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tagged: light surgeons

chase & status » saxon

saxon was a straight 2D after effects mission, animating up the cover artwork and compositing into it carnival soundsystem footage. its a heavy dubstep track, and i spent some time making the visuals really follow the bass… looping keyframe expressions ahoy. i’ll upload videos once the tour is over.

diary | 20 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · light surgeons

chase & status » is it worth it?

in many ways, this is my favourite video. they wanted the vocalists up on the screen, and this certainly delivers but taking it into chris cunningham territory. the magic was shooting with two cameras simultaneously, one recording crystal clear HD and the other super contrasty nightshot, while flicking the lights around. just compositing the two straight gave a crazy shifting ghost effect, and after some audioreactive magic and graphics passes the effect is really intricate. and with barely a manual keyframe, to boot.

i’ve made a 4-up frame to try and give an idea, but in retrospect it should have been a filmstrip of adjacent frames, the representation of takura flickering around.

diary | 20 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · light surgeons

chase & status » against all odds

chase and status delivery time: here’s a still from against all odds. this was a nice one to make, splicing together with a good dose of graphical sensibility the card-game-in-a-smoky-nightclub promo video c&s had already with the vocalist shoot we did at the beginning of the project.

diary | 20 sep 2009 | tagged: vj · light surgeons

chase & status » plan b shoot

finally, its plan b for the rip-it-up pieces and their new single ‘end credits’, taken from the upcoming film harry brown. think gran turino but with michael caine instead of clint eastwood, but from the opening minute that i’ve seen, hard hitting would be an understatement.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

chase & status » takura shoot

third up, takura for three tracks. we’re in double shoot mode here, flicking the lights and filming in HD and nightshot going for some frenetic cuts when it gets to post.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

chase & status » jenna g shoot

onto jenna g for [in love]. this started off all warm orange fuzz, and ended up barely blue. strange how things evolve sometimes.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

chase & status » kano shoot

into the studio with chris allen for a day’s shoot of chase & status vocalists. i’m pulling together the visuals for the chase & status autumn tour for the light surgeons. this was the first step: film four vocalists over seven tracks in one day. kano up first, though without the against all odds afro.

diary | 28 aug 2009 | tagged: *spark · vj · light surgeons · chase+status

onedotzero » live cinema at the bfi imax

i started writing an essay about this gig - the light surgeons performed “true fictions” and d-fuse presented “surface”, both huge and important works shown to a sell-out audience on the biggest screen in europe - but the window of opportunity to get it coherent let alone finished has passed for now, so here is a placeholder to say at least to say it happened.

thanks to laura fiorio for the photo

diary | 15 nov 2008 | tagged: vj · dfuse · light surgeons · onedotzero · live cinema

blackberry bold à la light surgeons

just finished a week production making the video content for the blackberry bold launch in the uk. while not the first time i’ve made stuff for led screens, its both amazing and terrifying seeing your seemingly perfect after effects composition playing out so big and so bright… any tiny mistake becomes crystal clear. also a test for live camera + laptop, combining band ‘the feeling’ with the neon backing comps. not as sucessful as i’d like, but still good to see and a good proving ground.
we rocked it tho’, with the goalposts changed at the last minute due to a sudden corporate influx from worldwide headquarters we pulled off a really nice balance of brand and bespoke imagery, to the point where said corporate types were overheard talking about ‘messing with the brand’ as a wonderful and mysterious thing: in short, london did itself proud.

diary | 24 jul 2008 | tagged: *spark · vj · vdmx · video-out · video-in · light surgeons

hello handheld low light

…and tim looking at the nth blackberry shot.

diary | 23 jul 2008 | tagged: errata of life · vj · light surgeons

southbank overture

here is ‘re-engaging reactive graphics’ from a post or two ago, in its final projected form (or at least, one frame of one of the permutations i delivered). its on tonight too, as part of the south bank’s overture event, the re-opening of the royal festival hall. 10.30

diary | 09 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · photo · light surgeons

re-engaging reactive graphics

back in the early days of visuals in brum with the most talented stef lewandowski, computers could barely hack video and so the dynamic stuff was a combination of flash and good old mixer twiddling. flash was cool for making loops, at a basic level if you had a few layers, you made them different lengths and they would loop independently pretty much always giving you a new combination with each frame… do that with a pre-rendered loop and it becomes clear you’ve only got a second or two worth of frames pretty immediately. then you could bring in text read on the fly into your graphics and allsorts.

all that pretty much got left behind when i went to the single laptop with the vdmx video based vj setup, quicktime loops or nowt. much richer, much more interesting capabilities for mixing that video, but no dynamic/generative content.

so continuing the theme of the vj platform really delivering on the mac nowadays, with dual-core/decent-gfx-chips and osx/vdmx-in-cocoa, it was nice to have a commission to make a graphic layer for the light surgeon’s contribution to the reopening of the royal festival hall, a commission where keyframing it all would be madness, and new the visual identity of the south bank centre lent itself to a generative machine.

so not quite hello flash again like the days of old, but quartz composer parsing the audio spectrum and turning that into reactive combinations of the sbc’s weave. and given the pain of editing a 4xSD wide canvas from a huge media library, its actually a shame the whole thing couldn’t have been a prototype for the innovative live setups coming into view.

diary | 06 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · light surgeons