Its been very busy at Shakinda recently and hard to know where to start on the news front. Great workshops at the Urban Arts Academy in Belfast, Fun gigs with Nakatomi towers at Stiff Kitten and continued residencies at Lush! and Yello. More production work for the new Yello visuals and DVD and Play and Wired and Belfast Exposed. We have now launched vj equipment rental services in response to popular demand!

Realtime Motion Graphics with Quartz Composer is a book and DVD project authored by Shakinda & Surya Buchwald, to be published by Pearson. Started nine months ago, this project aims to introduce Quartz Composer as a very powerful and fun graphical programming environment. Despite its massive potential for real-time audio reactive solutions, Quartz Composer is still mainly publicized for the creation screensaver, and remains woefully under-used as a visualization tool. The Mastering Quartz Composer book could change this forever.

This book and DVD shows the full potential of Quatz Composer, from taking a complete novice through the software setup process and getting to grips its interface, all the way to enabling the modelization of complex 3d audio reactive environments, midi interaction, to retrieving online database information.