After almost 2 months of beta, here is the final Resolume Avenue & Arena 6.0.0. Download is now open to everybody. Come and get it.

Thank you all for your feedback! Thanks to you we have been able to find and fix a lot of bugs and we think this version is ready for prime time.

This version can now open compositions from Avenue 4 and Arena 5. Simply select Composition > Open... from the Menu. Browse to ~/(My)Documents/Resolume Arena 5/compositions/ or ~/(My)Documents/Resolume Avenue 4/compositions/ and select the composition you would like to open. Double check if everything is working correctly. 99% of all your old composition settings should work just fine in version 6 but some things are not transferrable.

Please continue to send us your feedback. Because v6 can update itself we plan to release minor updates much more often. We have already started on 6.0.1...

We're soldiering on towards the final 6.0.0 release, here is Beta 3. Again, many crashes have been fixed, bugs squashed, pencils sharpened. Perhaps it's time for you to try this version on a gig?

Please log in to your account and download Beta 3. Let us know on the forum how it goes!

If you are into live visuals & motion graphics, KBK visuals is where it’s at.

Founded under the name of Kijkbuiskinderen in 2003, they’re super multidisciplinary with backgrounds in graphic design, animation, graffiti, photography, music et cetera. A collective of specialists, they expertly tie together the unending realm of visual art, installation, stage design, motion graphics and automation. It’s all about video and how video can relate to its surroundings. After having worked with the biggest artists at the coolest festivals, their work has already gone down in new-age history.
[fold][/fold]

They changed their name to KBK Visuals in 2012. Today, KBK is comprised of 10 people and they have all of it covered- be it management, 2D or 3D animation, operating, programming or research. Most of them carry multiple responsibilities. They often seek collaborations with other, not necessarily VJ-related, artists as well.


This brings us to Dutch megaevent- Awakenings.



Since 1997, Awakenings has been dropping relentless one-night parties and festivals. This year they hit 20 & to celebrate, the Easter rampage from April 13th-16th at the Gashouder was, for lack of a better word, Lit.



This Awakenings gig had robotic arms with Led screens on them. Just so cool. And as all things cool, super complex.

We caught up with the guys from KBK visuals to talk to us about the gig.

Thanks for doing this, guys.

It is pretty evident how KBK and Awakenings have grown together to create concert history. Since when & how has KBK been associated with Awakenings?
KBK has been associated with Awakenings for almost 10 years now. The first shows from 2008 until 2010 were in collaboration with Eyesupply, with KBK taking the task over fully in 2010. Over the course of the years Awakenings shows have become bigger and more elaborate, and we have grown with them. At this point we have provided visuals for well over 100 Awakenings shows.

The Gashouder is as beautiful as it is legendary. What do you keep in mind while designing shows here?


The Gashouder is a beautiful venue in and of itself. With its origins as a gasworks it’s easily recognizable by its circular shape, tall ceiling and industrial appearance. The fact that it’s cylindrical allows for stage designers to go nuts, and especially during Awakenings a lot of thought is put into creating an experience that is as breathtaking and immersive as possible. They never shy away from complex and often massive LED setups. Whenever a new edition comes along we try to pay as much attention as we can to our relation to the lights and lasers, so we can create show that works aesthetically as well as melting faces.


Tell us about your rig at Awakenings.

For pretty much all editions of Awakenings we use one or more heavy duty laptops running Resolume Arena to act as servers. At the moment we are using custom built Clevo laptops. These laptops capture HD inputs from other laptops, mixers and SDI camera feeds via a capture device that is supported by Resolume, like the Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K. The servers act as a kind of routing system and are used to distribute and chase the content across the various screens, as well as overlaying logos and additional graphics.


With this setup we can use the huge LED rig to its full potential, and it’s flexible enough that we can change things on the fly. This is incredibly valuable, as it’s not unusual for ideas to come up during the show, and Resolume allows us to quickly make changes and add things to the set.

When you do something groundbreaking, so are the challenges. Tell us about your biggest challenges on the Easter gig & how did you over- come them?

Every new edition of Awakenings provides new challenges, and we often get inspired by the technological curveballs that get thrown at us.
When Awakenings told us they were going to hire some industrial robotic arms and put LED screens on them, we knew we had to do something creative with them to take it to the next level.



The arms are basically repurposed factory tools, and their motion is pre-programmed and triggered live by a dedicated operator. We wanted to figure out a way to translate that motion to the visuals by using the rotation of the screens on the arms, and we did.

Merijn came up with the idea to stick iPhones to the back of the screens and use them to read out the phone’s accelerometer.




He approached our MaxMSP specialist Sem, who took the idea further and wrote a patch that translated the Phone’s tilt information to x/y/z rotation in 3d space and transmitted that to a laptop running Max in the front of house.


Sem created some custom visuals that made use of this data, which were then captured by our main Resolume server and sent to the screens on the robot arms.



The whole project was conceived and executed within a matter of days.
For those of you who want to dig a bit deeper into this, here is a bit of technical gebabble, as described by KBK, “The software that’s generating the live rendered physics was built with Max 7. Each of the three robo screens has its own compiled version of a patch that renders the physics in real time, based on the angle of the iPhones. Each patch now has 3 scenes and individual parameters like color selection of the lights and size of the objects. Every patch has a spout output and there is one patch combining all three Spout outputs to be sent to the main Resolume computer via TCPSpout. There it’s imported as a Spout input and scaled to fit the composition. All the apps are connected over a local network via UDP. This way it’s also possible to control all the individual apps with one controller on another computer. The laptop running the apps was tucked away so this came in very handy. There’s one central control app (called OSCBOT) not only controlling the physics renders but also controlling Resolume dashboard links with the angles from the iPhones. This way we can rotate visuals in the opposite direction to the rotation of the robot arms so it looks like the visuals are standing still while the robots are moving.”

Just amazing. You guys do make complicated rigs seem like child's play :)
We put a lot of effort into creating inputmaps that give us a comprehensive view of the available screens and allow us to effectively distribute footage across them. After we receive the stage designs and info on the LED setup, we think about where we want to place our footage during the show, if we want to see it full scale across multiple screens, duplicated or a bit of both. We build our inputmap with as much flexibility as possible in mind while trying to maintain a composition of manageable size.



Needless to say a powerful computer allows for larger scale compositions, which can in turn open up new possibilities as far as scaling your content goes. In the case of large setups the screens are often spread across multiple outputs. We often use Datapath X4 display wall controllers to split our signal across multiple outputs if we really need to cover a lot of pixels.


Are there any tips you would like to give budding visual artists out there? Hardware/ Software/ Life related?
We started small, doing all kinds of underground shows and developing our skills from the ground up. A lot of that DIY mentality hasn’t changed.


We still try out strange ideas (like sticking iPhones to the back of LED screens) and are people who generally enjoy solving the puzzles that a show can present us in a creative way. Quality comes with practice, and practice involves failure.


Also, make sure to drink a lot of water and bananas are a healthy source of potassium and vitamin c.

Yum. We're going to get cracking on those bananas right away, all sorts of pun intended.

Thanks for talking to us, guys!

KBK is: Freek Braspenning, Merijn Meijers, Luuk Meuffels, Tristan Gieler, Eva Imming, Marike Verbiest, Elisa Zaros, Chanon Satthum, Kees van Duyn and Sem Schreuder.


Check out more of their work on their website, vimeo and instagram.

It's less then two weeks since we released Resolume 6 Beta 1 and here is Beta 2! In this version we fixed a lot of crashes and made many improvements. Please log in to your account and download this second Beta. Let us know on the forum how it goes!

Thank You!
When we released Resolume 6 two weeks ago, we must admit, we were quite nervous. But we were overwhelmed by all the positive response from so many of you! It's so nice to see your enthusiasm for something we have worked so hard on for so long. Brenton March sums it all up with his top comment on Facebook: "YOU DID IT! you fixed EVERYTHING! the media manager alone makes me smile so hard, but all the other stuff, the custom UI, the new grouping system, wow. and 64 BIT!"

And we love how sometimes the little things matter the most. Cosmowe says on the forum: "OK...I'm done!.....the scrollbar is Midi mappable!!!!! :-)" And Nils Voges comments on Facebook: "wooohooo 'next-button'! major improvements! thank you!"

Ryan Whitmer expressed his joy with this gif:

Thank you all for making us smile and glow with pride :-)

Quartz Composer Removed
It wasn't all fun and giggles last week, unfortunately we had to make the difficult decision to remove Quartz Composer playback from Resolume 6. Quartz Composer was causing a lot of bugs and crashes that are impossible for us to fix because it's really not made to be used in a multi-threaded rendering application. Apple has abandoned Quartz Composer for years already so these problems are not going to be fixed. Of course Quartz Composer playback is still in trusty old Avenue 4 and Arena 5 and it will always stay there.

Ooh boy are we ever excited to finally show what we have been working on for years now: Resolume Avenue and Arena version 6. This is by far the biggest release we have ever done. It has a completely rewritten video rendering engine that is an order of magnitude faster than the previous so you can play more layers, higher resolution video and thus bigger stages.



Checkout the video to see the highlights of version 6 and checkout the What's New page for more details.

Beta
Because there is so much new it still has a few rough edges but we could not wait any longer we wanted to share this beta with you now. We need your help in the coming months to find the last few bugs and give us feedback. Together we'll tame this beast and have it ready for main stage as soon as possible. It's available for all Resolume customers so please log in to your account and hit the download.

Buy Now! (limited time offer)
Buy Resolume now because only now you get both Arena 5 AND Arena 6 for the price of one. Or Avenue 4 AND Avenue 6 for the price of one. This offer applies while Resolume 6 is in beta, so don't wait too long. Did you buy Avenue or Arena in the past couple of weeks? Contact us and we'll work something out.

We're stoked to welcome two new amazing content creators to the label.

First up is Julius Horsthuis, who drops some amazing fractal work. Take it from a person who thinks most fractals are as boring as broccoli, this is something special.


Get Cathedral from Resolume Footage

Then we welcome Rohan Gopalan, whose first release is the chronicle of ParticleMan.

Get ParticleMan from Resolume Footage

And closing the ranks is Muzencab, who is up to his usual retina breaking routine.

Get Primitve from Resolume Footage

“On a breezeless day, in total darkness, on the underside of the planet, somewhere in Austin, The Protocorn pulled a laptop from a rock and called itself Single Unicorn. Drawn to the roiling lumps of the sound waves, other corns appeared: an impossible trio. The Unicorn became Total.“

What do you get when you put a composer, visual artist and choreographer together? Cool content.
Thrown in a unicorn.. and things get cosmic.[fold][/fold]

Enter Total Unicorn.


A performance-based group, with multiple twists: Composer Lyman churns out some serious grooves.
Consciousness-expanding, hallucinogenic, dope.

Visual specialist Stephen backs the music up with some crazy illustration. Layers, colors,
dimensions- all if it synced to make sense in different parallel universes.


Lindsey, the choreographer, perfectly rounds out the performance with resounding energy & elysian
moves. Man, these Unicorn’s know how to tune in.


We caught up with these guys to talk about their show, and the world they live in. Try and see if we can bring some of that awesome sauce to Mother Earth.

It all began when, according to Lyman, Stephen had an idea about the visual delivery of Aesthetic Acid- that you could dose yourself or others with beauty itself, and asked to illustrate that idea with music.

“He then proposed we do this live, to dose entire audiences with our Aesthetic Acid, on a mass or semi-mass scale. Thus was born the idea of Total Unicorn. Lindsey (Unicorn Pink) happened upon one of these happenings, and offered to add a dance physicality to things.”


Total Unicorn say they were complete when the three dimensions of vision, sound and dance were present in equal quantities. But the journey begins with the Music.




Says Stephen, “The music usually starts the conversation. Often times, a moist concept forms in the dark. The witch reads the coffee grounds, the oracle orates, etc. Nowadays, story is critical when we’re making new material. We like pieces that introduces a new character, or that can elaborate on our backstory. I like to make apocryphal stuff about us. Like, if you’re paying attention, there’s a universe to discover.”


Checkout some of their work here:



When asked about his process of creating the audio, Lyman says it starts very simply with a beat, sequence or sample that catches his ear. It then gets run through various electronic and virtual processes- which adds a pulse and makes the sound breathe. Companion sounds are then added and with EQ, compression and other “nurturing” elements, the whole breathes as one. “There is no premeditated idea of what should be the sound. The sound comes to life, and tells me what it needs, and I attempt to deliver those goods to the best of my ability.”


About his visual design, Stephen has a pretty cool process. He loves creating narratives. These ideas only evolve when he plays around with contributing “items”.


“I have these huge libraries of rotoscoped images, 3d models and vector artworks that I’ve created over the years. I synthesize things with those, to get warmed up. Also, I like to do image research at the beginning of each new piece, and explore an obscure art movement, subculture, mythology, memes, mimes and different times”


“I love creating costumes from vegetables and auto parts, and I love modeling environments in 3D. I could spend a day just working on some filigree or other tiny detail. I suppose that I could sketch things out, and not waste so much time, but I would miss out on the spontaneous hexplosions.”

Hardware & software-wise, these guys have a lot of components coming together to create their vision.

Lyman recommends Abelton which he uses to build and indulge in the complete mutation of sound of any of the DAWs out there. Pro Tools is occasionally used as well. He uses a lot of secret and not so secret plug in mutation tools (the special sauce) which help break down and reassemble the component parts into music. Analog sources (Moog Sub-37, Realistic MG-1, Elektron Analog RYTM, Little Korg boxes, etc.) meet digital sources (Native Instruments, Sugar Bytes, Glitchmachines, et al) and “hilarity ensues.”



On the visual side, Stephen use the Adobe suite and Cinema 4D to produce animations. Some of it is cel, 2D, a lot is 3D and they occasionally shoot some live action on green screen. Stephen then distills that in After Effects and renders it for Resolume.





“There, it’s chewed up and broken down into digestible proteins. Resolume adds the presence, the performative quality, and the seasoning. Effects are added, and clips are broken up and cue points are programmed. If mapping is needed, if audio-reactivity is required, then a sacrifice is made, and the ancients are satisfied."


Resolume, as per Stephen, is the most straightforward, reliable and affordable tool for performing live projections. “I encourage a lot of my motion graphics friends starting out with live visuals to give it a go. The DXV codec is one of its strongest attributes, in my opinion. It makes performing with it, across operating systems, very stable.”


“I have actually done shows with artists using other applications and watched them crash or get bogged down with their clips at critical moments, while Resolume powers through. It’s insane how many layers of HD I can mix with in real-time on a laptop. Also, the interface is so intuitive. It’s really easy to visualize my composites when I can see thumbnails, and the layering is reminiscent of most editing programs, so that felt very familiar right away. I can label everything and plot my set left to right. It feels very natural, like writing.“


Lindsey has a “library” of moves of her own. They are essentially things that look cool in the mirror. “I then combine those with other moves from memes, GIFs and Youtube videos. Finally, I season with aimless flopping, slo-mo sequences, and feigned distress.”




When they perform live, Lyman runs Ableton Live with an APC40 Controller, a vintage Memory Man and a Red Panda Particle for a few delays and effects, the Moog Sub Phatty for sequences, all running through a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6. He also just picked up an Electron Octatrack- “so once I get my head around that universe I think the music will migrate into the boxes and the computer will stay at home.”

Stephen’s setup is, partially, a holdover from a time when he was using slower laptops. One runs Arena- used to drive the projections on the larger screen behind the band. The second runs Avenue- drives our smaller, free-standing vertical screens.
“I still have this Livid Block from several years ago which just keeps on ticking. That triggers effects, clips, mixes layers, and I use the knobs for time scrubbing clips on the fly. I also use this old Korg drum pad to trigger video cues so I can play them rhythmically. And there is a game controller (or whatever other type of USB controller I can get my hands on) to trigger clips on the smaller machine. I run this old Max patch that converts the controller signals to MIDI (or OSC)-kind of like a primitive version of OSCulator.”

Lindsey has the most interesting piece of equipment of all. A liquid spine with all the attached accoutrements.


Essentially believing in freestyle, Stephen creates the visuals to the track. But when they perform, it’s being triggered live by his living hands. :)

They decided, early on, not to have everything triggered automatically by one machine. Says Stephen, “The performance is essential. Rehearsal, repetition, regeneration. I mean, there are moments of improvisation, but we like to keep it tight.”

Lindsey’s dancing is a combination of choreography and improvisation. “On one hoof it’s important for me to know when the musical changes occur, but on the other hoof I need to keep it loose enough to be able to adapt to different situations as they occur. “

When asked about where Total Unicorn draws inspiration from Stephen said,“ From everything and everywhere. It’s all blended in the hyperspindle: the part of the brain filled with the softest, richest, most flavorful cream. Our cream is abundant, allowing the spindle to swell.“

Hmm.. Until we see you again, ponder on this:


"The Unicorn is perceived as this fanciful, sweet creature, but it’s really kind of terrifying. A Unicorn can be anything to anybody, and since few have seen one in person it gives us a freedom to be who we are, without fixed ideas or boundaries."

Photo Credits: Allison Turrell, Celesta Danger and Maye Marley

Excision. The man who has taken over the interwebz along with his mean machine: The Paradox.

For those living under a rock, Excision dropped some gigantic virtual bombs with his latest live experience “The Paradox”, on tour since Jan 2017. Forget at an actual gig, even if you’re at home looking at some videos on your phone, it is guaranteed to make your jaw drop. The rig looks deceptively simple. In reality, far, far from it. Deliciously seamless LED, a mobile DJ fascia, brilliant lighting, and slamming special effects- The Paradox is truly one of a kind. And we must say, has Excision written all over it.


All The Paradox shows are run by visual moguls Beama. We caught up with Brady Villadsen and Butz to understand what goes down in creating & running this monster, day after day. [fold][/fold]

Thanks much for doing this, guys! *tips hat


To start off, lets get the guys to give us some background about Beama.

BUTZ: "We got started by being inspired at Shambhala. The Fractal Forrest at Shambhala had a huge video system 10 years ago. I had the opportunity to volunteer under Gordon Blunt from Blunt Factory visuals and he got me started."


"There was very little visual arts in our home town of Calgary so we picked up a few projectors, a triplehead2go and a Mac Pro Running Modul8. Our first big gig was the Pagoda Stage at Shambhala, there we met Ben Leonard who is now one of our main Animators. After he joined the team we started doing video Mapping gigs with pixel perfect content. We started doing mapping before Mapping software was available and it was much more difficult back then to map a building. We used to take the projectors onsite and map the buildings through the projector using illustrator. Then we would go home make the content and come back and try to set the projector up in the exact same place."

"In 2012 two weeks after Mad Mapper came out I hit the road with Excision with our first touring stage called X Vision and ever since we have been working year-round on Excision tours and festival shows."



"The Executioner was our first time- coded show using the D3 and Resolume. We used the D3 for its auto calibration features which became very valuable at Coachella in 2013. At Coachella we had a 15 minute change over to focus, map and blend two Christie Hd35K projectors. Vello Virkhaus was the house VJ and was very skeptical of Beama’s claims but later did a series of speeches which praised our setup. To date the Paradox is our flagship tour and employs our animators Ben Leonard and Noah Freeman full time for a year leading up to the tour. Along with other tours such as Seven lions and Datsik."



Brady: "I’m a recent addition to the Beama team, I’ve known everyone through the Shambhala music festival for years. I was hired for the paradox after DJ Shadow's the mountain will fall tour. I really enjoy how diverse Beama is with their wide range of clients. It was a natural fit but still allowed me to work with friendly companies such as V-Squared labs and VJCLA."

Brady believes that the content of the Paradox tries to fit a large production rock show more than a standard loop based EDM event.  He affirms that the level of excellence required by Beama and Jeff (Excision) are the highest of any tour that he has worked on.

Let’s find out why.

The Paradox is a modular set with 110 meters of 5 mm LED. Straight up, the first question that jumps to our mind is how the crew manages so many back to back tours- From load in to out.

Turns out, there are 5-6 variations of the Paradox, with some basic equations. It has been specifically engineered with a self-climbing truss system over motors, so that twice as many fixtures & video panels can be crammed into a venue.

Says Brady,“The Paradox is an experience that has overwhelming properties to our audience. It's a very demanding tour with multiple 12 show runs. On the 2017 tour, we loaded in and out 360 semi trucks of equipment over 10 weeks. Everyone on this tour is multi-disciplined and wears several hats.  You're expected to be up, building truss, hanging panels and wiring systems with all the other crew.  I was actually the LED tech as well as media server/digital systems tech. Personally, I spend a lot of time eating healthy and not drinking.  That being said several crew members have the most impressive liquor constitutions I have ever seen.”

Aren’t we surprised? ;)



The next thing that struck us about this monster is the content. From robots shooting flames, to rampaging dinosaurs, to angry gorillas- it is a mech geek’s wildest dreams come true. It’s oh so cool.
All of this has been developed by longtime Beama & Excision Animator Ben Leonard. Also, the man behind the robotic T-rex & Robo Kitty fame.

“I've been working with Jeff for a long time now, and he pretty much trusts me to do whatever I want when it comes to content. Most of the time when given a song to animate, I'll just listen to it several times on headphones with my eyes closed, and whatever pops into my head is what I'll run with.
After a lifetime of saturating my brain with comics, anime, graffiti, video games and cheesy horror movies, my mind can wander into some weird places. I love making robots, aliens and heavy mecha inspired designs so a lot of that goes into the Paradox. Sometimes I will base my animations around a specific movement, like the camera moving up and down. Then I will build a scene around that movement, like an elevator dropping or a spaceship blasting off. But really, when making the content, it comes down to the music and what jumps into my head while I listen to it.”




So, how much studio time did Ben spend creating this stuff, you ask?
“I'm afraid to tell you how many hours it takes to make the Paradox content each year. Mostly I'm afraid to count that high. Let's put it this way, I'm working on next years content right now.”

Whew. As you let that sink in, we’re going to opt for a cure for our next itch- The dinosaurs. Were our eyes fooling us or does the Fascia LED actually rise for the CO2 fumes?



“Yes you are correct, our DJ booth is motorized and actually controlled by Jeff(Excision). We make sure to have different animation looks set for each song depending upon the booth state. This is a custom stage piece that was created when the Paradox was first designed. Everything of the set has been custom designed down to the mounting system for our LED panels. Our specifics are so rigid that Dave Hauss of the Hauss collective had to engineer everything down to the nuts and bolts.

The DJ booth was separate to this design but our specifications usually can’t be replicated by the average rental house. Because of this Jeff actually owns and had everything created for the Paradox. Jeff’s dedication to the show and bringing the best experience possible means he actually owns everything but the light fixtures.”

What a guy!


Cheggit, Beama actually flew out to China and worked with a manufacturer to refine the LED wall to their touring standards and build requirements.  They stuck with a 5mm panel because of the clarity it gives the crowd from a standard stage distance. Their new 4k processors certainly helped when syncing the signal sent out.
 
And oh, the sync is spot on. It isn’t as simple as running a SMPTE time-code, though. The whole show is created with several different systems working together. Jeff (Excision) actually controls most elements of the show.  The Cryo, DJ booth, visuals, lasers and lights all run off an intricate system with Resolume at the center.  

Brady says, “Resolume does an excellent job of taking multiple protocols and being able to route it to multiple sources.  We run a custom DVS system that feeds out to Resolume and then to a custom program I created in Touchdesigner that parses required data.  The GrandMA2 has a dedicated SMPTE AUX but our LD Chris Pekar still runs various elements depending on the rig and what we have patched in from the house.”


“The custom program shows me the state of Jeff’s faders, song position and the deck currently controlling the rig.  Behind the interface this program controls the timecode being sent out to the laser and lighting desks.  It controls several pieces of audio gear and actually will run macros on the light desk.  So, Jeff's faders will actually change laser or lighting settings along with audio/video.” 


So, Jeff is in control of it all?

“Yep! This level of precision allowed our lights, lasers, cryo, automation, video and music to be coming from a single control surface. We frequently had whole shows being controlled by Jeff alone.  A major requirement for the Paradox is the need of a true sync system that allows Jeff to properly DJ and mix while controlling everything.  
On stage, Jeff has your standard CDJ/DJM setup with a control panel for cryo/automation and monitors.  The monitors show the video for each track, master output and a dedicated camera feed.  Jeff will frequently jump between cue points when setting up a track to mix in so we couldn’t use traditional timecode for our video system. Because he frequently needs to see the video as he scrubs through audio, which makes SMPTE impractical for our video system.”

Some more interesting trivia: ‘The Paradox’ doesn’t have a single loop based visual. Every song has a video custom made for it, timed exactly for it.

Brady explains this further, “Jeff is just Djing as he normally would, if a fan at a meet and greet has mentioned an obscure song you can damn well expect it to suddenly just be in the set. There isn’t any loop based songs, each one has been created and edited to fit each auditory element. We’re bringing in new animations mid tour, switching animations for songs if we’re in cities multiple days and making edits based on Jeff’s mid tour changes. Each video is cued by Jeff, he picks the song on the CDJ and whatever song he picks is loaded automatically. Some days I don't touch the video machines after programming.  Sometimes Jeff just randomly picks whatever song he wants. We have specifically designed the system like this.”

Finally, we ask Brady about Resolume.

“We made some huge changes to our video architecture this year, Resolume was part of that foundation upgrade. Last year Beama stuck with Resolume 4 and madmapper until Resolume 5 had matured past its initial stages.  I was extremely happy with the performance and framerate gains that came from moving to R5.  Resolume itself had zero issues this tour and it was fun looking at how much the Resolume team has built.
 
I’m a frequent contributor to the Resolume forums and feel like the layer router feature in the advanced output is completely overlooked.  This allowed us to easily map decks to Jeff’s monitors, but also do some impressive bits of mapping during festivals.
 
Because of the changes made at the start of the tour we have already shifted to a new custom system that allows major elements of the Paradox control system to be used at festivals.  The Paradox in a small way is just becoming the Excision experience. Resolume is a central part with small obscure needs being filled by Touchdesigner and D3.”     

That’s always so satisfying to hear :)

Thanks Brady, Butz & Ben for talking us through this epic show. Cheers to the hard working, crazy crew at Beama. We can hardly wait for the next visual monstrosity.

Brace yourselves. It’s coming.



Check out more of Beama's work here.
Follow them on Facebook & Instagram

Hello my beautiful creaturesss of ze night. This veek ve have a vonderful selection of new visuals for you. These visuals are fresh, like a pulsing vein, teeming with ze promise of eternal bliss. So good you could almost taste it, yes? So drink up, and join me in eternity forever.

Welcome to Dumb Robot, who sets the bar high with a great theme and a lovely pastel color scheme on MachineHead.

Get MachineHead by DumbRobot from Resolume Footage

And another welcome to VisualLab, who drop the Mother Of Abstract Bombs: TwoPointZero.

Get TwoPointZero by VisualLab from Resolume Footage

And to close it off, we have VJ Galaxy, the zookeeper on a low poly diet.

Get LoPolyZoo by VJ Galaxy from Resolume Footage

Wolves are slightly eccentric, mega talented visual artists who are making their presence felt across the globe. With fabulous skills to boast of, Joshua Dmello & Jash Reen have been fast racing to the front of the (visual) pack.


They’ve worked with all sizes of setups- from tiny to large to omgsomassive and have delivered to the hilt, over & over again. Be it with projection, or LED.
[fold][/fold]
From Sunburn to EDC to Beyond wonderland; Noisia to Nucleya to Flux Pavillion- Wolves have definitely carved a niche for themselves and are well on their way to achieve their dream of world domination.



When you look through their work, what is striking is their creativity in led mapping.

This blog post looks to cover some of their best art, understand their psyche & give you a grand display of some of their prized possessions.

Thanks for doing this, you guys!

Tell us a little something about where it all began for you. At what point did you realize visuals was your calling?

It pretty much started when we met in high school and played a whole lot of video games. We were so obsessed with films, comic books and games growing up that after trying to chase the proverbial ‘calling’ in the real world — Josh has a background in his Dad’s light and sound business and Jash an audio engineer and a journalist — we somehow snapped back to a way to playing video games again. Only we’ve got way bigger screens now and a lot more people are watching.


What do you prefer: Projection or LED? And why?

LED. We respect and admire a lot of projection mapping set ups in the art installation space. But we reached a point of exhaustion with upholding that medium in larger music arenas and festivals. It felt like we were alienating the larger elements of production like the lighting rigs, lasers, stage fx and of course, the performing artists themselves. You can’t having them performing at the same capacity if you have to worry about the lights overshadowing the projections.

So we took the fundamentals of projection mapping and chopped and screwed our input and output maps to fit to the most luminous and stubborn of LED surfaces. Every show’s a new challenge and we never repeat a set up twice.



Tell us the process you follow for pixel mapping.

It starts with us coming up with a stage design, which we conceptualize from scratch or is given to us by the client/ festival. Once we get the tile sizes and resolutions we figure out a way to create the most effective pixel map. One that can fit custom content and existing 1080p content that will look correct moving across the entire stage. Doing a 5-6 hour music festival is not feasible on custom content alone. If you have the accurate outmap map as well you can do most of your mapping from the hotel room itself. Aside from a few onsite tweaks.
Resolume offers mapping and playout of content in the same platform, very few other software offer the same with the ease of access and user-friendly interface. The snapping features, keyboard short cuts and the ability the set virtual displays makes mapping on Arena a breeze.


From the Imperial guard to Nucleya’s crazy stage to the current tour rig with Flux, how do you come up with different LED designs? Is there a brief you follow? Or do you adapt as per the content that you visualize?

There’s never a hardcore brief in play rather than an intense few weeks of conversation between us and the artists/clients we’re working with. Our inspirations personally come from larger than life cinematic universes — think Guillermo Del toro explaining Pacific Rim for the first time to a boardroom of studio execs and you know the kind of take we go in swinging with. Often we get so invested in bringing our content to life they become part of larger narratives we rarely get to talk about in a field like live visuals; but it definitely helps us tie it all together. We can give you 3 examples:

1) When Nucleya’s team approached us for his Bass Yatra Tour, we had around 600-700 sq ft of LED available and that many different versions of the LED layout to explore. We do a few days of pure illustration work along these layouts. Sometimes things just don't click and we break it up and start again. There’s a moment where the practicality of having this layout on stage meets this insane war demon sketch you’ve been rooting for in the start, and then we all sleep well at night.



2) Some of the bigger stages we’ve done like the ‘Outer Realm’ stage at Beyond Wonderland in Los Angeles throw a real curve ball at us. The stage had multiple narrow arches extending from the stage over the audience with very little room for seamless content.


We took it upon us to create two worlds loosely themed as — An Enchanted Forest and A Lost Ship — and somehow adapt it to the whole spread of LED. Keep in mind this was for a stage hosted by the incredible Bassrush crew and we knew things were about to get heavy. Those pleasant environments gave way to a forgotten labyrinth of cogs and pipes powered by a mechanical eye and a set of makeshift Icarus wings - and it all fit!



3) Fast forward to the Flux Pavilion tour and we’re working with a limited itinerary. The production company and label (Bigabox Productions and Circus Records) stock their LED in-house and had to scale it down to a realistic number of panels that would tour safely across all cities and fit in every venue. When they gave us the LED layout and pixel map, we were determined to follow through and not fallback on a 16:9 screen.



The other half of the conversation was with Flux Pavilion himself who had a very distinct vision of these worlds he wanted us to create for different sections of his set. It really pushed us to get a collective vision across that would fit on four sections of LED (one being the fascia) and still be immersive enough to draw audiences in every night.


We ended up with one hell of a ride — a quirky intro feature that draws people from the a scenic British landscape to the strange worlds of Flux Pavilion. At one section of the we have a bionic ship carrier take over the LED and transport him between these worlds. At another, a mad-scientist rig of electricity Pylons take over the screens and charges up flags made of coloured electricity. It gets weirder as we go on, and we’re pretty much developing these worlds as we go along on tour. Every night’s had a great response and we cant wait to see what the show turns into.




Tell us about your content creation process. From scratch to the final render. What software you use, and how much time one clip takes, on an average.
We throw ideas back and forth to settle on a base LED design or projection surface. Once thats finalized, we start to sketch over it- not only does it help control our ideas, but it also assures we’re creating something that will no doubt function at every step.




The sketches are then scanned, digitized and modelled in a 3D realm. We then gather up as many parts as possible to see what we can play around with in terms of animation. We start of with Illustrator to vectorize the sketches and then move on the Cinema 4Dfor the 3D modeling and animation. Post that, its taken into After Effects for final compositing and animation.

We have a great team on board that makes doing all of this such a breeze. They work round the clock and deliver spot on content. Shout out to them!



It can take anywhere between one day to around three to four days based on how complex the clip is in terms of 3D animation and texturing and lighting.

Let's take a walk through your studio. What hardware do you use, what is your most prized possession and what would you like to change/ upgrade?



Like most VJ's out there, we've also realized that the macbook pros just don’t cut it anymore. The heating issues, performance related to the AMD cards and throw in the 'Donglepocalypse', its a no brainer. We've switched to windows laptops for our tour machines. 
We're currently using the Octane II from PC Specialist.


Specs: 
Intel® CoreTMi7 Quad Core Processor i7-6700k
32Gb Ram
GeForce GTX 1070
1 TB Samsung SSD + 1 TB Seagate Hybrid.
For display outs they have 2 x mini DP, 1 x HDMI , 1 x USB C/Thunderbolt 3.
For our live feed needs we use the Magewell USB 3 to HDMI capture card.
We’re using multiple Windows servers for content generation with dual GTX 1080 GPU’s and the Intel i7 5960x CPU, 32 GB of RAM and 2TB SSD’s in each machine.

Our most prized possession would have to be the TMNT statues we have based on art by James Jean.


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What process do you follow live? Do you prefer freestyling or is Midi/ SMPTE your friend?
We’re firm believers in doing everything live. We make our content in layers with alpha so we can explore different versions easily and no two sets end up being alike. It keeps the set interesting for us and helps us play it out with an instrument just like any performing artist would.

It also helps us build upon the content on the road and add more layers to it as our heads come up with something. If we go a bit too far we use Resolume’s crazed set of essential effects to roll out of a situation and come back with another banger. True story.

Is there anything more you would like to talk about?

We're playing around with expanding the Wolves brand because a lot of people seem to connect with it. It's all non profit and DIY at this stage. Our first step was starting a merch line that we want to promote within an immediate community of artists before they make their way out to a larger group of people. We started handing them ourselves at shows backstage, outside venues, on long tours and of course to all the wonderful crew we've had a chance to work with at front of house. It's like marking our path through the trenches of the creative industry with a sort-of-cult symbol rather than it become a household brand.


For people in India who'd like to represent, we've partnered with Redwolf to stock the latest 'MK-II' designs online: http://www.redwolf.in/wolves

We've also toying around with the tag 'New Wolf Order' to host a series of video content. At present, we're running with a VLog called transmissions.

It's really rough, surreal first person edits from what it's like to be at a Wolves show. Josh and I often argue that some of the videos lose the point entirely haha so hopefully we'll promote it better soon and start featuring more from a technical standpoint. If there's an audience for that, we're game.

Thanks guys for taking the time out to talk to us and giving us all these cool details.
Next up for Wolves: The Basspod Stage at EDC, Las Vegas.

Howl at ya’ll there.



Photo Credits: BRXVN. Follow him on Facebook & Instagram