Reflections on Being a VJ at Coachella: Mega VJ, VJ Gear Round-up
Ed.: Our guest superstar VJ Momo the Monster returns. Coachella isn’t necessarily a VJ convergence: VJs are aliens in a kingdom ruled by musicians. But with this crew, the gig rigs and artistry were flowing freely. Here’s just a glimpse of part of who and what was assembled. -PK
It’s now a week to the day since the start of the 2009 Coachella Festival, and I’m finally getting down to sorting notes, transferring pictures and video, trying to wrap the whole thing up in my head so I can file it away.
Doing visuals at Coachella was fun as hell, and also the craziest and most seat-of-my-pants show I’ve ever done. I was contacted by Brett Spivey of Xochi Media on March 31st (a little over two weeks before the event) and invited to join their crew. I joined them in Encinitas a week later for rehearsal and mind-melding, which is when I started my Coachella VJ Blog.
The Mission
Our job was to be the House VJs - we would do visuals for anyone who didn’t already have something prepared. Spivey emailed all the performers to find out what they wanted, and the big guessing game began. Some groups got back to us right away, others didn’t respond until we were already setting up at the festival, and some never did. Of the groups that responded, some told us they wanted no visuals, some had a logo or an album cover, and others, like Groove Armada, provided us with Gigabytes of beautiful content we were to work from.
For many groups, we had to guess - Shepard Fairey was easy since he’s also a visual artist and has plenty of prints we can animate, but for someone like Christopher Lawrence, we just listened to the music and organized groups of clips to work from.
The Gear
Oh, so much gear. From memory:
5
Comments 2
2007-Sep-27@13:00
