vestigual things like files that weren’t used anyway. And I have also removed the half-implemented JK Optical Printer functionality. But that’s only temporary. \[…\]Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:28:05 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/yet-another-vop-tease-this-time-a-slit-scan/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/yet-another-vop-tease-this-time-a-slit-scan/Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:26:42 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/a-thought-about-time-travel-and-paradox-solutions/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/a-thought-about-time-travel-and-paradox-solutions/The problems of time travel paradoxes kind of disappear if we make the assumption that if you go back in time, at the time point of arrival, the universe is split into one with the time traveler and one without. The one without just sees the time traveler poof out of existance when they leave. \[…\]Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:55:20 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vibes-and-whackamolity/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/vibes-and-whackamolity/“No, you can’t have it. I know I said Monday, but I want Baldrick to readit, which, unfortunately will mean teaching him to read, which will takeabout ten years — but time well spent, I think, because it’s such a verygood dictionary.”– Sir Edmund Blackadder This whole thing with the VOP has been a project \[…\]Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:54:16 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/teasing-the-mds-mode-of-the-vop/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/teasing-the-mds-mode-of-the-vop/I just want to add here a link to the latest tease I published on youtube for the VOP project. The “music” is loud. It is cacaphonous. But I think it fits the mad scientist vibe this whole project has. Also. I know I say this a lot. But… I really need to get back \[…\]Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:55:03 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/oh-dear/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/oh-dear/I’ve just found out about the indie-web movement. This here webpage is about to see a lot of strange changes.Sat, 21 Feb 2026 11:22:07 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/250207-quick-depth-map-test/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/250207-quick-depth-map-test/Nothing schmancy fancy here. Just a strange thought I had to explore. I just took the footage from my camera. Fed it into a depth map node and let it create its thing. The Depth Map. I then fed it into a 3D plane that’s then displaced.With a camera and set of lights that spin \[…\]Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:35:13 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/250126-further-adventures-in-film-photography/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/250126-further-adventures-in-film-photography/Well, I for some reason wanted to do some more film photography, so I got myself a bunch of rolls of various forms of black and white stock. I also got a fresh bottle of Cinestill DF96 (because I am a bit cheap and a single monobath is still the most cost effective option). The \[…\]Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:24:08 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/250119-splattest-please-mute-its-just-cacaphonous-noise/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/250119-splattest-please-mute-its-just-cacaphonous-noise/A discussion on facebook got me thinking what it would actually look like to take a wobbly video, feed it into a Gaussian Splat program like Jawset Postshot. So I grabbed my camera. I did a really bad camera motion… And I put it through Postshot. The result is quite remarkable, considering it was a \[…\]Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:45:57 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/replicating-the-ultra-q-title-sequence/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/replicating-the-ultra-q-title-sequence/So, I was looking around at old shows on my own server. And I suddenly got really really obsessed with the title sequence for Ultra Q. The pseudo-anthology monster show that would later, in its second iteration, become the more well known Ultraman. I saw this title sequence, I can guess that it was probably \[…\]Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:23:44 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/a-pseudo-unboxing/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/a-pseudo-unboxing/Just had an idea while driving home after picking up a packet with a couple of blurays from Vinegar Syndrome. Turned into a week-long project filling up my spare time. Does this mean I will be starting reviewing films? Will I return to that series of reviews that after over a decade still is getting \[…\]Wed, 25 Dec 2024 12:20:28 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241205-breaking-the-interpolator/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241205-breaking-the-interpolator/I was quite literally sitting on the toilet thinking, “wait… what if I film in super slow rate and feed it into the DaVinci Resolve timeline with frame interpolation set to optical flow instead of nearest neighbour for real time playback?” A test needed to be done, and that’s this video. Just a simple video \[…\]Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:15:08 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/24-haikus-of-christmas-mit-herr-nicht-werner/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/24-haikus-of-christmas-mit-herr-nicht-werner/Where we meet up with Herr Nicht Werner and see what he’s been up to since last year when he got turned into a golden orb and was sucked into a kitchen drawer. Bonus: Making the storyboard I’ve been livestreaming on youteube on a semi-daily basis. This is a condensed version of these streams up \[…\]Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:07:45 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241117-3dvortexthing/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241117-3dvortexthing/Like the thumbnail says. I had a little idea and it became this vortex where a vessel sloooowly creeps through. Visuals and sounds by yours truly. Me, that is.Mon, 18 Nov 2024 12:03:48 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241104-starfield-experiment/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241104-starfield-experiment/Ever wondered what it might feel like to tumble across space uncontrollably while a hellish organ-like sound pounds your ear? Well. This may not be it. But that’s what I thought it looked and sounded like as it went rather quickly from a simple test of line-animations (it’s not in the video any more) to \[…\]Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:59:00 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/matte-painting-experiments/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/matte-painting-experiments/And now, here’s a handful of experimental shots. Trying my hand at the ancient and noble art of Matte Painting. But as it’s my first attempt, i did keep it on Black and white to at least not have to worry about color theory and color matching. Oh, and… No AI was used in these \[…\]Sun, 20 Oct 2024 22:01:00 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241009-electric-vortex-423/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/241009-electric-vortex-423/Back to the regular content now. A flickering mess of DaVinci Fusion noise. I just kind of thought it looked coool. Especially as I added the Motion-blur node and things moved too fast for it so it kind of broke and it started to show strange squiggly lines as artifacts. So of course I put \[…\]Sat, 12 Oct 2024 22:15:00 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/240922-slowrate-recording-tutorial/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/240922-slowrate-recording-tutorial/Ever wanted to be your own Wong Kar Wai? Ever wanted to try out StepFrame recording? Ever wanted to use 180degree shutters while going slower than normal framerates? Were you one of the few that saw my SlowRate Recording Test ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paAGscJ\_kxg ) from a couple of years ago and wondered how to actually do \[…\]Wed, 02 Oct 2024 09:50:16 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/240912-aurora-borealis/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/240912-aurora-borealis/This time. I actually went out to record the Aurora Borealis, not just doing it by accident like I did in youtube.com/video/NHckn3uEY30/Sat, 14 Sep 2024 13:34:35 GMThttps://www.jmalmsten.com/post/found-video-4x4/https://www.jmalmsten.com/post/found-video-4x4/About a year and a half ago, I made most of an almost hour long video that explored how long a 4×4 single bit video at 24 fps could be without repeating any frames. Then… I somehow, through sidetracks… I kind of forgot to finish it and upload it. Now, now that I was cleaning \[…\]Sun, 01 Sep 2024 13:33:08 GMT