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Eyesupply Profile
Eyesupply and Resolume have always made a tight team. The boys from Eindhoven have been using Resolume since version 1.1 (and since they were still the boys from Rotterdam ;)). Over the years they only became bigger and better at what they do, and now they're putting together some of the biggest and awesomest shows you've ever seen, not least of which the Armin Only world tour, which has them flying all over the five continents. If you want to know all about what makes these fellas tick, read on:
Can you give us the low down on Eyesupply? What do you do supply to the eyes? Or are you actually a front company for black market organ smugglers?
What's in a name? Haha. Our goal is to supply all eyes with mind-blowing visuals. In the past few years we've done visuals for over 1000 major events. We are currently touring with the Armin Only worldtour, A state of Trance worldtour and we are the main VJ's of Armin van Buuren during his gigs. For 5 years now we are responsible for all visuals during the Extrema Closing show and all Masters of Hardcore shows.
Left to Right: Syndicate - Westfallenhalle Dortmund (DE), Kane - Amsterdam (NL), A State of Trance 450 - Wroclaw (P ), Masters of Hardcore - Den Bosch (NL), Lowlands - Biddinghuize (NL), Best of Both Worlds - Amsterdam (NL)
What do you reckon makes Eyesupply one of the major players in the visual scene? Is it all hard work and good content, or is there a secret to your success?
There's no magic secret. Like every successful company or artist: it all comes down to hard work and indeed a lot of high-quality content. Also we differentiate ourselves by our own distinctive style what is best defined as abstract, animated, rhythmic and vivid. All our content is made by our team and it's growing everyday.
Can you tell us a bit more about the history of Eyesupply? How did you get started and what are some of the highlights thus far?
Eyesupply was founded in May 2003 by 5 people with each a complete different backgrounds, ranging from industrial design to motion graphics design. Our first gigs where small gigs for friends and were paid with beer and food :D But after a while it got more serious and we really got into it after a gig at the Roskilde festival! We wanted more! Our network grew and the projects started to become more serious. It wasn't a hobby thing anymore. Till the point we are now, still doing the thing we love the most, creating visual shows! We are now with 9 people at the office and a good network of freelance content designers and video operators.
When you guys play, one thing that always stands out is how you work together with the lighting guys. Is that a conscious decision? Do you use DMX control at all?
We always keep an eye on the complete show. That included lights but also motion, laser, performance and pyro. When all elements work together the show is at its best. Therefore we work closely together with 250K (http://www.250k.nl): a company that creates show concepts and stage designs and combines all these elements in the best possible and innovative ways. We don't tell our story, we tell the story the artist / promotor wants to tell to their audience.
Masters of Hardcore 2010 - The Voice of Mayhem Aftermovie
Right now, you're doing the main visual setup for the monster Armin Only tour. Can you give us some more details about that? What sort of screens are you using, what sort of content are you playing on them? Any wonderfully ingenious rigging setups? How does the stuff get from one place to the other?
Yeah the whole Armin tour was a big step forward for us. Creating over 460 minutes of custom content, figuring out a complete new way to sync video to audio with a custom made Video Server configuration and some special adaptation to Resolume Avenue! We are using 5 seperate 18mm LED screens with a total width of 44 meters and 8 meters heigh. 2 of them on a trolley system so that they can slide open and they can turn 360 degrees.The output that we are using is a Full HD signal from straight out of the Avenue Video Server and pixelmapped by the Advanced output options in Avenue! There are 5 controllable dome camera's and 2 small finger/spy camera mounted on the drum kit and the guitar. All those signals are collected in a Edirol V8 and thanks to the guys from Roland we where the first one to use the Roland MVS-12 multi-viewer for our previews.
Armin van Buuren - Mirage Worldtour 2010/2011
Backstage report Armin van Buuren - Mirage Worldtour 2010/2011
A lot of people are interested in the custom Avenue machine you're bringing on the road. What are the specs on that little fella, and how do you generally use it?
When the Armin project started we were searching for a new way to play video in the best quality and in the most easy way possible for us. We've looked at other servers and mixers but weren't completely satisfied, most of them are too complex and needed too much pre programming before you start your show and also way too expensive. We wanted our own little fella with the software we grew up with! After a chat with Bart from Resolume we've decided to build the best possible configuration around Avenue! With some minor modifications we had ourselves a beast! 3x Full HD Input, 3x SD Inputs, Up to 3 Full HD Outputs still running 60fps with 8 layers of Full HD mixed together!
What other gear are you bringing with? What's the signal flow like?
Each project is different and needs a different approach, sometimes a single SD signal is enough to do the trick. Two Resolume or Avenue PC's with a Edirol V8 would be the configuration. But the pixelmappings are starting to get bigger and more complex, multiple screens, different LED pitches, stitched projectors, videomapping, etc, is getting more common nowadays. So we bring our server to control all video as an end control. We now can decide where to place bits of video on what and change this during the show.
Since a few days we're the proud owners of a Roland V440 HD Mixer. We haven't had the change to use it during a show but i think this machine will also be a change in our workflow.
There's also some custom time code stuff happening at the Armin Only shows. How does that work?
That's our little secret :D Unfortunately we can't give you those details. It's like us asking you to give the open programming file of the avenue software. ;)
But the main thing Armin wanted the visuals to be completely sync in HD without him doing video stuff even when he pitches his tracks, and he wanted us to keep full control over the video.
How come you're still using R2.41 on some machines? Get with the times man!
We started using Resolume on version 1.1. We grew up with the interface and still love the quickness and the fast controls. Especially when you really want to VJ fast and live in time to the music with your visuals, R2.41 is still the best interface there is! Also all our content was created based on the workflow of R2.41. Since our projects grew we are using Avenue more because we needed a stable and reliable piece of software to do Full HD or more and still stay digital. But sometimes when it's possible we just want to VJ the oldskool way. It feels natural! You know what would be the best innovation ever? An R2.41 interface with the power of Avenue, sort of Avenue Light version!
What about the pyros, dude, do you get to play with fire?
LOL, that isn't an Eyesupply thing. But it's nice to see some fireworks once in a while! Specially during the summer season and if you want to see great fireworks go and see the Closing Show of Extrema Outdoor!
Where are things heading? What's the next step after this?
We are constantly trying to renew and challenge ourselves. Trying to find new solutions to give people a great show. Now we are working on several new shows that will be touring the world this summer. And of course a new Extrema Closing Show this summer! Trying to professionalize and keep evolving our vj'ing.
We are always looking for experienced people (Motion Graphics, VJ'ing, Operating, etc) if you're interested please send us an email!!
Contact:
Mail: comeonboard@eyesupply.tv
Website: http://www.eyesupply.tv
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/eyesupply
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eyesupply/126703474058989
Eyesupply showreel spring 2010
Can you give us the low down on Eyesupply? What do you do supply to the eyes? Or are you actually a front company for black market organ smugglers?
What's in a name? Haha. Our goal is to supply all eyes with mind-blowing visuals. In the past few years we've done visuals for over 1000 major events. We are currently touring with the Armin Only worldtour, A state of Trance worldtour and we are the main VJ's of Armin van Buuren during his gigs. For 5 years now we are responsible for all visuals during the Extrema Closing show and all Masters of Hardcore shows.
What do you reckon makes Eyesupply one of the major players in the visual scene? Is it all hard work and good content, or is there a secret to your success?
There's no magic secret. Like every successful company or artist: it all comes down to hard work and indeed a lot of high-quality content. Also we differentiate ourselves by our own distinctive style what is best defined as abstract, animated, rhythmic and vivid. All our content is made by our team and it's growing everyday.
Can you tell us a bit more about the history of Eyesupply? How did you get started and what are some of the highlights thus far?
Eyesupply was founded in May 2003 by 5 people with each a complete different backgrounds, ranging from industrial design to motion graphics design. Our first gigs where small gigs for friends and were paid with beer and food :D But after a while it got more serious and we really got into it after a gig at the Roskilde festival! We wanted more! Our network grew and the projects started to become more serious. It wasn't a hobby thing anymore. Till the point we are now, still doing the thing we love the most, creating visual shows! We are now with 9 people at the office and a good network of freelance content designers and video operators.
When you guys play, one thing that always stands out is how you work together with the lighting guys. Is that a conscious decision? Do you use DMX control at all?
We always keep an eye on the complete show. That included lights but also motion, laser, performance and pyro. When all elements work together the show is at its best. Therefore we work closely together with 250K (http://www.250k.nl): a company that creates show concepts and stage designs and combines all these elements in the best possible and innovative ways. We don't tell our story, we tell the story the artist / promotor wants to tell to their audience.
Masters of Hardcore 2010 - The Voice of Mayhem Aftermovie
Right now, you're doing the main visual setup for the monster Armin Only tour. Can you give us some more details about that? What sort of screens are you using, what sort of content are you playing on them? Any wonderfully ingenious rigging setups? How does the stuff get from one place to the other?
Yeah the whole Armin tour was a big step forward for us. Creating over 460 minutes of custom content, figuring out a complete new way to sync video to audio with a custom made Video Server configuration and some special adaptation to Resolume Avenue! We are using 5 seperate 18mm LED screens with a total width of 44 meters and 8 meters heigh. 2 of them on a trolley system so that they can slide open and they can turn 360 degrees.The output that we are using is a Full HD signal from straight out of the Avenue Video Server and pixelmapped by the Advanced output options in Avenue! There are 5 controllable dome camera's and 2 small finger/spy camera mounted on the drum kit and the guitar. All those signals are collected in a Edirol V8 and thanks to the guys from Roland we where the first one to use the Roland MVS-12 multi-viewer for our previews.
Backstage report Armin van Buuren - Mirage Worldtour 2010/2011
A lot of people are interested in the custom Avenue machine you're bringing on the road. What are the specs on that little fella, and how do you generally use it?
When the Armin project started we were searching for a new way to play video in the best quality and in the most easy way possible for us. We've looked at other servers and mixers but weren't completely satisfied, most of them are too complex and needed too much pre programming before you start your show and also way too expensive. We wanted our own little fella with the software we grew up with! After a chat with Bart from Resolume we've decided to build the best possible configuration around Avenue! With some minor modifications we had ourselves a beast! 3x Full HD Input, 3x SD Inputs, Up to 3 Full HD Outputs still running 60fps with 8 layers of Full HD mixed together!
What other gear are you bringing with? What's the signal flow like?
Each project is different and needs a different approach, sometimes a single SD signal is enough to do the trick. Two Resolume or Avenue PC's with a Edirol V8 would be the configuration. But the pixelmappings are starting to get bigger and more complex, multiple screens, different LED pitches, stitched projectors, videomapping, etc, is getting more common nowadays. So we bring our server to control all video as an end control. We now can decide where to place bits of video on what and change this during the show.
Since a few days we're the proud owners of a Roland V440 HD Mixer. We haven't had the change to use it during a show but i think this machine will also be a change in our workflow.
There's also some custom time code stuff happening at the Armin Only shows. How does that work?
That's our little secret :D Unfortunately we can't give you those details. It's like us asking you to give the open programming file of the avenue software. ;)
But the main thing Armin wanted the visuals to be completely sync in HD without him doing video stuff even when he pitches his tracks, and he wanted us to keep full control over the video.
How come you're still using R2.41 on some machines? Get with the times man!
We started using Resolume on version 1.1. We grew up with the interface and still love the quickness and the fast controls. Especially when you really want to VJ fast and live in time to the music with your visuals, R2.41 is still the best interface there is! Also all our content was created based on the workflow of R2.41. Since our projects grew we are using Avenue more because we needed a stable and reliable piece of software to do Full HD or more and still stay digital. But sometimes when it's possible we just want to VJ the oldskool way. It feels natural! You know what would be the best innovation ever? An R2.41 interface with the power of Avenue, sort of Avenue Light version!
What about the pyros, dude, do you get to play with fire?
LOL, that isn't an Eyesupply thing. But it's nice to see some fireworks once in a while! Specially during the summer season and if you want to see great fireworks go and see the Closing Show of Extrema Outdoor!
Where are things heading? What's the next step after this?
We are constantly trying to renew and challenge ourselves. Trying to find new solutions to give people a great show. Now we are working on several new shows that will be touring the world this summer. And of course a new Extrema Closing Show this summer! Trying to professionalize and keep evolving our vj'ing.
We are always looking for experienced people (Motion Graphics, VJ'ing, Operating, etc) if you're interested please send us an email!!
Contact:
Mail: comeonboard@eyesupply.tv
Website: http://www.eyesupply.tv
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/eyesupply
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eyesupply/126703474058989
Eyesupply showreel spring 2010
Resolume Blog
This blog is about Resolume, VJ-ing and the inspiring things the Resolume users make. Do you have something interesting to show the community? Send in your work!
Highlights
Nick Bertke aka Pogo interview
One of the great things about developing creative visual tools, is that sometimes you see things done with them that surpass your wildest expectations. One of those revelations was seeing that AV phenomenon Nick Bertke, better known as Pogo, uses Resolume Avenue as his live VJ tool. After listening and dreaming away to his tracks on many a long journey, it was about time to ask the man some questions!
-So, even after choosing a well known term as your artist name, you're the fourth hit on Google. How does it feel being more popular than both the stick and the dance?
Dunno, it just feels like a lot of people listen to my music. I invest emotions into my work, and people receive them as though opening a parcel. It's great being able to emotionally communicate with so many people, but sometimes, the hype and recognition tends to go to my head. I think it's a balance between taking pride in your work and not leaning on it to validate your existence and worth as a human being.
Your style of music is very unique. Have you been always been doing this cut-up, vocal syllable style, or did the pennies fall into place later on?
When I was around twelve, I'd punch sequences into a Playstation game called Music 2000. I had always longed for the freedom to make music on my own. The music I made in those days was very much Happy House, kind of like Todd Edwards and DJ Tonka. When I hit thirteen/fourteen, I became fascinated with piecing sounds together like a jigsaw puzzle. I've always heard small sounds, chords and vocal slithers in movies that stand out to me, so I thought "Hey, if I love all of these sounds individually, why not put them together?" I guess it's where any sample artist begins. Where my work differs is that I concentrate largely on finding notes in the spoken voice and piecing them together without any intention of forming sentences or making sense.
At the moment you get millions of views online, do projects for 'big business', but also show your work at the Guggenheim, and you're about to go on a USA tour. How did your career take off like this? Is one good clip on youtube and a heap of talent all it takes, or did you have to do lots of promotion and social networking?
'Alice' took off entirely on its own. All I did was upload it to my YouTube channel, and it received a good 2 million views within 6 months. I then hooked up with Bryant Randall, a DJ at the time who expressed an interest in my work and wanted to help me make some business out of it. I've never been good with business, money or the law, so I figured it was worth a try. Now, Bryant has helped me find work with Disney, Pixar and Showtime, and I'm at a point now where my music is selling online well enough for me to continue supporting my passion.
There's a cool video on your blog, showing how you work in FLStudio (link). Can you explain a bit about your process for creating the video part of your work? Any particular hardware or software tricks involved?
No hardware. No software tricks. I simply capture the clips from the film I'm remixing, and edit them over the track I've made. This means going back to the vocals and chords in the film to capture the corresponding video - a process that sometimes requires word searches in the script of the film online. I have always edited my videos in Sony Vegas, but I'm choosing to migrate over to Final Cut Pro because I prefer the features and performance.
Is a Pogo live show a DJ mix of all your hits, or do you also 'remix the remixes'? What are the crowd's reactions like?
I have every layer of every track on a Jazzmutant Lemur in front of me, and it's my goal of the evening to mix and splice them together to form a megamix of my tracks. The crowd, at least in the USA, can never seem to get enough of it.
Can you explain a bit about your live setup? What gear do you bring on stage? How are you connected?
On my MacBook Pro, I’m running Ableton Live and Resolume. Processing my audio is a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1. I’m using a Jazzmutant Lemur to control my Ableton set, which is kind of like an iPad, just bigger and better suited for live performance. In place of my Roland PCR-300, I’m trialing an iPad Wi-Fi, which displays the same Ableton set but through the touchAble iPad app. This is so I can adjust a mixer with my left hand, and trigger clips with my right on the Lemur. I’m also busy experimenting with Korg iElectribe, an amazing iPad app that lets you build drum loops and percussion sequences live for immediate mixing. I simply connect the iPad headphone jack to an input on the Audio Kontrol, route that through a channel in Ableton, and I’m ready to roll.
How did you decide on using Resolume for the video part of your shows?
VJZoo in Perth WA first introduced me to Resolume. At the time, I wanted to essentially edit videos live. It was great fun and Resolume proved to be ideal for the job.
Which features of Resolume do you use the most? How do you use Resolume in general?
I have since focused more on my music than my videos in my live shows. As I developed my system for triggering sections and layers of my tracks in real time, I needed an application that would automatically take care of the video side of things. Splicing my videos and triggering them in Resolume via MIDI in Ableton is so far the best solution I've come up with.
Do you have any tips and tricks for people developing their own live av-sets? Any gotchas or things that took you ages to get right?
I think 800x600 Photo-JPEG .MOV is the fastest, most accessible format to use in Resolume. It's quite large in file size, but it performs like a dream and the quality is great.
Any upcoming projects, shows, collaborations or world travel plans that you are particularly excited about?
In the same way I remixed my mother in her garden, I'm heading to Tibet this year to remix the sights and sounds of its culture. It's going to be tremendous fun and I'm very grateful to everyone who has helped us fund the project on Kickstarter.
Check out more of Pogo's work at http://www.pogomix.net/ or at his Youtube Channel.
-So, even after choosing a well known term as your artist name, you're the fourth hit on Google. How does it feel being more popular than both the stick and the dance?
Dunno, it just feels like a lot of people listen to my music. I invest emotions into my work, and people receive them as though opening a parcel. It's great being able to emotionally communicate with so many people, but sometimes, the hype and recognition tends to go to my head. I think it's a balance between taking pride in your work and not leaning on it to validate your existence and worth as a human being.
Your style of music is very unique. Have you been always been doing this cut-up, vocal syllable style, or did the pennies fall into place later on?
When I was around twelve, I'd punch sequences into a Playstation game called Music 2000. I had always longed for the freedom to make music on my own. The music I made in those days was very much Happy House, kind of like Todd Edwards and DJ Tonka. When I hit thirteen/fourteen, I became fascinated with piecing sounds together like a jigsaw puzzle. I've always heard small sounds, chords and vocal slithers in movies that stand out to me, so I thought "Hey, if I love all of these sounds individually, why not put them together?" I guess it's where any sample artist begins. Where my work differs is that I concentrate largely on finding notes in the spoken voice and piecing them together without any intention of forming sentences or making sense.
At the moment you get millions of views online, do projects for 'big business', but also show your work at the Guggenheim, and you're about to go on a USA tour. How did your career take off like this? Is one good clip on youtube and a heap of talent all it takes, or did you have to do lots of promotion and social networking?
'Alice' took off entirely on its own. All I did was upload it to my YouTube channel, and it received a good 2 million views within 6 months. I then hooked up with Bryant Randall, a DJ at the time who expressed an interest in my work and wanted to help me make some business out of it. I've never been good with business, money or the law, so I figured it was worth a try. Now, Bryant has helped me find work with Disney, Pixar and Showtime, and I'm at a point now where my music is selling online well enough for me to continue supporting my passion.
There's a cool video on your blog, showing how you work in FLStudio (link). Can you explain a bit about your process for creating the video part of your work? Any particular hardware or software tricks involved?
No hardware. No software tricks. I simply capture the clips from the film I'm remixing, and edit them over the track I've made. This means going back to the vocals and chords in the film to capture the corresponding video - a process that sometimes requires word searches in the script of the film online. I have always edited my videos in Sony Vegas, but I'm choosing to migrate over to Final Cut Pro because I prefer the features and performance.
Is a Pogo live show a DJ mix of all your hits, or do you also 'remix the remixes'? What are the crowd's reactions like?
I have every layer of every track on a Jazzmutant Lemur in front of me, and it's my goal of the evening to mix and splice them together to form a megamix of my tracks. The crowd, at least in the USA, can never seem to get enough of it.
Can you explain a bit about your live setup? What gear do you bring on stage? How are you connected?
On my MacBook Pro, I’m running Ableton Live and Resolume. Processing my audio is a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1. I’m using a Jazzmutant Lemur to control my Ableton set, which is kind of like an iPad, just bigger and better suited for live performance. In place of my Roland PCR-300, I’m trialing an iPad Wi-Fi, which displays the same Ableton set but through the touchAble iPad app. This is so I can adjust a mixer with my left hand, and trigger clips with my right on the Lemur. I’m also busy experimenting with Korg iElectribe, an amazing iPad app that lets you build drum loops and percussion sequences live for immediate mixing. I simply connect the iPad headphone jack to an input on the Audio Kontrol, route that through a channel in Ableton, and I’m ready to roll.
How did you decide on using Resolume for the video part of your shows?
VJZoo in Perth WA first introduced me to Resolume. At the time, I wanted to essentially edit videos live. It was great fun and Resolume proved to be ideal for the job.
Which features of Resolume do you use the most? How do you use Resolume in general?
I have since focused more on my music than my videos in my live shows. As I developed my system for triggering sections and layers of my tracks in real time, I needed an application that would automatically take care of the video side of things. Splicing my videos and triggering them in Resolume via MIDI in Ableton is so far the best solution I've come up with.
Do you have any tips and tricks for people developing their own live av-sets? Any gotchas or things that took you ages to get right?
I think 800x600 Photo-JPEG .MOV is the fastest, most accessible format to use in Resolume. It's quite large in file size, but it performs like a dream and the quality is great.
Any upcoming projects, shows, collaborations or world travel plans that you are particularly excited about?
In the same way I remixed my mother in her garden, I'm heading to Tibet this year to remix the sights and sounds of its culture. It's going to be tremendous fun and I'm very grateful to everyone who has helped us fund the project on Kickstarter.
Check out more of Pogo's work at http://www.pogomix.net/ or at his Youtube Channel.
AV remixing with Frank Sent Us
Many of you may know Frank Sent Us, a team of energetic Italians that rock the crowd with powerful AV remixes of some of your favourite movies, video games and cartoon shows. They've been playing shows all over Europe, all the while running their faithful Resolume Avenue setup. And if you didn't know them, it's long overdue that we dig a little deeper in the audio visual phenomenon that is Frank Sent Us.
Frank Sent Us consists of four people, Mastro (guitar player), Frenetik Beat (live electronics), Mr Orange (Bass player) and Frank Sandrello (audiovisual player) and they have their visual roots way back in 2001. Starting in the underground clubs of Rome, specifically the Brancaleone, rocking VHS tapes and analog mixers, they soon made the jump to lightspeed AV mixing.
These days they take a more technological approach, but still keep it surprisingly down to earth. Using good old QuicktimePro to select AV loops, a collection of cool sounding and cool looking clips is created. The clips are loaded into Resolume Avenue, which is also sporting a Focusrite sound card. These samples are then played pretty much like a drummer would play the drums, triggering the clips with an Akai MPD24.
You might be surprised to hear that instead of tightly laying out the sync with a combo of Ableton and Resolume, all the AV stuff is done freestyle in Resolume. No beat snap, no BPM sync, all the clips set to timeline one-shots, allowing them to really follow the flow of the music and the crowd.
This intensity is what makes Frank Sent Us shows so powerful, and anyone that has seen em live will agree! They're literally an explosion of energy, visuals and music, and I dare anyone to keep their hands in their pockets and feet on the ground when these guys hit the stage!
Currently working on a DVD collection of their material, as well as making the move to commissioned Hollywood remixes, you're bound to see more of em in 2011. Keep your eyes and ears peeled, and in the meantime check out their site at http://www.franksentus.com/
Frank Sent Us consists of four people, Mastro (guitar player), Frenetik Beat (live electronics), Mr Orange (Bass player) and Frank Sandrello (audiovisual player) and they have their visual roots way back in 2001. Starting in the underground clubs of Rome, specifically the Brancaleone, rocking VHS tapes and analog mixers, they soon made the jump to lightspeed AV mixing.
These days they take a more technological approach, but still keep it surprisingly down to earth. Using good old QuicktimePro to select AV loops, a collection of cool sounding and cool looking clips is created. The clips are loaded into Resolume Avenue, which is also sporting a Focusrite sound card. These samples are then played pretty much like a drummer would play the drums, triggering the clips with an Akai MPD24.
You might be surprised to hear that instead of tightly laying out the sync with a combo of Ableton and Resolume, all the AV stuff is done freestyle in Resolume. No beat snap, no BPM sync, all the clips set to timeline one-shots, allowing them to really follow the flow of the music and the crowd.
This intensity is what makes Frank Sent Us shows so powerful, and anyone that has seen em live will agree! They're literally an explosion of energy, visuals and music, and I dare anyone to keep their hands in their pockets and feet on the ground when these guys hit the stage!
Currently working on a DVD collection of their material, as well as making the move to commissioned Hollywood remixes, you're bound to see more of em in 2011. Keep your eyes and ears peeled, and in the meantime check out their site at http://www.franksentus.com/
Procrastinat.us AV set
Every once in a while you get hit by something out of leftfield, and 78 minutes you're left with your jaw on the floor, drooling saliva, and your mind in a different place altogether. Watching Procrastrinat.us is one of those experiences. Performed at the New Media Meeting 2009 in Sweden, by the trio of Emil, Olof and Emmanuel, it's a beautiful example of how style, sound and sights can come together perfectly.
We set our sights to the north and found out that the AV possibilities of Resolume were actually a large inspiration for the lads, and so we figured we might as well pick their brains a bit more. You can read the whole interview below, but not before watching the epic two parter that is Procrastinat.us
-What are your backgrounds as artists? What medium and tools do you prefer to work with?
We all started seriously listening to electronic music in the mid 90s, Olof and Manne met at a techno party and soon started to make music together. Emil and Olof met in junior high school around the same time and we ended up beeing a part of the same Demo group because we were both interested in computers and the Demo/Tracker Scene. Emil works as a freelancing motion graphics artist so he uses Adobe After Effects on a daily basis and he and Olof used it for creating the videoloops in procrastinat.us. As for audio tools we can't make up our minds if we like Reason or Ableton more.. we use them both and we love them but Impulse Tracker will always be in our hearts.
-How did you get into the live side of performing?
Olof did his first VJ gig when an other VJ canceled his gig at a event where he was dj'ing. He VJ'd with 5 VLC windows and just alt-tabbed between them, it was quite fun, just to have a movie in VLC and start to jump in time to the music. Emil played around with a VJ app called Monster back in the days but nowadays he's making AV/VJ loops, both professionally for groups like Swedish House Mafia and for fun for procrastinatus. So he's not really been focusing on live performances but that will hopefully change in the near future. The brothers Emmanuel and Jonte have been focusing on Djing for a long time, it has grown into more of a lifestyle for Emmanuel, he truly lives for the music.
-So, what is Procrastinat.us, aside from an epic 78 minute visual and musical journey?
It's just an experiment, on how to use AV-loops, this production was actually started as a test just because Resolume 3 came out and we were like 'O.M.G!! We can use audio now, and all the new kick ass features!' So we created the basic video loops and preformed live and then we were like 'Let's make a "movie" but we make it in full HD so it's future proof too!' We asumed that we would make it in a week, but it took more like 1.5 years of production/procrastinating.
Because of the high data rate of uncompressed HD, the workflow for the HD movie ended up to be this: we used sequenced full HD Quicktime loops "live" in Ableton Live and then rendered it as video and then edited that, adding transitions in Adobe Premiere and finally some postproduction as a cherry on top. You could say its an " edit of " AV performance using Resolume. Regarding the loops, they're just one sound accompanied by a video synced to, or generated by the audio.
-Can you explain a bit about the concept behind Procrastinat.us?
It's an experiment! And a really exciting learning experience, we decided really early in the process that we should use a limited amount of colours because its gives consistency. We really hate seeing VJ material that is just like a pixel porridge of colours and styles.
Emil and Olof created the AVloops quite quick, focusing on making both manually synced and generative ones. We used soundloops that Olof and Manne had created during the years, there's so many of them and some are more than 4 years old! Our future productions will be more concistent in so many ways but we are procrastinating with these projects at the moment.
-Can you explain a bit about your live setup? What gear do you bring on stage? How are you connected?
Two laptops - connected via MIDI to sync - master runs Ableton and Resolume3. Slave runs Ableton for extra soundloops and effects we might use.
-Do you use generative material, or prerecorded loops?
Prerendred! We aren't geeky enough to code generative video yet, but prerecorded material does on the other hand gives it a bit more soul because its manually synced and polished so it doesn't have that winamp visualisation feeeling.
-Do you have any tips and tricks for people developing their own av-sets? Any gotchas or things that took you ages to get right?
If you want to make perfect audio sync, make sure you save all your audio as separate audio files, it's so much easier to sync and it looks much better when you generate AVloops from it. And if you want to mix it like you mix audio. having the same BPM on all the files is also a good idea.
-Which features of Resolume do you use the most? How do you use Resolume in general?
Opacity, Multiply/Screen blending and beat sync thingy. We don't really use the effects that much since we carefully produce each clip for one single purpose. We really love the new alpha channel feature in the DXV codec, this is so awesome! But something we realy miss is a little feature that makes it possible to change between different types of animation when routing bpm to for example scale. Now it's just linear but it would be so much awesommer to have exponential, smooth and maybe your own defined bezier controlled curve. And maybe that the values build additively. You already have the feature of routing the BPM so why not add some more options to it to make us happy ? :D
-Who are the up and coming visual artists out there that we should be looking out for?
We are having a huge boycrush on the guys at Transfett (http://www.henrikjose.com/transfett/ ) And we love the work of Sougwen Chung http://sougwen.com/ There might be some collabs going on if there is not going to be an excessive amount of procrastination in the future :D
-Multiply or screen?
Haha, ehm as we said earlier we use them both pretty much. But multiply maybe. Emil only likes content with alpha channels and is not so keen on blending.
And last we just want to say 'Data and die !'
Check out the individual sites of the Procrastinat.us gang:
Emil Bardh http://www.emilbardh.com
Olof Schröder http://www.osch.se
Emmanuel Moreno http://www.soundcloud.com/maginfluensa
and of course http://procrastinat.us/
We set our sights to the north and found out that the AV possibilities of Resolume were actually a large inspiration for the lads, and so we figured we might as well pick their brains a bit more. You can read the whole interview below, but not before watching the epic two parter that is Procrastinat.us
-What are your backgrounds as artists? What medium and tools do you prefer to work with?
We all started seriously listening to electronic music in the mid 90s, Olof and Manne met at a techno party and soon started to make music together. Emil and Olof met in junior high school around the same time and we ended up beeing a part of the same Demo group because we were both interested in computers and the Demo/Tracker Scene. Emil works as a freelancing motion graphics artist so he uses Adobe After Effects on a daily basis and he and Olof used it for creating the videoloops in procrastinat.us. As for audio tools we can't make up our minds if we like Reason or Ableton more.. we use them both and we love them but Impulse Tracker will always be in our hearts.
-How did you get into the live side of performing?
Olof did his first VJ gig when an other VJ canceled his gig at a event where he was dj'ing. He VJ'd with 5 VLC windows and just alt-tabbed between them, it was quite fun, just to have a movie in VLC and start to jump in time to the music. Emil played around with a VJ app called Monster back in the days but nowadays he's making AV/VJ loops, both professionally for groups like Swedish House Mafia and for fun for procrastinatus. So he's not really been focusing on live performances but that will hopefully change in the near future. The brothers Emmanuel and Jonte have been focusing on Djing for a long time, it has grown into more of a lifestyle for Emmanuel, he truly lives for the music.
-So, what is Procrastinat.us, aside from an epic 78 minute visual and musical journey?
It's just an experiment, on how to use AV-loops, this production was actually started as a test just because Resolume 3 came out and we were like 'O.M.G!! We can use audio now, and all the new kick ass features!' So we created the basic video loops and preformed live and then we were like 'Let's make a "movie" but we make it in full HD so it's future proof too!' We asumed that we would make it in a week, but it took more like 1.5 years of production/procrastinating.
Because of the high data rate of uncompressed HD, the workflow for the HD movie ended up to be this: we used sequenced full HD Quicktime loops "live" in Ableton Live and then rendered it as video and then edited that, adding transitions in Adobe Premiere and finally some postproduction as a cherry on top. You could say its an " edit of " AV performance using Resolume. Regarding the loops, they're just one sound accompanied by a video synced to, or generated by the audio.
-Can you explain a bit about the concept behind Procrastinat.us?
It's an experiment! And a really exciting learning experience, we decided really early in the process that we should use a limited amount of colours because its gives consistency. We really hate seeing VJ material that is just like a pixel porridge of colours and styles.
Emil and Olof created the AVloops quite quick, focusing on making both manually synced and generative ones. We used soundloops that Olof and Manne had created during the years, there's so many of them and some are more than 4 years old! Our future productions will be more concistent in so many ways but we are procrastinating with these projects at the moment.
-Can you explain a bit about your live setup? What gear do you bring on stage? How are you connected?
Two laptops - connected via MIDI to sync - master runs Ableton and Resolume3. Slave runs Ableton for extra soundloops and effects we might use.
-Do you use generative material, or prerecorded loops?
Prerendred! We aren't geeky enough to code generative video yet, but prerecorded material does on the other hand gives it a bit more soul because its manually synced and polished so it doesn't have that winamp visualisation feeeling.
-Do you have any tips and tricks for people developing their own av-sets? Any gotchas or things that took you ages to get right?
If you want to make perfect audio sync, make sure you save all your audio as separate audio files, it's so much easier to sync and it looks much better when you generate AVloops from it. And if you want to mix it like you mix audio. having the same BPM on all the files is also a good idea.
-Which features of Resolume do you use the most? How do you use Resolume in general?
Opacity, Multiply/Screen blending and beat sync thingy. We don't really use the effects that much since we carefully produce each clip for one single purpose. We really love the new alpha channel feature in the DXV codec, this is so awesome! But something we realy miss is a little feature that makes it possible to change between different types of animation when routing bpm to for example scale. Now it's just linear but it would be so much awesommer to have exponential, smooth and maybe your own defined bezier controlled curve. And maybe that the values build additively. You already have the feature of routing the BPM so why not add some more options to it to make us happy ? :D
-Who are the up and coming visual artists out there that we should be looking out for?
We are having a huge boycrush on the guys at Transfett (http://www.henrikjose.com/transfett/ ) And we love the work of Sougwen Chung http://sougwen.com/ There might be some collabs going on if there is not going to be an excessive amount of procrastination in the future :D
-Multiply or screen?
Haha, ehm as we said earlier we use them both pretty much. But multiply maybe. Emil only likes content with alpha channels and is not so keen on blending.
And last we just want to say 'Data and die !'
Check out the individual sites of the Procrastinat.us gang:
Emil Bardh http://www.emilbardh.com
Olof Schröder http://www.osch.se
Emmanuel Moreno http://www.soundcloud.com/maginfluensa
and of course http://procrastinat.us/
Awesome video helmet
This video has already been making the rounds on the Interwebs, but we couldn't resist showing it here again:
The helmet, made by Terrence Scoville consists of a classic Macintosh Plus bought on eBay, stripped of its innards, and an iPad slid in the front to replace the screen. Add some electroluminescent material, and you've got one kick ass helmet.
The interesting part for fans of all things Resolume is that the projections in the background are being run on Resolume Avenue, controlled by a midi keyboard and a WiiMote.
It's actually heart warming to read that in this time of AV sets and super tight midi syncing, the visuals on the iPad and on the background screens were actually started by pressing the two play buttons simultaneously :D Old-school!
Read more at http://afterglowvp.com/2011/01/kid-chameleons-helmet/
The helmet, made by Terrence Scoville consists of a classic Macintosh Plus bought on eBay, stripped of its innards, and an iPad slid in the front to replace the screen. Add some electroluminescent material, and you've got one kick ass helmet.
The interesting part for fans of all things Resolume is that the projections in the background are being run on Resolume Avenue, controlled by a midi keyboard and a WiiMote.
It's actually heart warming to read that in this time of AV sets and super tight midi syncing, the visuals on the iPad and on the background screens were actually started by pressing the two play buttons simultaneously :D Old-school!
Read more at http://afterglowvp.com/2011/01/kid-chameleons-helmet/
Interview with Strangeloop / David Wexler
Hi everyone!
Over at Resolume HQ we like our music to be weird, experimental and full of big bass. The music that's coming out on the Brainfeeder label fits this bill exactly, and many a time has a head been bopped to Brainfeeder beats. So when we heard it through the grapevine that Strangeloop had signed to that label as a visual artist, our interest was piqued, to say the least.
David Wexler, aka Strangeloop is a visual artist and musician that works with a variety of media, ranging from stop motion to full on CG to generative work. Visit his Vimeo page, and prepare to be blown away, if only by the sheer variety of his skills. Combined with his beautiful electronic melodies, you're all set for your trip to the other side of the looking glass.
So when we then found out he was using Resolume for his shows, the deal was done: we had to know more about this guy! So at the end of last year, we conducted an interview via mail, and the wonderful results you can read below. Step in to the mind of a strange loop!
-So, what's your strangest loop?
I always thought the name Strangeloop was a fitting title for my work, because I have, for as long as I can remember, been completely obsessed with fractals and 'strange loops' in chaotic systems. A "strange loop" is actually a technical term for a tangled hierchary, where you can move from one level of a hierachy to another and find yourself back where you started (kind of like the Escher drawing you see below). Its a really interesting paradox you find in all sorts of natural phenomena, including the most fundamental natural phenomena I can think of, perception.
In other words, its all a "strange loop."
Though on the video front, I made a piece awhile ago called Holographic Landscapes : Synesthetic Studies of Natural Sequence in Relation to God and Reality which is essentially an experiment in strange loops. I took a lot of video of a creek where I used to play when I was a kid, and then seamlessly looped the footage back on itself that gave the appearance of these un-ending zooms and camera moves. Like you were forever zooming into a leaf passing by in the current... kind of like a video version of the droste-effect.
-How did you get started with doing visuals?
I've always been a very visual thinker, and spent a lot of my time when I was younger tuning out of school and drawing elaborate, psychedelic pictures [see below]. Actually, I still draw pretty frequently, and am in the process of putting together a book of my sketches. Drawing was my first love, but I never felt confined to any medium. I love all the possibilities that CG brings into the mix; painting, music, writing, it all interesting to me deeply. Different mediums bring different things out of you, and lend themselves to different kinds of exploration.
I was working on a psychedelic tv-show pilot called 'EuKi,' but found it difficult pitching my ideas to the corporate world that could give me money to make it, and deep down I didn't even want to be involved in any of that... So I may have self-sabotaged a bit. I found myself with a surplus of psychedelic animations and didn't know what to do with all of it. Also, I was frustrated with the mainstream world of media production, and wanted to avoid the whole process of 'pitching' projects to people.
I realized that by being a live-visualist I could perform media, make stuff and show it to huge audiences, and turn media production into a much more performative, spontaneous, interactive thing. Live-visuals are really exciting because there are really no rules to the form, anything is possible. Sometimes its more like directly downloading associations to people than it is giving them a narrative; you can have subliminal narratives, abstract narratives, fractal narratives where you are the main character. Its really exciting territory :D
Flying Lotus gave me the opportunity to perform at the first Brainfeeder event in LA, and I started putting material together. Something clicked that night, and I sensed that it wasn't just for me. A lot of people all of sudden were coming up to me with a kind of fervor about what was going on. I felt like I'd found something very deep and authentic, something I already knew how to do without any specific training; A way of communicating deeper concepts and feelings that felt very natural to me.
-As a visual artist you got signed to Brainfeeder which is a music label. How does that compute?
Brainfeeder is very multidimensional, and I know Steve (Flying Lotus) has always thought about it that way. When we were going to art school together, there was a deep interest amongst us in all sorts of creative forms. Avant-garde cinema, video games, drill n' bassy music, psychedelic visual art like H.R. Giger, Alex Grey, Leigh McCloskey its all good.
Brainfeeder is definitely more than a music label. Its really, for me, about cross-pollination, different media, the synesthetic play between the senses. Hell, its really about feeding brains. Whatever mediums we can do that in are totally acceptable.
-Is making music very different from making visuals?
In ways, yes. Music is almost even more personal to me, it is like therapy. Most of my life I have made music without the thought of releasing it in any significant way. It is like journaling for me. Steve [Flying Lotus] was one of the first people I really respected to suggest that I release some of it, and was really intent on making it happen. I literally have hundreds, if not thousands of unreleased songs, but it has been a struggle balancing all the visual work with the musical work. I find that the scale seems to tip more in one direction at any given time and the other form gets neglected. It would be so much easier if I was just musician or a vj! :D
However, I also recognize that many of my strengths lie in my synesthetic aspects.
My avant-sci-fi project 2010 : (or) How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Singularity was an attempt at integrating some of my strange tunes and visuals into one piece, I was really excited that Mary Anne Hobbs wanted to feature it on the BBC, she has really championed a lot of my work, and I am really thankful for that. She gave me a lot of confidence to get the really authentic stuff out there without worrying about what people would think.
-Your vimeo page shows work in a lot of different styles, ranging from stop motion to cg, and you also mention Quartz Composer. Can you describe a bit about how you approach projects and how you end up working in a particular style or medium?
Its funny, in ways I don't really have a style. Real style is what happens when you're not even thinking about style, its authentic and spontaneous. However, I am totally ADHD in certain respects, and find that I can shift my style very rapidly without feeling weird about it. I think there is something deeper in the work hopefully that people can identify, but in terms of the aesthetic style of my work, I kind of shape-shift … I try on different styles, and even though I have common motifs (fractals, bio-mechanical forms, semi-abstract sci-fi narratives etc.) I'm really always trying to evolve, which means doing things I haven't done.
This can be a funny situation sometimes, because without much hesitation I'll think, I can make a stop-action video! Then I find myself with all this clay and fabric and what-not, and realize how little I know about the whole process. It makes creating things really fun though, continually moving into unfamiliar territory and really being educated along the way. Plus, most of the stuff you really want to learn can't be taught to you, you just have to dive into the process.
-Can you talk a bit about your work process in general?
First, I drink 10 cups of coffee every morning. Then I take a hit of DMT and travel into the far reaches of space. It is there that I meet with various galactic councils, alpha centaurian drum circles, etc. and attempt to convince their thoughts to migrate to Earth (which can be quite difficult!) One has to, first of all, dissuade them from believing the common misconception, that Earth is a barren wasteland, quarantined, and populated by radioactive monkeys. In other words, you give them advertisements (in the form of thoughts and what-not) for dope stuff going on in our neck of the woods, but you have to be subtle, otherwise they detect your eagerness and turn into puddles of oozing phosphenous ectoplasm ... (just joking by the way). I'm crazy, but only that crazy on occasions.
-How does Resolume fit into all this?
Honestly, Resolume has changed everything for me. I was using other software for a long time, but found myself running up against a lot of walls. I wanted sophisticated generative forms, audio-responsive parameters, and to be able to integrate all of this with the videos I'd been designing and appropriating over the last ten years. It always seemed like different pieces of software had different parts of the puzzle, but Resolume was the first I found that tied it all together. I've even performed audio-visual sets using Resolume, which is a trip. Music and visuals in the same program?
There's definitely so much more territory to explore in this realm, but you guys are on the edge of it all … and its commercial software that doesn't require a lot of back-end programming, which is great for me, because even though I can rock 3d graphics pretty proficiently, I have a lot to learn in the programming world.
-What functionality of Resolume do you use the most? How do you use Resolume in general?
I tried to use literally everything, or rather, rig my set-up so it at least all available. Music responsive geometries, sampled video clips, my own 3d graphics, all mapped to midi-controllers so I can play the visuals in the same way many in our community perform their electronic music compositions.
However, I have a lot of dreams where I am using verrrry sophisticated VJ software / hardware that I would love to get my hands on. Though Resolume is fantastic, it is still only a step towards one of my holy grails, which is to create fully immersive holographic visuals directly from my thoughts and movements. There is a lot of work being done on these sorts of mind-machine interfaces now, but we're still a little bit aways from what I've used in my dreams. However, I think there are certain mind-altering technologies available now that can accomplish what I'm talking about ;)
-What gear do you use on a show?
visuals : MacBook Pro laptop 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, Resolume Software, Akai MPD24.
music : MacBook Pro laptop 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, Ableton, Akai APC20, Duet audio interface.
….that's the simple set-up, but its sometimes gets very complex. Live-camera feeds, video mixers, multiple laptops, DVDs etc. I try to keep it simple these days, because all the gear sometimes gives me a headache. Its like one element breaks down and you have to change your whole plan for the show! Craziness.
-Are your live shows very different from the videos you make? What does a typical Srangeloop show look like?
I incorporate more sampled footage live, usually for fun, and because its sometimes hard to fill a night with purely original imagery. I also like turning people on to media I really dig, like the work of Studio 4 Degrees Celcius. They are my absolute heroes, and I love it when people come up and ask "What was that clip with the little boy telepathically destroying those nuclear war-heads and…" I get to tell them about what I'm really excited about.
Tekkon Kinkreet, Mindgame, Noisman Sound Insect, these to me are the first truly 21st century animated films. Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Nausicaa, these were some of our great animated sci-fi psychedelic epics of the late 20th century, and were far beyond their years, but Studio 4 Degrees Celcius takes it to the next level ….
Their work, like many of our lives currently, is vaguely sci-fi, but way beyond that. Its shamanic, its post-genre, totally intuitively psychedelic, in a very natural way, rooted in characters and experience … not just the thrill of strange technologies, or trippy aesthetics. I think in many ways, they are about 10 years beyond anything out there right now.
So yeah, I can't stress this enough, you should just drop this interview right now and watch everything they've ever done. haha
My shows are tripped the f**k out, and I'm always trying to bootstrap them to another level. Whether I'm doing visuals or music I'm always looking to bring something different and awe-inspiring into the mix. First and foremost, I want to be awed, I want to be educated, I want strange and mystical experiences. This is why I do what I do, to invoke that in myself, and then hopefully share it with other people and evolve through that process.
-What's the best and worst gig you ever played?
That's a tough one. I love playing with the Gaslamp Killer, because, quite simply put, he is a beast. After he plays, I'm surprised the walls are still standing. Any show we can do together is a jolt of inspiration to my system. Recently, doing visuals for Amon Tobin on the NinjaTune XX shows was really incredible, because he basically got me interested in electronic music when I was 14, him and Aphex Twin. It felt pretty serendipitous.
On the 'worst' front, one time I was helping kick off a mini-tour starting at Low End Theory when my audio-card conked out. It sounded like everything was going through a ring-modulator / distortion pedal and it was really noxious ...I tried to fix it a couple times, but to no avail! I kind of realized I just had to run with it and act like I intended the audio to be mind-blowingly distorted ... to my surprise, there was a group of people that were getting into to it, and I kind of just performed like I normally would, still trying to bring the energy behind the music. It was really funny because a lot of people came up to me afterwards and enthusiastically said they'd never heard anything like it. So I suppose it turned out all right, but basically, what people had heard was the sound of the computer uncontrollably destroying my music.
-What's the last album you heard / book you read / video you saw/ lyric you heard / game you played that knocked your head back?
Cosmogramma was my favorite album of the year. Seeing Flying Lotus' evolution over the years has been incredible, and in my opinion, he really changed the game with that one; its completely ridiculous that it wasn't nominated for a Grammy. Flat-out absurd. Though I don't think the Grammys represents the most exciting worlds blooming in the global music community, it is just a big hype circus that has lost its soul, like the Oscars.
If you want to find more crazy music stuff, LA is popping. The underground is thriving with communities like Magical Properties, SoSimple Records, Low End Theory//AlphaPup, Dublab … that's the really good stuff, continually evolving, always inspiring and challenging. I am blessed to know a lot of these people, and they keep LA really interesting.
On the movie front, ENTER THE VOID is IT. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It felt to me almost the '2001' of our generation, but instead of going deep into outer space, it went into inner-space, the DMT trance, psychedelic realities ... insane.
-Who are the up and coming visual artists out there that we should be looking out for?
Beeple (who just did one of the latest Flying Lotus videos, 'Kill Your CoWorkers') is the sh*t. His open-source sensibility and DIY approach to sophisticated 3d imagery is great. Sometimes I'll take his files and use them as a jumping off point, they are always impeccably designed, dynamic, inventive.
Theo Elsworth is also incredibly dope, and a champion of a whole new type of fractal narrative. AntiVJ is dope. Daito Manabe is dope. Robert Seidel. Lucio Arese. Scott Pagano (KILLS it), check out his video below… actually, we are going to feature a lot of these cats in an upcoming Brainfeeder DVD that we'll release next year as another manifestation of the Future Cinema Series experimental shorts program I curated for the Brainfeeder Sessions in LA. Its gonna be crazy.
I feel like a lot of this interview is pretty hyper-textual, but seriously, check all these people out. They are phenomenal.
-Do you have any upcoming collaborations with other artists coming up, or projects in general you're excited about?
Almost so many it makes my head spin. Ay mi! Where to start … I'm working on music videos for Take, Jon Wayne, collaborating on music projects with Austin Peralta (an EP of some of our avant-beat creations), Rebekah Raff (various experimental works), Timeboy (an ambient EP we've finished called 'Balance'), Micah Nelson (son of Willie Nelson and one of the founders of psychedelic freak-out band Insects vs. Robots), and Miguel Baptistia Benedict (a sound-collage project just featured on Dublab called 'DINS') … I have few mini-albums almost completed Everything is Alive, 2099, and Easy Listening for our Future Children. I have been kind of hoarding all this music, but I really want to give it all a life beyond my studio in 2011.
Flying Lotus and I have some really exciting stuff in the works, both event-wise and on the cinematic front, but I don't want to reveal too many details. I will also be working with 12th Planet on a custom visual show we will premier at Together as One in LA New Years Eve 2011. ::whew::
That's just the half of it, I'm really thinking of cloning myself to get all of this moving a bit faster.
-Nature or code?
Nature is code :D
-Realtime or premade?
Both.
-Richie or the Fonz?
Fonz. eyyy.
For more info on Strangeloop visit http://www.strangelooptv.com
Over at Resolume HQ we like our music to be weird, experimental and full of big bass. The music that's coming out on the Brainfeeder label fits this bill exactly, and many a time has a head been bopped to Brainfeeder beats. So when we heard it through the grapevine that Strangeloop had signed to that label as a visual artist, our interest was piqued, to say the least.
David Wexler, aka Strangeloop is a visual artist and musician that works with a variety of media, ranging from stop motion to full on CG to generative work. Visit his Vimeo page, and prepare to be blown away, if only by the sheer variety of his skills. Combined with his beautiful electronic melodies, you're all set for your trip to the other side of the looking glass.
So when we then found out he was using Resolume for his shows, the deal was done: we had to know more about this guy! So at the end of last year, we conducted an interview via mail, and the wonderful results you can read below. Step in to the mind of a strange loop!
-So, what's your strangest loop?
I always thought the name Strangeloop was a fitting title for my work, because I have, for as long as I can remember, been completely obsessed with fractals and 'strange loops' in chaotic systems. A "strange loop" is actually a technical term for a tangled hierchary, where you can move from one level of a hierachy to another and find yourself back where you started (kind of like the Escher drawing you see below). Its a really interesting paradox you find in all sorts of natural phenomena, including the most fundamental natural phenomena I can think of, perception.
In other words, its all a "strange loop."
Though on the video front, I made a piece awhile ago called Holographic Landscapes : Synesthetic Studies of Natural Sequence in Relation to God and Reality which is essentially an experiment in strange loops. I took a lot of video of a creek where I used to play when I was a kid, and then seamlessly looped the footage back on itself that gave the appearance of these un-ending zooms and camera moves. Like you were forever zooming into a leaf passing by in the current... kind of like a video version of the droste-effect.
-How did you get started with doing visuals?
I've always been a very visual thinker, and spent a lot of my time when I was younger tuning out of school and drawing elaborate, psychedelic pictures [see below]. Actually, I still draw pretty frequently, and am in the process of putting together a book of my sketches. Drawing was my first love, but I never felt confined to any medium. I love all the possibilities that CG brings into the mix; painting, music, writing, it all interesting to me deeply. Different mediums bring different things out of you, and lend themselves to different kinds of exploration.
I was working on a psychedelic tv-show pilot called 'EuKi,' but found it difficult pitching my ideas to the corporate world that could give me money to make it, and deep down I didn't even want to be involved in any of that... So I may have self-sabotaged a bit. I found myself with a surplus of psychedelic animations and didn't know what to do with all of it. Also, I was frustrated with the mainstream world of media production, and wanted to avoid the whole process of 'pitching' projects to people.
I realized that by being a live-visualist I could perform media, make stuff and show it to huge audiences, and turn media production into a much more performative, spontaneous, interactive thing. Live-visuals are really exciting because there are really no rules to the form, anything is possible. Sometimes its more like directly downloading associations to people than it is giving them a narrative; you can have subliminal narratives, abstract narratives, fractal narratives where you are the main character. Its really exciting territory :D
Flying Lotus gave me the opportunity to perform at the first Brainfeeder event in LA, and I started putting material together. Something clicked that night, and I sensed that it wasn't just for me. A lot of people all of sudden were coming up to me with a kind of fervor about what was going on. I felt like I'd found something very deep and authentic, something I already knew how to do without any specific training; A way of communicating deeper concepts and feelings that felt very natural to me.
-As a visual artist you got signed to Brainfeeder which is a music label. How does that compute?
Brainfeeder is very multidimensional, and I know Steve (Flying Lotus) has always thought about it that way. When we were going to art school together, there was a deep interest amongst us in all sorts of creative forms. Avant-garde cinema, video games, drill n' bassy music, psychedelic visual art like H.R. Giger, Alex Grey, Leigh McCloskey its all good.
Brainfeeder is definitely more than a music label. Its really, for me, about cross-pollination, different media, the synesthetic play between the senses. Hell, its really about feeding brains. Whatever mediums we can do that in are totally acceptable.
-Is making music very different from making visuals?
In ways, yes. Music is almost even more personal to me, it is like therapy. Most of my life I have made music without the thought of releasing it in any significant way. It is like journaling for me. Steve [Flying Lotus] was one of the first people I really respected to suggest that I release some of it, and was really intent on making it happen. I literally have hundreds, if not thousands of unreleased songs, but it has been a struggle balancing all the visual work with the musical work. I find that the scale seems to tip more in one direction at any given time and the other form gets neglected. It would be so much easier if I was just musician or a vj! :D
However, I also recognize that many of my strengths lie in my synesthetic aspects.
My avant-sci-fi project 2010 : (or) How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Singularity was an attempt at integrating some of my strange tunes and visuals into one piece, I was really excited that Mary Anne Hobbs wanted to feature it on the BBC, she has really championed a lot of my work, and I am really thankful for that. She gave me a lot of confidence to get the really authentic stuff out there without worrying about what people would think.
-Your vimeo page shows work in a lot of different styles, ranging from stop motion to cg, and you also mention Quartz Composer. Can you describe a bit about how you approach projects and how you end up working in a particular style or medium?
Its funny, in ways I don't really have a style. Real style is what happens when you're not even thinking about style, its authentic and spontaneous. However, I am totally ADHD in certain respects, and find that I can shift my style very rapidly without feeling weird about it. I think there is something deeper in the work hopefully that people can identify, but in terms of the aesthetic style of my work, I kind of shape-shift … I try on different styles, and even though I have common motifs (fractals, bio-mechanical forms, semi-abstract sci-fi narratives etc.) I'm really always trying to evolve, which means doing things I haven't done.
This can be a funny situation sometimes, because without much hesitation I'll think, I can make a stop-action video! Then I find myself with all this clay and fabric and what-not, and realize how little I know about the whole process. It makes creating things really fun though, continually moving into unfamiliar territory and really being educated along the way. Plus, most of the stuff you really want to learn can't be taught to you, you just have to dive into the process.
-Can you talk a bit about your work process in general?
First, I drink 10 cups of coffee every morning. Then I take a hit of DMT and travel into the far reaches of space. It is there that I meet with various galactic councils, alpha centaurian drum circles, etc. and attempt to convince their thoughts to migrate to Earth (which can be quite difficult!) One has to, first of all, dissuade them from believing the common misconception, that Earth is a barren wasteland, quarantined, and populated by radioactive monkeys. In other words, you give them advertisements (in the form of thoughts and what-not) for dope stuff going on in our neck of the woods, but you have to be subtle, otherwise they detect your eagerness and turn into puddles of oozing phosphenous ectoplasm ... (just joking by the way). I'm crazy, but only that crazy on occasions.
-How does Resolume fit into all this?
Honestly, Resolume has changed everything for me. I was using other software for a long time, but found myself running up against a lot of walls. I wanted sophisticated generative forms, audio-responsive parameters, and to be able to integrate all of this with the videos I'd been designing and appropriating over the last ten years. It always seemed like different pieces of software had different parts of the puzzle, but Resolume was the first I found that tied it all together. I've even performed audio-visual sets using Resolume, which is a trip. Music and visuals in the same program?
There's definitely so much more territory to explore in this realm, but you guys are on the edge of it all … and its commercial software that doesn't require a lot of back-end programming, which is great for me, because even though I can rock 3d graphics pretty proficiently, I have a lot to learn in the programming world.
-What functionality of Resolume do you use the most? How do you use Resolume in general?
I tried to use literally everything, or rather, rig my set-up so it at least all available. Music responsive geometries, sampled video clips, my own 3d graphics, all mapped to midi-controllers so I can play the visuals in the same way many in our community perform their electronic music compositions.
However, I have a lot of dreams where I am using verrrry sophisticated VJ software / hardware that I would love to get my hands on. Though Resolume is fantastic, it is still only a step towards one of my holy grails, which is to create fully immersive holographic visuals directly from my thoughts and movements. There is a lot of work being done on these sorts of mind-machine interfaces now, but we're still a little bit aways from what I've used in my dreams. However, I think there are certain mind-altering technologies available now that can accomplish what I'm talking about ;)
-What gear do you use on a show?
visuals : MacBook Pro laptop 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, Resolume Software, Akai MPD24.
music : MacBook Pro laptop 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, Ableton, Akai APC20, Duet audio interface.
….that's the simple set-up, but its sometimes gets very complex. Live-camera feeds, video mixers, multiple laptops, DVDs etc. I try to keep it simple these days, because all the gear sometimes gives me a headache. Its like one element breaks down and you have to change your whole plan for the show! Craziness.
-Are your live shows very different from the videos you make? What does a typical Srangeloop show look like?
I incorporate more sampled footage live, usually for fun, and because its sometimes hard to fill a night with purely original imagery. I also like turning people on to media I really dig, like the work of Studio 4 Degrees Celcius. They are my absolute heroes, and I love it when people come up and ask "What was that clip with the little boy telepathically destroying those nuclear war-heads and…" I get to tell them about what I'm really excited about.
Tekkon Kinkreet, Mindgame, Noisman Sound Insect, these to me are the first truly 21st century animated films. Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Nausicaa, these were some of our great animated sci-fi psychedelic epics of the late 20th century, and were far beyond their years, but Studio 4 Degrees Celcius takes it to the next level ….
Their work, like many of our lives currently, is vaguely sci-fi, but way beyond that. Its shamanic, its post-genre, totally intuitively psychedelic, in a very natural way, rooted in characters and experience … not just the thrill of strange technologies, or trippy aesthetics. I think in many ways, they are about 10 years beyond anything out there right now.
So yeah, I can't stress this enough, you should just drop this interview right now and watch everything they've ever done. haha
My shows are tripped the f**k out, and I'm always trying to bootstrap them to another level. Whether I'm doing visuals or music I'm always looking to bring something different and awe-inspiring into the mix. First and foremost, I want to be awed, I want to be educated, I want strange and mystical experiences. This is why I do what I do, to invoke that in myself, and then hopefully share it with other people and evolve through that process.
-What's the best and worst gig you ever played?
That's a tough one. I love playing with the Gaslamp Killer, because, quite simply put, he is a beast. After he plays, I'm surprised the walls are still standing. Any show we can do together is a jolt of inspiration to my system. Recently, doing visuals for Amon Tobin on the NinjaTune XX shows was really incredible, because he basically got me interested in electronic music when I was 14, him and Aphex Twin. It felt pretty serendipitous.
On the 'worst' front, one time I was helping kick off a mini-tour starting at Low End Theory when my audio-card conked out. It sounded like everything was going through a ring-modulator / distortion pedal and it was really noxious ...I tried to fix it a couple times, but to no avail! I kind of realized I just had to run with it and act like I intended the audio to be mind-blowingly distorted ... to my surprise, there was a group of people that were getting into to it, and I kind of just performed like I normally would, still trying to bring the energy behind the music. It was really funny because a lot of people came up to me afterwards and enthusiastically said they'd never heard anything like it. So I suppose it turned out all right, but basically, what people had heard was the sound of the computer uncontrollably destroying my music.
-What's the last album you heard / book you read / video you saw/ lyric you heard / game you played that knocked your head back?
Cosmogramma was my favorite album of the year. Seeing Flying Lotus' evolution over the years has been incredible, and in my opinion, he really changed the game with that one; its completely ridiculous that it wasn't nominated for a Grammy. Flat-out absurd. Though I don't think the Grammys represents the most exciting worlds blooming in the global music community, it is just a big hype circus that has lost its soul, like the Oscars.
If you want to find more crazy music stuff, LA is popping. The underground is thriving with communities like Magical Properties, SoSimple Records, Low End Theory//AlphaPup, Dublab … that's the really good stuff, continually evolving, always inspiring and challenging. I am blessed to know a lot of these people, and they keep LA really interesting.
On the movie front, ENTER THE VOID is IT. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It felt to me almost the '2001' of our generation, but instead of going deep into outer space, it went into inner-space, the DMT trance, psychedelic realities ... insane.
-Who are the up and coming visual artists out there that we should be looking out for?
Beeple (who just did one of the latest Flying Lotus videos, 'Kill Your CoWorkers') is the sh*t. His open-source sensibility and DIY approach to sophisticated 3d imagery is great. Sometimes I'll take his files and use them as a jumping off point, they are always impeccably designed, dynamic, inventive.
Theo Elsworth is also incredibly dope, and a champion of a whole new type of fractal narrative. AntiVJ is dope. Daito Manabe is dope. Robert Seidel. Lucio Arese. Scott Pagano (KILLS it), check out his video below… actually, we are going to feature a lot of these cats in an upcoming Brainfeeder DVD that we'll release next year as another manifestation of the Future Cinema Series experimental shorts program I curated for the Brainfeeder Sessions in LA. Its gonna be crazy.
I feel like a lot of this interview is pretty hyper-textual, but seriously, check all these people out. They are phenomenal.
-Do you have any upcoming collaborations with other artists coming up, or projects in general you're excited about?
Almost so many it makes my head spin. Ay mi! Where to start … I'm working on music videos for Take, Jon Wayne, collaborating on music projects with Austin Peralta (an EP of some of our avant-beat creations), Rebekah Raff (various experimental works), Timeboy (an ambient EP we've finished called 'Balance'), Micah Nelson (son of Willie Nelson and one of the founders of psychedelic freak-out band Insects vs. Robots), and Miguel Baptistia Benedict (a sound-collage project just featured on Dublab called 'DINS') … I have few mini-albums almost completed Everything is Alive, 2099, and Easy Listening for our Future Children. I have been kind of hoarding all this music, but I really want to give it all a life beyond my studio in 2011.
Flying Lotus and I have some really exciting stuff in the works, both event-wise and on the cinematic front, but I don't want to reveal too many details. I will also be working with 12th Planet on a custom visual show we will premier at Together as One in LA New Years Eve 2011. ::whew::
That's just the half of it, I'm really thinking of cloning myself to get all of this moving a bit faster.
-Nature or code?
Nature is code :D
-Realtime or premade?
Both.
-Richie or the Fonz?
Fonz. eyyy.
For more info on Strangeloop visit http://www.strangelooptv.com
Resolume with DMX at the Paul Oakenfold tour
Some of you may be wondering why we made such a big fuss over the DMX support we added in version 3.3.1. Well, we could explain it to you by saying things like 'immersive experience', 'synchronized event programming' and other words that have even more syllables. But rather we'd let someone in the field do the talking.
Robb Pope, who is doing the visual design on the Paul Oakenfold tour, writes about his experiences:
'The tour has been going amazing. The DMX implimentation is working great and the whole show, lights and video, are controlled on a GrandMA console. I'm out at Front of House every day. I have a laptop to remote desktop in if need be, but Resolume has been running so well I rarely have to even play with the GUI directly. In fact I've never had to switch over to the backup server! Resolume is amazingly stable and it is very very fast. It is without a doubt supplanting all other VJ software as the dominant platform.'
Reports like that are always good to hear, but Robb was kind enough to supply some visual proof to feast your eyes on as well:
And of course the impact only becomes greater when you see it in motion:
(All visual design by Robb Pope, stage and lighting design by Breckinridge Haggerty.)
Be sure to check out more pictures and video at http://pauloakenfold.com/. And if you have some amazing gig footage or experiences you'd like to share, with or without DMX consoles, let us know via the comments!
Resolume Team
Robb Pope, who is doing the visual design on the Paul Oakenfold tour, writes about his experiences:
'The tour has been going amazing. The DMX implimentation is working great and the whole show, lights and video, are controlled on a GrandMA console. I'm out at Front of House every day. I have a laptop to remote desktop in if need be, but Resolume has been running so well I rarely have to even play with the GUI directly. In fact I've never had to switch over to the backup server! Resolume is amazingly stable and it is very very fast. It is without a doubt supplanting all other VJ software as the dominant platform.'
Reports like that are always good to hear, but Robb was kind enough to supply some visual proof to feast your eyes on as well:
And of course the impact only becomes greater when you see it in motion:
(All visual design by Robb Pope, stage and lighting design by Breckinridge Haggerty.)
Be sure to check out more pictures and video at http://pauloakenfold.com/. And if you have some amazing gig footage or experiences you'd like to share, with or without DMX consoles, let us know via the comments!
Resolume Team
Resolume at Armin Only Mirage
Armin van Buuren, for the fourth time in a row, a new record, has been voted the n#1 DJ in the world. He' s performing in the premiere of his new show, Armin Only Mirage, this saturday.
The visuals for this show are done by 250K (aka Eyesupply) which have been good friends and loyal customers of ours for years. They are using a custom version of Resolume Avenue 3 for the show. They will be touring all over the world, and performing on New Years Eve in Melbourne.
So we've got tickets for saturday but I'm afraid there are no tickets left, we'll let you know if Avenue performed well during the 8 hour show!
Check the Armin Only] site to see when and if they come near you.
http://www.arminonly.com/
Check out the showreel of 250k to see what you could expect!
The visuals for this show are done by 250K (aka Eyesupply) which have been good friends and loyal customers of ours for years. They are using a custom version of Resolume Avenue 3 for the show. They will be touring all over the world, and performing on New Years Eve in Melbourne.
So we've got tickets for saturday but I'm afraid there are no tickets left, we'll let you know if Avenue performed well during the 8 hour show!
Check the Armin Only] site to see when and if they come near you.
http://www.arminonly.com/
Check out the showreel of 250k to see what you could expect!
Neal Coghlan's Work for the Kraak & Smaak VJ Competition
Neal Coghlan won the Kraak & Smaak VJ competition we organized this summer and here is an update of the clips he eventually created for them. Excellent work!
Neal shares some interesting details about his way of working:
See a Resolume screenshot here: http://www.bit.ly/TVResolume
See stills of the illustrations here: http://www.bit.ly/TastyFlickr
Neal shares some interesting details about his way of working:
Before animating any of the parts I chose 3 of Kraak & Smaak's tracks and sliced it so that it was a segment of 16 beats. I then altered the tempo of the segment to 125BPM - as this works well with a 50fps frame rate (and is consequently easily scalable for slower or faster sections should I need to re-render to a certain speed). Within these segments there was enough going on musically that I could animate individual objects to sounds, meaning that you can watch them again and again and still find new bits that sync up to something. The beauty of this is that all these elements can be removed as single pieces and reassembled to create new compositions. The limitations of the grid plus no gradients or transparencies also meant that consistency between the pieces was easy and that they could all be played consecutively and gel.
My next step is to separate the elements in these visuals and use them as separate clips over multiple layer in the Resolume - allowing me to form new compositions live to music!
See a Resolume screenshot here: http://www.bit.ly/TVResolume
See stills of the illustrations here: http://www.bit.ly/TastyFlickr
Eyesupply 2010 Showreel
Checkout the new 2010 showreel from Eyesupply. It's huge! Enjoy!