Downtempo Visuals

[karmavideo]

Just looking for some content ideas for downtempo visual sets. Around 100 bpm.

Appreciate it

John - Karma Video

[thomase]

I used some footage of clouds for a triphop song once...
Or waht abaout fishes or something like that... I used some fx, so it worked out pretty well.

[illectric]

..once I used the rain drops..zoomed of course.With good resolution and video compression.
Ok the procedure goes like this:when is raining, put the camera on your window but not too close..and tape it when you see the the rain drops very clearly..make sure that you have enough light.
Then put it in after eff. and rework it...and the downtempo avi is perfect...
.......................the each drop is different and thats the point of good avi..
peace

[complexvisuals]

Get a pot made out of Pyrex. Fill it with water, put it on the stove and boil it. Film the bubbles on the surface, bring them into AE, slow the clip down and blend between frames.

Make sure to have plenty of light.

Cian
COMPLEX

[KillingFrenzy]

In a general sense...

Toss out the flashy swirlies and bright colors, those are for house and trance. Instead, go for muted tones, or darker palettes. Work with feedback and time posterization effects to enhance the dreaminess. Fool with rates of playback. So maybe take a scene of someone breaking a glass and play it backwards in slow motion, that sort of thing. Think about the sources the music is drawing from, and try and incorporate the equivalent in visuals. I find bits of film noir go well, because of the mysterious feel.

[rossco]

i find natural images work well with 'downtempo' sounds.

- black sheet/background
- bucket with a desired size hole in bottom
- fill bucket with dry sand (coloured sand makes it more interesting)
- film sand pouring out
- film the just the 'stream' of sand
- film the 'pile' growing at bottom
- or both

once u got footage as a movie ( and added any desired fx) u can mix in these 'coloured sand streams' into fottage and speed up/slow down etc,

cutting between the streams and piles would make nice effect.

[karmavideo]

Thanks for the great ideas. 'Tis always good to hear the little things that impact the feel of a performance - I.E. suggesting using muted colors.

I think I will take this project the route of time-lapse type video.

Love the ideas...thanks again

[PilotX]

When you say downtempo is it just the speed, or the feel of the music that is slow?

If it feels slow, then really anything that flows rather than jumps should go with it, hence why anything that is natural or looks organic should work.
You might also want to forget beat matching and try to follow the treble lines, but htis depends on the music (downtempo in feel to me means long flowing treble lines, but might not do so in this case), look for the bar and key changes instead.

Also, if you have flowing backgrounds you might be able to do some stuff in front of it that will still look right because the backgrounds link to the music.

Hope this helps, when we do stuff to hip-hop we tend to use videos of people dancing, playing instruments over panning images of graffiti, but altough it has slow beats, it is not really downtempo, more dancy.

Let us know what you find out.

Tom
syzygy visuals

[bluntfaktory]

smiling baby faces
falling feathers
lightly blown candle flames
a draining sink
burning coals
under water lava
stop motion opening flowers
sunsets
forming ice crystals
the moon
space walks
tears
bubbles
burning sheets
people kissing
slow motion shaking faces
a kitten licking it's paws
flexing mylar
out of focus Christmas lights
street lights at night
any melting plastic
someone snoring
water ripples
heavy rain drops
anything coming to a stop
and late night traffic

[Mbazzy]

... on the VJ side I'm a heavy lurker here trying to absorb as much knowledge found in here ... at present I'm mainly an audioproducer ... my style is said to be downtempo but often quite hectic .. this thread just made me wonder what you VJ people would come up with when asked to provide visuals for my audio :

http://www.mbazzy.tk [maybe disregard the Saul Williams remix - this URL is a redirection of : http://stage.vitaminic.com/sad_end_projects (in case the redirection is flakey)]