true audio-visual content.

[USE]

how hard is it to get vjs and musicians to collaborate? i would say very.

i have numerous mates who are quality drum and bass and hiphop producers, and i keep trying to sell em the idea of producing audio visual content. like properly intergrated, like the holy "timber" by coldcut, where the samles and noises work in synergy between the sonic and the optical.

what i recon is a good starting point is to settle on several av clips, maybe from a film we both enjoy, some of my own original film, tv, anything we both feel works well in creating a theme that we both enjoy.

i have got as far as this, with one DnB producer, but settling on times and places for actually getting together and producing is a different kettle of fish. i think its because av content is still not widely recognised and appreciated outside a certain cognoscenti, and basically the musicians see it as a novelty at best and at worst a waste of time.

has anyone else had any better luck?

[bryandod]

I have found it very hard to work with musicians, but definately worth the trouble. I find A/V work more rewarding than vjing. I think the hardest thing about the A/V projects I am involved is the complexity of our setup. By the time we have all our midi rig set up we have lost a great deal of energy. I think that true A/V art has great potential.:inf:

Bryan
integratedvisions.net

[deepvisual]

working with musicians.

ha ha

well, everybody wants to be onstage, but only the lucky few are. Musicians are like members of an exclusive club and they wont be in a hurry to let anyone else in. Take the chemical brothers for example.
their live show was heavily dependent on visuals, mainly because the performers had no stage presence whatsoever. But the guys who did the visuals, vegetable vision recieved almost no credit, either from the music press or the bands management.
It seems to boil down to a political thing, be it nightclub or recording studio.
If you want musicians and producers to treat you as an equal, a creative, forget about it.
If you are willing to work as an assistant, in effect act as a butler, then you wont be seen as a threat and things will be fine - and of course you wont be earning a tenth of what they are.
The problem is that to do a real A/v mix the VJ needs to be able to control the music, but the band will never let that happen, hence the politics.

Soon there will come a time when the VJ is as much a part of the band as the guy on the turntables is now - unthinkable in the 80s but an everyday feature now.

lets hope its soon
until then, expect to be seen on the same level as the bar staff in a venue.

[sleepytom]

sorry thats crap :)

why would the chemical brothers who've been working together for years suddenly let a load of VJs "join the band" when the band in question is doing gigs on the scale the chem's were? if you want to be in a band you should probably start one! if you do start a band they your as much part of it as anyone else, the project will be AV focused from the beginning and nobody will feel like your an unnessacerry extra.

if you work with the musicians (ie you help make the music as well as letting them help make the visuals) then your an AV act. if you just want to be left alone to do the visuals and don't help with make suggestions about the music then your a VJ playing alongside some musicians.

My top tip for av production is to do the music first! even tracks with the fully AV sample approach are best done like this as it is so much easier and quicker to get on with the music if your using traditional techniques rather than the slow process of video sampling and sequencing. - get the audio right and you can reassemble the matching video samples at a later point.

when it comes to playing live the the simplest way is for the musicians to play the music and for you to trigger some AV samples over the top (works well with stuff like samples of people speaking in films) - you can get into midi triggering between the audio and video setups as and when you want / need to

[evomedia]

Why would any successful group or DJ ever see an unknown VJ with no previous music industry experience have a say in the sound they produce? Just because you could do something does not give the right to.

Timber was designed by coldcut, not external people saying hey you should do this, it was their idea and their vision.

A VJ doesn't want to be told what their content should look like any more than Dj's and Musicians don't want to be told what their music should sound like, it their artform as much as video is ours.

Really if you can't get your producer friends to get excited then make something to show them your ideas and skills as to what could be achieved, if they still don't spark any interested they probably never will. If no one shares your interest then just do it yourself, learn tracktor and create a mix, or ableton, or reason. Create your own AV, then you never know, you may meet another producer who likes what your doing enough to get involved, you may find that you really just didn't have enough faith in your own abilities and actually you never needed someone to work alongside.

Maybe just get them to produce a hour mix, something they don't think about, and then you can edit and play with what they produced.

Its all about following your own passions and others will join that vision if its good, but to think people like the chemical brothers have the slightest interest in random unknown video producers getting input into their sound is pointless. You can't force your own visions onto artists, when their own vision has gained them infinately more success.

[deepvisual]

oh dear. crap??
which bit I wonder??....

anyway.
lets talk about the chemicals a little more first.
Vegetable vision did their visuals for a very long time, from before they went big, so it is a shame that neither the press or the management ( i didn:t say the band) really gave them credit for it. after all apart from the visuals the live performance was just a button twiddling karaoke turn . almost all the show ran from playback and was "remixed". the audience could have stayed at home and played the record. buts thats another story....

so,
lets move on from this

indeed, if a band starts out with a VJ in house then everything is possible and I really do think this will break big soon with bands having promo footage made just for live performance and the VJ remixing audio and video live.

however, if a band doesnt have a VJ built in, then I think the politics issues do apply. What I mean is,
its a bit like , if you are a session musician and you play a sax solo on the record, come the live show, the band will let you stand onstage with them and play. not so the visuals.
please don:t get me wrong, If I wanted to be famous I would learn to play guitar - and I wasn:t suggesting a Vj should walk up after 15 mins and ruin someone elses lifetimes work.
all the same a band will happily spend $130,000
on a pop video and 6 months making an album but then only $2,000 on visuals for a tour and expect it all to be made in two weeks.

so lets go back to the chemicals and a little story.
part of the show visuals consisted of a clown saying the words " your my children now".
now the easiest way to do this, is to put the audio and video together on a DVD and press play.
but, because of the politics backstage, the video guy couldn't do this as the band had to be in control of the sound, but the band couldn't control the video as well as the sound because etc etc etc.
so in the end, hours and hours were spent programming a computer to send MIDI to a V1D player to trigger each clip in time to the music when it would have been so simple to have it all coming from one source.


and that was my point really,
it's a political thing, a hangover from the past, this line between the band and the other creatives.
new technology is breaking all the borders in media and many musicians are dabbling in visuals.
I think VJs are going to cross over the other way, maybe not controlling all the audio but for sure having audio with the visuals so the sound and vision correlates.



anyway, i like working with bands, its more fun. But touring really is structured like the class system.

is that clearer??

[vjpixylight]

and therefore VJ's aren't going to just pop up new in every live PA set played..
for one, there just aren't enuf VJ's to cover it all..

That said, it seems to me that most electronica music is made by 1-2 peeple, and so a 2nd or third visual element seems a natural...