AV technology is progressing rapidly. We now have two DJ/VJ mixers to choose from (Pioneer SVM-1000, Numark AVM02), most VJ apps will now play audio on video clips, and many DJ programs are incorporating video playback in their current or upcoming feature sets. Obviously these moves are following a trend: DVJ is totally hot right now. Our interweb tubes are being filled with youtubes, video mashups and remixes are constant viral video hits… The time for AV to go mainstream is now, and we’re going to see the next generation of performance innovators rise, buoyed up by these new, accessible, and immensely capable tools.

I spent last night a guest of VJ Morph at Brisbane’s Tivoli Theatre, for the last show of the Smirnoff Secret Sessions Australian tour.

Headlining the show: DJ Yoda with a DVJ set. Yoda is obviously a talented DJ, but as a visualist I was entirely underwhelmed by his performance. The source material was uninventive - mostly popular movies and music videos - with low resolution and compression artifacts telling us that much of the content was ripped from youtube. Technical nitpicking aside, the set wasn’t assembled with much regard for editing, visual storytelling, coherence, or even visual interest. There were occasional inventive tricks, nice material selection, and some proficient scratching and sample triggering, but the bulk of the visual set was comprised of clips playing through towards their full length, generally in their original unedited form, and often completely at odds with the accompanying audio. Old black and white movies would be scratched in for their vocal samples, and then continue to play as the audio segued into some unrelated track. Aside from a sprinkling of original content, the videos were solidly uninspiring, and probably overfamiliar to most internet-age, youtube slurping punters.

Despite the hype, the Pioneer SVM-1000 didn’t help matters, its video effects looked cheesy on first appearance, and positively hackneyed by the fourth time the page-spin and tile-shuffle were dropped in. There were some crowd-pleasing pop culture moments - scratching audio and video definitely has the ability to wow an audience - but anyone with a more than rudimentary knowledge of video would have been hard pressed to find “next level” visual performance here, and by the end of the 90 minute set even the crowd was losing focus between the humorous video interludes and old-favorite tracks.

So how can we go about fostering real innovation in AV, “popular”, music performance. The short term solution is obvious: Have a visualist to take care of the video.

Some lovely, light-hearted motion tracking and compositing here from Lovely Productions.

ORBA SQUARA “GRAVEL” MUSIC VIDEO from LORCANFINNEGAN on Vimeo.

Apparently for this type of head tracking you need 8-12 tracks to be visible. This was achieved using a skullcap covered with different colored balls.

CDM’s Most Eligible Bachelor 2008, Adam Buxton (who is indeed married), had the pilot of his new TV show - MeeBox - playing on BBC3 last night, so it’s now available to people inside the UK, and nobody else. However, Adam has posted some clips on YouTube:

Beautifully simple, effective, cheap-arse post production. Hopefully the full version of MeeBox will appear somewhere online soon.

(For more Adam, check out Radiohead, Spoon, and camping and racing on Dermott’s Sporting Buddies [Parts 1, 2, 3, 4])

Last week I spent about half an hour under a bridge with some musicians, 2 guitars, a microphone and a camera.

About 2 hours of post-production later, I released a music video for one of my new collaborators: Edward Guglielmino.

Edward Guglielmino - Late At Night (Bridge Sessions) from Jaymis.

The idea for this piece was that it start out looking like it was shot on a camera phone, and seamlessly segue into a lovely HD panorama. The camera was locked-off on a tripod. All zoom and camera moves were created in After Effects. I’m very happy with the effect, but that’s not really why I post it here. I’ve been considering, discussing, and planning my future as a visualist, and I’d like to share some of where I’m aiming, and hear what you, lovely CDM readers, are pointing your considerable talents towards.

This video is part of a slightly new direction for me. Previously I’ve striven for “perfection” with every work. The cleanest image, the highest resolution, the perfect performance, the seamless post-production. These are all noble goals, clearly, but they’re not really compatible with an abundant output, and it’s an abundance of output which I feel is the way for myself - and others - to transition from weekend-VJ to full-time visualist.

I’m sure I’m not the only visualist to have been inspired by Autechre’s Gantz Graf video, nor the only person to have watched it and though “some day, we will be able to do that in realtime”:

I think we’re still quite a way off, but the latest project to set my mind thinking along these lines is Amoeba Dance - Caliper Remote (and the followup, Amoeba Dance with Mad Girls,) by CDMo reader Memo:

This is created realtime in VDMX from a quartz composer generator, controlled by 9-band audio analysis, and topped off with a very nice little effects chain.

A few people have mentioned they don’t get the same look when they use the QTZ file, this is because the QTZ file renders with very basic shading and there is quite a bit of post done in VDMX. The Effects I’m using (from top to bottom) are:
Serpia Tone (100%, Source Atop)
Shaded Material (0-40% tied to audio analysis, Soft Light)
City Lights (100%, Source Atop)
Bloom (100%, Screen)

I’ve also got a 9-band audio analysis going on, with different frequencies driving all the parameters of QTZ. You can just setup the frequencies randomly and it will do pretty cool stuff to almost any song (see http://www.memo.tv/amoeba_dance_v1_5 for an example!!), but it is best to taylor the frequencies to the specific song…

Memo shares the GLSL code and the QTZ file on his site, which contains some interesting nuggets of QC, Actionscript, Processing and other codey goodness. PK: Because this uses GLSL which runs in any OpenGL environment, you could also port the geometry stuff to Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd/GEM, or (with some adjustments) even things like vvvv, etc. — no need for Quartz Composer per se.

He also maintains a VDMX and Quartz Composer repository: http://vdmx.memo.tv/.

Awesome work, and more to come it seems.

For all of the other CDMo readers who are doing cool things, don’t wait for us to find you: Hit the comments or the contact page and tell us what you’re up to!

I’m not sure why we didn’t mention it here while it was “current”, but we did talk about Radiohead’s recent webcast of their album In Rainbows on CDMusic. Even if you’re not in to Radiohead it’s worth watching, as it brings a beautifully varied, personal, low-budget aesthetic to one of the biggest bankers in modern music, it completely changed how I identify with the album. As mentioned in the CDMusic comments, I’m historically a huge Radiohead fan, but have found myself drifting away from their music over the last couple of albums. I paid money for In Rainbows (even though I didn’t have to), listened to it once or twice and then forgot about it, but the Scotch Mist videos made me re-examine the entire album, and it finally clicked for me.

All of this preamble is by way of introducing Adam Buxton, a British filmmaker who says he “helped out” on the webcast, but is billed #2 in the introductory credits to the piece, so it seems he was doing a little more than making coffee.

Ok, maybe not the last. But I’m proud to say I actually worked on this video, sweating, printing and gluing for hours on end. Directed by Asif Mian. Fast Cars turned out absolutely great. You can find a higher resolution quicktime on Asif Mian’s site here. It helps that im a huge Aesop Rock fan as well.