So it’s time for VJs on the radio again. The Swedish radio show Ström (P2) has dedicated a whole show to the VJ scene. The interviews were carried out by Hanna “Knivflickan” Kihlander a few months ago and has now been edited together to a fabulous show with electronic music between the interviews. The show includes Linnea “Morrsken” Forslund, Joel Dittrich, Mikael “The Midi Thief” Wehner, Vidiots, and Nicolas Boritch from AntiVJ. All interviews are in Swedish except for the one with Nicolas Boritch.

Check out the homepage for the show and listen to the VJ episode. The audio stream is available 30 days after it first aired.

B6, DJ/Producer

The Volt crew came back with yet another festival at the concert hall in Uppsala. I recognized a lot of faces from last year. It feels like Volt only invites their friends to perform, but with friends like these, who could blame them? And if it wasn’t for the friendship, we wouldn’t be there either.

The VJ line up was actually pretty much identical to last year. Me (The Midi Thief) and Ben (Synthetics) from Instructions, Morrsken, Lysbang and the Vidiots, Joel Dittrich and Martin Söderblom. The Field had brought their own VJ, Victor Tarre, who did wonderful visuals for The Field‘s live set.

There was a part in Tarre’s visuals that looked like they were parts of a music video. It was made with few clips but cut in a very neat way. I got hold of Victor Tarre and asked him a few questions about his techniques and work process.

TMT = Me/The Midi Thief, VT = Victor Tarre

TMT: Is this material from a music video?

VT: The idea comes from an early draft of a music video for the Field that was never finished. Originally I thought of using the studio footage and the outdoors footage with 50% opacity composed on top of each other to create the feeling of “a giant” that uses buildings and things as instruments. This technique has been used in many movies before special effects, 3D and tracking was invented. The technique is based on having a lot of contrast in size between the two clips that are matched against each other. For example, a book could become a container, a cassette tape could be a car on a street, a bridge could be a harp.

When the footage had been filmed and captured we realized that it was a bit slow and boring having these clips multiplied on top of each other. Axel’s (The Field) music is not at all boring, rather funky and danceable. The music is built up by fragment and to use the same fragment approach on the movie clips seemed to work out great.

A display of Victor Tarre’s techniques

TMT: First I didn’t realize that it was live visuals. It was so tight that I thought it was triggered from Ableton Live over MIDI sync. Also because of the few clips used, it seemed unnecessary to use a VJ. So I was surprised when Axel told me that your were mixing it live. Could you tell us about how you synced up with Axel and what hardware and software you were using?

VT: I use software from the stone age called Wirecast that is made for editing live television. The program is really simple but since I only have film clips and never use graphics or typography interactively during the performances, Wirecast does it’s job. The synchronization is an illusion. The brain wants to put images together with sound and since it’s a pretty intensive play with perspectives or brains will fix the rest. But of course, I have different speeds that I know works when the clips work together the music’s BPM.

Me and Ben were happy to have received the evening’s prime spot, The Le Petit Orb live set, a streamlined version of the legendary British The Orb. Graphically we were more in sync than ever and we were really pleased with how the evening turned out. You can read more about the gig on our blog, www.instructions.se

Joel Dittrich and Martin Söderblom

Martin & Joel did a marathon set in one of the DJ rooms. I stopped by during the Chinese DJ act B6 and it both looked and sounded great. They had talked to B6 before the gig and decided on an abstract theme. The Vidiots were doing visuals for Shinedoe, a female Dutch DJ and remix artist. They had left their midi controllers at home but luckily we cold lend them ours which I think are the exact same ones as they usually use. It took a little while for the boys to get into the groove but once they did they delivered a potpourri of great Vidiots VJ classics. I didn’t get to see Lysbang’s nor Morrsken’s sets but it’s always a pleasure to meet them.

The Vidiots visuals for Shinedoe

The night ended up with a VJ/DJ Sandwich party (oh no, not THAT kind of sandwich…) in the hotel lobby. We had Gabba techno girl Funky Tuna, techno legend Håkan Lidbo, Shinedoe, me, Ben, Joel Dittrich and a sleeping Martin Söderblom. Pretty cheerful crowd that no outsider could break into and believe me there were attempts. There was this strange fellow that showed up. Picture this: A middle aged man, kind of buff in sweat pants and a yellow busy Ed Hardy t-shirt, eye shadow and a plate of french fries. He started rambling about having 4 mille alcohol in his blood and having to leave his Porsche (stuffed with no less than four Fender Stratocasters) around the corner. He also claimed to have been bitten by a cobra about a week earlier and he had a red swollen leg to show for it. None of us had any muster left to deal with this guy so he wandered off to the hotel shop and started stealing ladies underwear (at least that’s what it looked like because I… that’s what it looked like).

It might just be the biggest article ever about VJs in swedish press. Cap & Design features a 6-page article called “Design on the dance floor” written by Mats Almegård. It includes interviews with The Midi Thief, Morrsken, Vidots, Joel Dittrich and Bertrand Gondouin. Issue nr 4 is out in the stands now.

Sheer is a commercial codec that looks a bit better than Photo JPEG but results in slightly bigger files. Sheer also has support for alpha channel. The question is – is it worth $149?

Bart from Resolume was saying that the Sheer codec was not that great and accusing David from Vidvox of promoting the codec out of commercial reasons. David already denied any money being involved in his first post.

[Edit] This thread was started in 2005 so the initial posts are pretty old (like Daves and Barts comments), but the last posts with comparison of codecs is from a recent date. [/Edit]

In the same thread you could learn that you could swap the Animation codec for the more modern, faster, smaller PNG codec to get that nice alpha channel.

Read the whole thread here.

Some good news for Resolume users: Resolume has develeoped a new video codec called DXV toghter with The Pixel Addicts and UnitedVisualArtists. DXV is hardware accellerated and will decompress the frames using the video card’s GPU which is faster than using the computer’s CPU as conventional codecs does. This will result in the abillity to mix more video layers with higher resolution.

The codec is cross-platform and will work in all Quicktime enabled applications but the hardware accelleration will only be enabled in Resolume. And best of all, it’s for free. Read more and download the plugin on Resolumes home page.

I just found this (probably old?) comic strip on Rocky’s MySpace page where Mange just started doing video art but Klasse disses him stone cold. It’s couple of good puns in this strip. (Rocky is a swedish cartoon by Martin Kellerman).

beta.vjcentral.com

Sveriges Radio stores their programs for  30 days. Click here to find the interview, pick 18:30-19:00!