iline
28th August 2007, 10:07 PM
I'd known I had a gig to prepare for for about three weeks, but having just got some freelance work I had no time to prepare. This was my first solo gig, the previous one was at the V&A so I was a lot less worried. That said, I did spend the day of my gig cursing repeatedly at my computer. "F&*K YOU, AFTER EFFECTS!!" I had to make a timer for a DJ showcase where each DJ had exactly 15 minutes to play a set, so what with a 15-minute timer animation taking 3 1/2 hours to render, I opted to render out 15 seconds of each timing, one for 15 minutes, 10, 5 2 then the final 1 minute countdown timer. This meant that on the night I would have to remember to stop VJing every 5 minutes to put the timer on screen.
I nearly shat myself when I realised it was time to get my shit together and get the tube to Elephant and Castle, so I whacked my clips (renders of my 3D animations, ephemerals from archive.org, some dodgy pre-clipped kungfu hits off a VJ site), an Arkaos 3.5 trial and Quicktime installer on my external Firewire drive, grabbed my projector and midi keyboard and hit the street.
I couldn't find the place as it's in an unmarked railway arch, but once the 15th person I asked thumbed me towards the blue door next to a dumpster, I got in and started to really shit myself about the night to come. Thankfully the promoter lent me a laptop with the best possible rightclick display options, so it hoofed it up the VGA cable in no time and after 90 minutes of sweating and twiddling, Arkaos was outputting visuals while leaving me the interface screen on the laptop. The MIDI worked instantly and at this point, an hour and a half before showtime, I started to learn how to use Arkaos (and VJ in general)...by this time I went out to grab an Indian takeaway and sit down to master the beast.
Loading the clips onto the keys and setting effects is easy....I just had to load my clips (even clips up to 100mb H.264 were playing fine - cannot recommend a 7200rpm firewire drive enough!!). This done, I made my first furtive attempts at beatmatched visual entertainment.
One of the better decisions I made earlier on was to put the important clips of the timer on the bottom note of octave 0, meaning I could find the timer clips in seconds to play them every 5 minutes exactly.
Stan Brakhage, you saved my night and allowed me to go for a fag break (by leaving a power transformer wedged on top of the note that played Black Ice, a great experimental mishmash handpainted on roughcuts of 16mm film). When I came back from my fag break, the poor promoter I'd left tapping keys had got his friends to stand in for me. After showing them the ropes, I got myself a beer and started getting down next to some fitties. It was sweet to see my stuff getting played out over the DJs - who were all great - but when the live gabber set came on, I had to get on the MIDI keyboard and go mental. This was my defining moment and the mentalism was utterly brilliant to attempt to match in ferocity. I had an archive.org animation of 'Private Snafu' which had the convenient title of "BOOBY TRAP" which loomed up prominent under the other fuctup stuff I was throwing at the wall. I reckon it looked pretty good.
Overall I enjoyed myself immensely and the fact that no-one mentioned anything could be interpreted that people thought I was just a normal VJ, not a first-timer.
If anyone here was there (highly unlikely) let me know what you thought!
Ed
I nearly shat myself when I realised it was time to get my shit together and get the tube to Elephant and Castle, so I whacked my clips (renders of my 3D animations, ephemerals from archive.org, some dodgy pre-clipped kungfu hits off a VJ site), an Arkaos 3.5 trial and Quicktime installer on my external Firewire drive, grabbed my projector and midi keyboard and hit the street.
I couldn't find the place as it's in an unmarked railway arch, but once the 15th person I asked thumbed me towards the blue door next to a dumpster, I got in and started to really shit myself about the night to come. Thankfully the promoter lent me a laptop with the best possible rightclick display options, so it hoofed it up the VGA cable in no time and after 90 minutes of sweating and twiddling, Arkaos was outputting visuals while leaving me the interface screen on the laptop. The MIDI worked instantly and at this point, an hour and a half before showtime, I started to learn how to use Arkaos (and VJ in general)...by this time I went out to grab an Indian takeaway and sit down to master the beast.
Loading the clips onto the keys and setting effects is easy....I just had to load my clips (even clips up to 100mb H.264 were playing fine - cannot recommend a 7200rpm firewire drive enough!!). This done, I made my first furtive attempts at beatmatched visual entertainment.
One of the better decisions I made earlier on was to put the important clips of the timer on the bottom note of octave 0, meaning I could find the timer clips in seconds to play them every 5 minutes exactly.
Stan Brakhage, you saved my night and allowed me to go for a fag break (by leaving a power transformer wedged on top of the note that played Black Ice, a great experimental mishmash handpainted on roughcuts of 16mm film). When I came back from my fag break, the poor promoter I'd left tapping keys had got his friends to stand in for me. After showing them the ropes, I got myself a beer and started getting down next to some fitties. It was sweet to see my stuff getting played out over the DJs - who were all great - but when the live gabber set came on, I had to get on the MIDI keyboard and go mental. This was my defining moment and the mentalism was utterly brilliant to attempt to match in ferocity. I had an archive.org animation of 'Private Snafu' which had the convenient title of "BOOBY TRAP" which loomed up prominent under the other fuctup stuff I was throwing at the wall. I reckon it looked pretty good.
Overall I enjoyed myself immensely and the fact that no-one mentioned anything could be interpreted that people thought I was just a normal VJ, not a first-timer.
If anyone here was there (highly unlikely) let me know what you thought!
Ed