What made you get into visuals?

[PilotX]

This thread comes with all thanks to Complex Visuals.


Noticed the idea for the thread and decided to kick it off.

In the 'pioneers of visuals' thread Orbital and Timber have been mentioned. I suspect that them, along with Kraftwerk, and Floyd will arise again.

For me personally, Orbital made me want visuals at any event I was doing, and seeing Kraftwerk at Tribal Gathering '97. The idea of doing it myself was inspired by seeing visuals done at those events.

So, where else does the bug begin? Are there any VJs who have been thinking about it since the displays that were created for 60s acid parties, or Floyds light/laser shows?, or are we mostly kids of the 80s and 90s?

[murph]

cthugha. I've been into Cthugha and the winamp stuff since I found them, and going to parties around here I saw stuff that was really dumb, that could be bested by the likes of cthugha or winamp. We didn't really have any real VJs here at the time. So I started doing it, and fell in love... =] (and thank god grew out of the cthugha/winamp stage quickly)

[robotfunk]

same here .. sheer drama.. friend gave a party in berlin in 93 and asked me to bring some nice f00tage. I thought he was just gonna play it but on arriving there he showed me a setup with a mx-50, 2 vcr's and a cam. From that point I got interested in adding visuals to my otherwise purely musical performances.

[eXhale]

I read an article about VJing (mentionning mostly TechnoVision, a VJ label in Paris) on a computer magazine when I was, like, 14-15 year old and I thought at once it was awesome and that's exactly what I wanted to do (no kidding! ;)). Then I forgot about it and several years later I went to some raves where I could see what the VJ was doing from behind so it got me interested again and I made searches on the Internet and found AudioVisualizers.com.

[Primebase3]

went to a art exhibithion of a dutch Vj pioneer "Micha" hated it very much so and I was wondering if I could do it better. did some research and found some stuff from 00-Kaap and dept (my personal heroes) later on I also got a cd from my Typography teacher because I couldn't stop talking about it...It said Coldcut on the front. ...:D

[rhythmicimaging]

I suppose for me it was the Amiga and the rave animation disks that would randomly come my way (if anyone has any of these tell me.)

Those animations combined with pratting around with Deluxe paint and caligari truespace got me going. I didn't think about visuals until i got a life and went out and saw that i could apply my skills to something i could enjoy, (as i realised i didn't have the brains to do cgi for films etc)

[complexvisuals]

Anyone got Jesus On Es? Amzing demo from years ago.

Cian

[fluchtpunkt]

for me it was doing computer animations & friends who were djing that asked me to bring them along to parties. then one thing led to the other...

[PiedPiper]

Cthugha, ACID, beast wars. early demo groups
boring Dj's, the fact i cant mix (sound)
my extreme computer geekness
ability of vj'ing to make me feel worthwhile

[unjulation]

it was a logical step forward for me, involved in free parties and festiys theatricaly and artisticly, backdrops and costume based circus madness, moved into 8mm 16mm and slide projection and when i finely could aford a computer then that was that and havent looked back since

[bigloose]

started to project video (2vcr&1switchbox) for some friend while they were playing on stage (coz it was different, cool & more interative) fell in :heart:

[many2]

In the same month two seemingly unrelated events : I got a VJ as a roommate and I went to my first rave. (What a wonderful time it was ;) ). I already had some experience in 3d and game development and I saw I could help my roomate by producing loops for him. I then began to learn from him how to mix visuals and I gradually became VJ Many-2.

[2Bit]

it was a logical progression for us - we'd been putting on our own nights & parties for ages then within a couple of months we saw CCuts Timber & Headspace VJing @ a party.

Spoke to (read - asked endless questions) Headspace for a few hints & tips on the night & haven't really looked back since.

Many thanks to SleepyTom, Mark & the ninja family 'cos without you.........

:love2:

[charlielangridge]

The Big Chill Festival was where it all started for me! I was engineering the MixMedia tent (where i was told i was only going to be doing a few DJs!). From the first act through to the last, i was shown images and visual which i had never imagined before! I had seen hexstatic's work on Let Us Play before and a few shitty club visuals (a dvd playing clips with no relevance to the music) but the ability to mix live visuals blew my mind! .....

Oh well, i wont bore you! You get the idea!

Thanks mostly to the Robin & Stuart Hexstatic (http://www.hexstatic.co.uk/), the guys at Curious Yellow (http://www.curiousyellow.co.uk/) and the guys at SoxaN (http://www.soxan.co.uk/).

[KillingFrenzy]

I would have to say that the Pirate intros for C64 games were a start. I had a little hack that would play the entire Doctor Who theme with flashing lights and a little picture of the Tardis, and I thought that was the best thing ever. It just went from there, in terms of interest. I was just as excited about getting the next hacker intro, as I was the accompanying game.
I think my interest in film came when I saw Eraserhead. Something inside of me ticked that film wasn't just there to tell a story in a rote manner. I remember vividly imagining putrid color in the scenes with the sick baby, and realized later that the power of the images had been so strong I'd associated it in like a dream.
The Herbie Hancock "Rock It" video was the first time when I saw how powerful cutting and working with rhythm could be.

[XeroDark]

I was doing music videos with japan animation and got into shooting footage and makeing my own videos, music videos, presentations and then became a Christian and started doing it for my church and other churchs. My friend that was christian was into the the rave scene meet some really cool djs and they where looking for someone who could provide christian material in a rave scene and i kind of just fell into it.

Peace I.m out
Dustin

[XeroDark]

Yeah there are alot more christian ravers then you think even alot of Christian rave clubs. They all have Christian Djs and staff. Now as for the R&R part im guessing your meaning Drugs, achool ect. Well we try to provide a rave scene without all of that. I do admite that some of that still gets around but very little. Most people dont want to do drugs and have a good time just being there its a big enough high. Most of the people that show up arent Christian but if you go to tastyfesh, Dm4c and some others websites/ groups there are huge groups of Christian ravers. As for me i do have a backgound of doing alot of drugs achool but gave it up and became a Christian also alot of other people i know and we try to provide a message of christ when we dj or i vj.

Peace I'm out

[KillingFrenzy]

They don't need drugs, they have religion.

[Nema]

christian raveclubs? can you post me their homepages please?

(no sex until marriage?)

[LarryLightshow]

watching TV everyday all day somtimes since I was a kid inspired me to work with media....

[scarab]

Originally posted by LarryLightshow
watching TV everyday all day somtimes since I was a kid inspired me to work with media....

same with me...
there was one step in between, because i started editing films. and because my guys didn't come up with new stuff to edit i was playing around with premiere and avid.... and the results were too good to be left somewhere on the hd. after the fusion with t-cut i also came into live visuals... and that brings us up2date.

[karmavideo]

the reason I got into visuals...

when I first started listening to electronic music, I became friends with a couple djs and started hanging out with them at the piece of shit club (if you can even call Scornovacco's basement a club). During the club event, the bar's TVs would never be turned off...we be listening to this dope music & watching something fucked on TV, like the 700 Club or the Waltons. I started dragging down my Powerbook and hooking up the video out to tvs and playing G-force visuals & Arkaos (poorly made, I might add) visuals. A couple months later I bought a video mixer, and the rest is history.

I guess I took too many drugs back inthe 60's ;-)

The other reasons:

It gave me something to do at the club rather than just drink & drink & drink...I now did visuals & drank & drank & drank!

Also, almost everyone I was hanging around with just HAD to be a dj. I decided early on that I was NOT going to become a dj...

Besides, I've always been a "visual" person

[InsideUsAll]

I moved in with a friend who I'd known since I was a kid, who was into organising parties & club nights. I quickly ended up doing this with him, and we wanted to make our parties that little bit better, so we bought 3 t.v's down to the club, put them in a line and played skate/snowboard videos. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

I had graduated in computer graphics imaging & visualisation in 2000 which was a programming course really. I had been working in the machine vision industry for 3 or 4 years and I always used to think of my talents as purely technical, yep I could draw some good stuff with 3d studio max, and yep I was heavily involved in the nitty gritty of computers & there relationship to video. But until I started getting involved in the parties my friend was doing I didn't really realise I could do anything artistic with my skills!

I actually failed G.C.S.E art at school, which is funny, cos I reckon out of everyone that was in that class years ago, I must be the only one actually doing anything artistic now.

Its snowballed for us from that point of realisation. It's so nice to have something I can channel all my abilities into that I actually love doing. It doesn't seem like only 18 months ago that I was carrying those 3 t.v's into that club. What an exponential rate of explosion to our 3 projector/3 computer/mixer/dvd/vhs/blah blah blah rig that we trek round the country with most weekends!

I feel like a little kid sometimes who needs to calm down.

constantly excited

Dave

[labmeta]

Had a chance meeting with someone when i asked for a cig paper, ten minutes later was discussing visuals from glastonbury and we were partners in crime.

Days later we got asked to produce a slide show for a fashion catwalk thing, the technician there was also a club promoter he asked me to do the same for some dark drum and bass night. Kept on working to pay the debt for producing hundreds of slides for the first show and never really stopped. I now have more debts, more kit and more club nights. So never really achieved that paying off thing but turned into vj in the process.

[Mindtrap]

I guess my obsession with visuals started in High School, I was the Video Toaster operator for the morning show and our monthly news program, around that time i also started going to parties, the first one being Jam Pony Express and DJ Laz at the Kitchen in Miami, and they had one screen behind the DJ showing clips of women doing the weirdest things, and they were cutting that with clips of the live show and of the crowd... that was the "first" time i even saw a glimpse of what could be done.

A few months later I saw Pink Floyd, and the visual show was still one of the best i have seen, using videos to accent the songs they were playing. so then i went back to the TV studio at school and made my first mix tape, using the toaster v2, 2 svhs decks, a wall of badly shot school events and saturday morning cartoons... it was not my best work, but a start... the seeds were planted but i would not get serious for another couple of years...

i came to Chicago to go to film school, and the rave scene was thriving and i got hooked, but was understimulated, sure music was great and dancing even better, but the lights weren't enough... at that time the only crew doing it here was Alibi, and OVT, so i threw my hat into the ring with the SIMA mixer, a borrowed projector and a whole lotta heart, and rocked my first show alongside Paul Johnson, Mike Dearborn, Kid Entropy, and then we got shut down... but it has continued on since then steadily, traveling all around east of the mississippi... taking infulences from horror films, cheese sandwiches, graphic design mags, and bad eighties sitcoms starring John Stamos, i find my shows getting weirder and weirder, but it still hasn't gotten weird enough for me....

Enjoy the Buffet
MindTrap :D

[vjpixylight]

hahaha reading all these posts are great...it seems that we all in one way or another got into this business(for lack of a better word) to express ourselves thru creativity and to enhance the art arounds us...

I think it is great that christians and pagens and others can come together and express these stories with out any judgement calls on each other...:)

as for me, I began doing visualz because i got a camcorder, and wanted to show ppl what I was video taping...one thing led to another, and so in '95 i borrowed some money from the 'rents, and got my first projector so I could do visual backdrops for a local grateful dead cover band..(having seen some awesome visualz from jerry and company at red rocks)

As for mixing footage, I used the very primative technique of facing 2 TV's at each other with a piece of glass in the middle to catch each of the TV's reflections, then running footage that i had shot with the camcorder thru each TV, and used the camcorder to videotape the mix...

Well, that worked out ok, but at some point I knew that I needed a real video mixer, and ended up buying a used with a MX10,(the only video mixer that I could find at the time in my price range) and the rest is history...

[SilentEclipse]

I was at a Festival of Flight gig in Kings Cross, London last year and saw Yeastdirections.org.uk VJ'ing and was blown away.

I decided that it was something I could get into as I work for a News footage archive ;) and I have a background in Photojournalism and DJ'ng.

I'm just about to buy my first camcorder (Sony TRV25, only ?650 here www.letsgodigital.co.uk) and will be creating my first project very soon.

I've only just found this site and it has answered many of my questions and given me some useful tips.

My only unanswered question is, are there many other female VJ's out there??? :cool:

[phluxm]

I got into visuals because I was into video and performance art and art galleries are so lifeless - I wanted to use them in a club. With the future aim of transforming the club into a gigantic art installation, full of ravers and mad visuals.

Kind of an all out sensory assault of visuals and music. I also saw what else was availible at clubs and thought 'what a load of crap'. I still feel that visuals are kind of clinging to the music scene and until we stop being secondary to the music, and become primary or equal, club visuals are still going to be slightly confused as to why theyre there at all.

[Anyone]

I got into visuals in 1996 because at the time I was going clubbing about 3 times a week and I came to a point where felt I was waisting my youth and needed to change my lifestyle and curb my expensive habits...

I still wanted to feed off that energy only clubs can give, but in a more productive way, so at the end of the night I had more than a downer to remember the evening with...

I've got a compulsive personality, when I go into something, I jump strait in the deep end, whatever it is. I was just lucky VJing turned out to be a good thing for me :nod:

Ne1

[RayV]

I guess it was a combination of things that brought me to the exiting Vj game world. I actualy saw few years ago a guy fliping reels of film f00tages on 3 projectors of 16 mm simulatniously, reflecting it on a boring electro-rock band - but he was a Hero! - so fast & so accurate - & the mix of those materials. I wish I could work with film.. the colors...
Or maybe it was earlier, studying cinematography for 3 years (& doing clips too) as well as fiddeling about with music & midi & then got a shot to work doing graphic design while doing music some more. Few years later those freinds crew were doing a video documentry of a Trance party, & one of the girls told me that her boy friend is a VJ, & I was asking her so many questions that ended up when she said that the gear is sooo expensive.
Few years later my mate Masterdamus started VJing, & I asked him to teach me, & he did. I went along with him to a party
(which was my first gig) some VERY wild TRANCE party @ the Hilton in Tel Aviv. I took it from there & I can't REALLY shut this computer down since. (Render) :)
I just love it!
:p

[Amukidi]

I was making short animations with my pal Roger Eno, and was at the point of wondering what we were going to do with them, when I went to a club gig with Rog and Lol Hammond. There it was, staring me in the face!!Within 6 weeks I'd blagged a charity gig, and present at that gig was the AV co-ordinater for the Big Chill.....he took me aside after the gig, offered me some work at the Enchanted Garden festival and I've not looked back since! Still pinching myself.

[neoteo]

since i was 5 years old ... the dream was born .. then it was just a mather of possibilities ... first time with after effects and the psicadelic videos start to come out naturaly ;)