A group of VJLondon.org members got together at mine last night to pool our mad skillz and collaborate on some high-speed footage in the infamous back room of my warehouse. DeepVisual’s Gary brought along a carful of black bags, blue paper and extendable metal which opened out into a fully equipped studio…
We were joined by the tirelessly energetic dancer Ilona, who until recently was my neighbour down on Sugarhouse Lane. She’s not just a pretty face either; she’s currently remixing new material from the Dandy Warhols at their studios and working on her debut album. We were shooting against a bluescreen colorama at 60fps with the intention of slowing the footage down to 120fps, so needed a lot of light and some interesting subjects.
Things got violent when I took a hammer first to a plaster bust I’ve been wanting to pound into smithereens for some time, and then a TV that’s been cluttering up our back room for about 8 months. Then another TV.
It was pretty cathartic whacking the living fuck out of things but we had more shots to do involving plastic pigment sample chips, stuffed toys, fishing line and lots of fiddling with lights. The digital footage will be graded and distributed in the next week or so and then the fun starts as we get to see what visuals everyone creates with the same source footage. Having been simmering my own little pot of anti-television sentiment for some time it’s great to see other VJs share my resentment of society’s favourite licensed sedative. Let the ambient political stand commence! Thanks to Mowgli and DeepVisual for supplying beer and equipment, to Ilona for the sick moves and glaucoma-inducing outfit changes, Prick Image for his ideas, enthusiasm and paint chips, and Neones and Trotula for rocking up late and smashing the second TV. Big shout out to the Pie Crust on Stratford High Street for the world-class Thai catering.
I was invited to the festival this year to capture some of the action and ambience for a video collage. The festival site is a sprawling valley around Eastnor Castle and now encompassing the Sunrise Festival, who were flooded out before they could throw their festival to higlight climate change earlier this year.
After checking out the site we caught Beth Orton’s set on the Castle Stage, then trekked accross the field to the Cocktail Bar. Big Chill House favourites NiceUp! commandeered a few hours of Saturday afternoon to showcase some funk, hiphop and dance DJs for a commited crowd in the blazing afternoon sun, shaking off the last of the hangovers into the mud. Over in the Media Mix tent, Adam Buxton guided us through some highlights of the BFI’s series of BUG nights, including the typically twisted/sophisticated new music video from Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal and and an odd, affecting promo for Grizzly Bear , until audio connection failure led to Adam improvising by showing us a lot of his clips off the internet, which garned a riotous reception and prompted our host to burst into song… twice.
Some of Bomb the Bass' killer visuals (lots of skulls)
90’s dance pioneers Bomb the Bass delivered a blinding AV set in the same tent later that night, delving visually into their graffiti roots onscreen with vivid sprayed strokes beatmatched to the heavy bass, going some way to prepare us for the shock and awe of Cornelius, whose mesmerising visuals synchronised perfectly in time with their propulsive sound (so the 18 hour soundcheck we sat through wasn’t being spent playing Jenga backstage then). The band rehearse with the videos to match their performance, and the preparation pays off when a tryptich of screens splitting one feed are mounted up behind and to either side of the band. They charged through a pulsing set of songs a with an intense precision, each song complemented by images of singing mouths, splashing paint, an underlit meniscus of water, and one amazing and surprisingly emotional sequence following the flight of two ducks across a rolling black landscape. A perfect example of music and visual conceived and performed together with the scale and intimacy to astound.
We fit shooting on Sunday around John Shuttleworth, whose domestic turn of phrase and Brylcreem-smudged leathery Sheffield bark won me over back when John Peel used to play the single Austin Ambassador Y-Reg on Radio 1. He shared a tender ballad called Two Margerines, about that heartbreaking moment when you have to choose which tub to eat from when you’ve bought 2-for-1. Jilted John also made an appearance later in the day and played a song that entered the charts 30 years ago this year.
Scene from a puppet show, a stop on The Art Trail
Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was rolling over the spreading trees when the pyrotechnics went up in the chilling fields. There’s some beautiful footage in my rucksack of fireworks lighting up the whole valley and the clouds and casting the crowds in silhouette. Afterwards we took in some Asian Dub Foundation DJing in the dance tent, and later Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry painted live on stage to interpret Adrian Sherwood’s dub mixing, making messy, dramatic canvasses and signing them SCRATCH.
Best of the Fest: AV a-go-go
As a festival, the space was well-managed but with too few water taps that were badly drained, and three quarters of the site are on a 45º incline - including camping area - leading wags to dub the place ‘Big Hill’ with signature lightening wit. But the schedule was packed with tempting performances, many of whose names I never learned as there was so much to see, and stages were far easier to find and identify than at Secret Garden Party, the weather held up sweetly and the multimedia Arts Trail was a beautiful touch that ensured the last night was a special one. Thanks to Shep, to Phloss, and to the weather for the spectacular showbiz exit:
Just got in the door from SGP, furry mouth, crusty soles and all. Photos coming soon. We were praying for rain by the end of Saturday. All available shade was packed tighter than a suitcase with hungover revellers (dehydration was rife; there were about 5 taps to provide water for 125,000 people - sort it out SGP) so when some drizzle leaked down and cloud washed over the sun the party picked up where it had dripped off. The atmosphere was charmingly playful; costumes, characters, games and silliness, Mud wrestling and flinging oneself down a hill in a tractor tyre, wheelchair or customised bike, makeshift waterslides, and canoe trips out to a beautiful pirate ship moored in the centre of the lake.
We scheduled a trip out to the pirate ship for Sunday morning, thinking we would appreciate the shade and relative quiet (once the sun starts to rise in this weather, sleeping in a tent turns your face into a friend egg and your clothes into microwaved clingfilm - fugeddaboudit) but never made it as they burned the ship down in a blaze of fireworks and floating lanterns that rose into the sky in a perfect staggered column of light to announce the arrival of a certain Grace Jones to the main stage that night. She made an imposing entrance with typically harsh but beautiful visuals, but the steep, crowded and oddly shaped terrain and dodgy sound quality motivated us to drift off to be drummed to sleep in the Peace Circle by a growing troupe of tripping percussionists.
For me the standout festival act was Beardyman, who now loops his vocal acrobatics in real-time onstage using a sampler to create rich layered beds over which he spat some deep DnB riffs. The Home and Away theme re-engineered as a beatboxed mash-up in the Valley of the Antics tent got a particularly rowdy reception. The kamikaze downhill death derby (people nearly died, it was invigoratingly reckless - the child who, by the skin of his teeth, ducked a man in a tractor tyre as it flew over a ramp of hay bales got a huge cheer, topped only by the cheer that went up when the tyre and its passenger then rolled into the lake HAW HAW FAIL LOL) proved a huge spontaneous hit and was a pretty memorable occasion, a highlight in a lot of Gardener’s memories no doubt.
Yet there was so much more going on than music. We were treated to impromptu poetry by Hammer and Tongue, a collective led by Angry Sam and some brilliantly boisterous wordsmiths, chilled out on cushions and watched massage, games, mud wrestling, boating, swimming, knocked back energy drinks laced with guarana and lime, lay on straw watching experimental film, climbed stacks of bales, made friends with strangers who turned out to be neighbours (back home in the East End), painted faces, posted secrets, fed zebras, cut loose, kicked back and generally let the festival happen to us. St. Etienne were usurped by a straw fight, which leeched their crowd away in the prayed-for drizzle. Their crass visuals didn’t help; alternating between basic shapes and the band’s name, matched only by light-entertainment chancers the H**siers’ projections, which again relied on the sight of the band’s brand in cursive script.
Security was lax between sites and on the gate, everything was a bit pricey, choice was narrow and barely any of the stages were signposted (deliberately, most likely, to ensure visitors explore thoroughly and don’t stick to their schedule of bands they already know) and no timetable of acts available (ditto), but there was something genuinely magical about the festival, and authentic passion for silliness, play and imagination that set it apart from its commercially sponsored peers. My set was an hour long and closed the Valley of the Antics stage on the last night, minimal and bold, graphic and simple, centred imagery isolated from the edges of the screen with negative space. The crowd extended out into the field, poured over bales, crashed into the barriers and pogoed in the mosh pit even after we pulled the plug.
As usual the best thing about the festival were the people. Thankyou Mtnz for the photography, Bunny, Alex, Emma, Nikhil, Felix, Lucia, and Al, and Neil and Simon at Productions London for such a winner of a weekend, and see you all next year.
Details of Resolume Avenue 3 features are hatching out of this site like flying ants in a London heatwave. Resolume is a brilliant software package for triggering live visuals; a bit dense and dry to the uninitiated but very practical and visual once you’re accustomed to the interface. The most exciting feature for me has to be that Avenue is written using cross-platform technologies like openGL and a cross-platform programming language c/c++, so it finally runs on the Mac - everything else is a bonus. No more rebooting in Windows, no more self-congratulatory anti-virus proclamations (yeah, you blocked a pop-up, but you announced it via a whole string of NOISY pop-ups… ), no more unexplained crashing and driver re-installing!
Where where we? Oh yeah. I can see the video mapping capabilities, for mapping the output image to a specified terrain or shape, the multi-screen and the sound-output features getting a caning from me when I snap this software up once I’m back from next weekend’s Big Chill 2008.
Fat Butcher will be taking over a corner of the Secret Garden Party this weekend, providing visuals in another big top, this time the all-new Valley of the Antics stage.
My set is on the Sunday night so I’ll be having a wander round on the Saturday and hopefully catch Grace Jones as I missed her and the outfits when she sashayed through London this month, and also beatboxing genius Beardyman. This is my second time working with Productions London and I’m expecting the music in the Antics tent to be as heavy as it was at 93 Feet East last week.
Trend-buckers Radiohead have released a video made without cameras or lights. You can download the data and play with it yourself here.
It’s also well worth having a look at the Making Of to see how the technology works. The potential of this sort of scanning system in film and visuals to create some groundbreaking visual narratives is exciting, possibly even as adaptable as Michel Gondry’s Bullet Time technique. As far as promoting a song goes, allowing fans to download the scanner data from Google Code for their own creative gains is pretty innovative and in keeping with the band’s mission to rip up the pop marketing rule book and line our skulls with the shreds.
5 live acts covering dnb, hiphop, alt. and beatboxing at Brick Lane’s estimable 93 Feet East, visuals by Fat Butcher.
7:00PM - 1:00AM FREE BEFORE 8PM / £3 BEFORE 9PM / £5 AFTER.
Production London’s Second Summer party, With Utah Jazz bringing his high Energy, Funk-fuelled Drum and bass sets, Captive state’s 8 piece live band pits horns to accordions to bring an effortless of Electronic alternative vibe, The Cheeky Cheeky Nose Bleeds are in NME’s 10 young bands to see this summer with catchy tracks such as ‘Slow Kids’ and ‘You Let Me Go’ pop fun you cannot miss, Hella Cholla smooth acustic sounds will kick the night off With a ‘BANG!’ As ever Pikey Esquire will be comparing with his musical mouth. With fun and frolics in the courtyard and the usual DJs (formally of BANG!) keeping the pink bar bouncing as always this is going to be fun.
UPDATE
Saturday was a busy night with a heavy quartet of live acts. Standout band Captive State premiered a new song and proved, er… captivating. Live they came across as something betweeen Arcade Fire and Hot Chip, with 7 musicians swapping instruments and trading really sweet harmonies onstage. Thanks to Francoise at 93FE for his prompt ladder scaling, to the ingenious Pikey Esquire for the vodka and beatboxing and to Simon and Neil at Productions London for throwing us all together.
Exciting news about lost portions of Fritz Lang’s landmark film Metropolis turning up in Argentina. This was the first film I started taking images and shots from when I began VJing and occasionally Maria and her gynoid doppelganger turn up at shows like Bassline and Interzone.
Metropolis has to be seen to be believed - it’s framed and paced like a graphic novel, with clever effects and animation integrated subtly into the print to create a believeable and prophetic dystopia. Like all dystopias the power to change is in the hands of the proletariat - but will they realise that and take back the power? Or will they permit themselves to be manipulated by an artificial beauty and continue sacrificing their lives to fund the party lifestyles of the rich few?
I’ve searched around and according to Obsessed with Film the refurbished original cut will be available on Blu Ray in 2009. Here are some screen grabs from the found segments courtesy of AICN, which apparently reveal a new character and tidy up some of the plot’s loose ends:
And below are some grabs from my VJ archives. The film is perfect for visuals because it’s so beautifully photographed in the German Expressionist style with bold shadow and isolated action, meaning it mixes well against negative space - plus the print has cute rounded edges. Aw, cuddles, c’mere… rrrrr.
Spent a week in the MoS-TV last month animating scenes for the new Hed Kandi Summer Mix CD. This one was somewhat more elaborate than the last HK spot, which involved only one scene reworked for several shots. The concept of this one, worked up by art director James Worsely from illustrations by regular HK cover artist Jason Brooks, involved a handful of vignettes following some characters on a brief sojourn in the balaerics, presumably taking time off from their jobs as giraffe lingerie models. The speedboat, crashing wave, leaping fish and flapping silks were most fun to animate.
Bringing illustrations to life requires an eye for stylised movement - the temptation sometimes is to make things look more realistic, but it’s such an artificial world that if you don’t observe its internal logic your real-world textures or physics will jar with the artwork. The silhouettes were shot in the club against greenscreen and keyed out in After Effects - and yes, that really was a real saxophone. Go clubbing without a brass section? Have a word with yourself mate.
So I read in the Guardian that Peter Greenaway was invited to create an AV installation to promote the newly-restored Last Supper by some da Vinci bloke. Greenaway’s messed around with VJing before; at last year’s onedotzero he premiered a piece that explored screen-in-screen technique and suitcases. With this piece the concern was that he’d damage the painting or blaspheme - as screens go, a 510-year-old vignette of a mortal God’s last meal is one expensive and risky backdrop.
“Greenaway’s production team said they are now keen to find an art gallery in Britain that could stage The Last Supper show on a full-size replica. Meanwhile, Greenaway plans to repeat the trick on Las Meninas by Velázquez, Picasso’s Guernica, Monet’s Waterlilies and a Jackson Pollock in New York.
His ultimate ambition is to take on Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and talks have begun with its gatekeepers at the Vatican.”
So perhaps we can expect this kind of installation to be a new growing trend. Having just enjoyed a couple of similar comissions myself (see After The Ice, and also a multimedia music and light show about Marc Chagall I animated last year) I can say that it’s extremely pleasurable to take apart and rebuild painted works digitally, and the opportunity to play with famed images, iconoclastically, reverently or experimentally can generate quite a hypnotic reverie in a crowd well-versed with the original. At its best I think this kind of installation can be a document of how the image could have come into being, physically, as a record of instinctive gesture and practised, systematic action, and a rejuvenation of a work now absorbed into the popular consciousness until its original passion has become soggy and flavourless. At it’s worst it could be a load of flashing lights and ‘modern opera’ in an austere flagstoned setting surrounded by money men holding their breath. But until I’ve seen one of these Greenaway pieces up close I’ll reserve judgement…
VJ blog covering digital visuals in theatre, art spaces, concert and club venues, festivals and the streets. Updated every now and then without fail.
wtf is photosonica?
Real-time video collage, digital projection, LCD visualisation, video light shows, immersive ambience, animation, film, motion graphics, snaking, snapping and synched with live music.
Band visuals, concert visuals, atmospheric surrounds, digital backdrops, theatrical ambience, unidentified lights in the sky and spots behind the eyes.
Bookings, commissions, inquiries and brown paper packages tied up with string to:
fatbutcher@gmail.com
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