Create Digital Motion » Turntablist Visualism: Cut Chemist vs. DJ Shadow

Turntablist Visualism: Cut Chemist vs. DJ Shadow

We’ve seen visual vinyl, via the video stylings of Serato’s VIDEO-SL plug-in. But here’s a more literal approach: stick the camera on the turntable. Via a multi-camera setup, Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow are doing that with their honest-to-goodness, scratching turntablist sets. I especially like the camera up close on the turntable itself — something instrumentalists might try, too. (Well, maybe you want to stop somewhere … no endoscopies during your performance, please, unless you’re an avant-garde performance artist or something.)

More on this sort of thing soon, but there’s something to get the thought process going. Thanks, Jaymis!

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Comments

beatfix

Fun stuff. Looks like the close-up cam is actually attached to the DJ’s hand/wrist. I did something similar with a POV cam once while spinning on the radio:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nQCpEuUI8M

The camera was mounted on an eyeglass frame, in the middle of my forehead. I played around with a hand-mounted cam too, but it was really awkward.

March 28, 2008 @ 11:44 am

Story Boy

That wrist cam is an interesting idea.
The visual is very wobbly but i like the way it’s following the hand.

Qbert was in Cape Town recently and we used a 4 cam setup. Closeup’s on the turntables at various angles and then occassionally mixing luma keyed textures over the top.

Makes a huge difference when you can see what the turntablists is doing big up on the screen.

March 31, 2008 @ 3:42 am

visceral.x

heyya kids! i was the one responsible for designing and implementing the multi-cam setup for the Shadow/Chemist HardSell show. we had a full blown set/up with 9 or so cams (including the wrist mounted cam, an overhead and one that rode a track back and forth in front of the DJs’ setup) for the initial Hollywood bowl show last summer. a paired down setup is on tour with them currently.

the cool thing about these little cams we put together is that they all have MIDI controlled pan and tilt. we controlled in realtime with a midi control surface and can also record preset positions or simple moves and trigger them in ableton Live.

the 9 cam feeds were then cut on the fly and mixed live with pre-compiled visuals by Ben Stokes (of TINO Corp.)

for your tech-geekery fix,check out some behind the scenes pics from the show:
http://picasaweb.google.com/visceralX.images/LiveVisualsBehindTheHardSell

i’ll be running both the visuals and the cameras for the Australian leg of the tour in a couple weeks, so look for us down under! good times…

April 1, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

Paul Wenzel

I attended the Hard Sell show at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Getting to see three of my DJ faves, Cut Chemist, DJ Shadow, AND Kid Koala all in one space made me freaking giddy.

Whenever I describe the show to people, I always make note of the wrist cam. The video shots were a refreshing change from music videos which are so typical at events like this. As a visuals/video nerd, I was in heaven.

The intro video about 45s was absolutely wonderful too.

Visceral.x, thanks for bringing a great show to Minneapolis. Y’all come back now… hear?