A List of Video Performance Events

(Download the HD [700Mb] version here — takes a long time.)

Eclipse Festival is a yearly electronic music festival in Quebec, Canada. The Quebec government subsidizes it with an arts grant.

This year I got to perform at the Stellar Stage, which was a new stage geared for a more contemplative experience. The music of the night was dub step and the ambiance was focused but energized.

Using content from my summer project, the Blacklight Elves, combined with 3D animated backgrounds (some of which were found and some of which were created), I wove together a loose narrative set to the music. At certain point the eleves became angry, attacking insects in the air — we know those from festivals. At other points the played the flute, which was reflected by the music.

The footage was filmed by Seven Nescent and VJ Hotbot helped me perform for part of the set. It’s always fun when a friend can help out by jamming in effects one never thought of throwing in the mix. There’s a great synergy with the SMUC (Super Mega Ultra Crew) team.

Next on the agenda is Harvest Festival, which is going to be different. I think the elves content is done with for now. Maybe I will make it available online as stock footage.

Lester Alfonso, award-winning documentary film-maker as well as video jockey, deserves an honourable mention.

At this year’s Eclipse Festival in Gatineau Quebec, Lester put together two dazzling performances at the Solar and Stellar Stages. Eclipse Festival is one of the biggest electronic music festivals in central Canada, drawing an audience of thousands. It is also subsidized by the Quebec government through a grant.

Lester has been steadily building his reputation by performing at various events since 2006. He has earned respect and recognition by being a reliable VJ who always delivers a good show. He has been very supportive of other VJs; helping them get established and giving them recognition as well.

It is a real tragedy that at Eclipse Festival, all of Lester’s gear was stolen. His computer, controller, camera, and hard drives were all stolen. For someone with so much creativity, this is a real downer.

I sincerely hope that Lester finds a way to create, either by finding new tools or some other way. Maybe his community and audience will help him out with a FUNraiser or maybe there is another creative solution for the near-term? In the end something like this can ‘make it better’, in the sense that there could be newer and more passionate work to show despite this setback.

I hope that the audience who has been blessed by Lester’s great visuals and hours upon hours of work appreciates all he’s done for them. It really is a lot of work and risk to be a VJ. We are a breed of artists still struggling for recognition on this continent. We are the brave pioneers who risk much for our audience.

This month I had the privledge of performing at an outdoor music festival called In:Fuse. Much thanks goes out to the organizers, including: ORP, VJ Siren Sativa, VJ Guy.

Actually this is the same event that scheduled my to VJ for my first time a year ago! I feel like I have learned and improved so much in a year’s time.

Here’s a short clip of the Moonbase stage featuring the elf compilation from Silvan Dawn with different text:

Here’s another clip of the same VJ/DJ set with a different character. This time the footage is not beatmatched.

The bugs fly around randomly. It’s a flash file I programmed that loads a 3D models and moves it randomly.

The last weekend of May was the dawn of a new level of visual story-telling for me.

Silvan Dawn was an epic 24-hr party that called for a special video project. The theme was obvious: elves and forest backgrounds.

Some of my friends helped me out a lot with this project. Together we staged a green screen video shoot, where 5 models were dressed as elves, including prosthetic elf ears, UV reactive elements and clothing donated by the Faeries Pajamas. I was lucky enough to be able to used my friends’ green screen space and HD video camera.

What I thought would either be really funny or really good turned out to be really delightful and good.

The videos were processed so that the green screen was removed, creating the appearance that the videos were part of the background. With 8 layers of videos that are beatmatched it’s possible to tell a story set to music.

The following are some edits I made, where I tried to match up the right footage to what was filmed at the event.

The next two edits are set to music recorded at the event, but are not matched to the actual footage.

Here’s another blog entry from Lester Alfonso who called me ‘VJ of the Month’.

Thanks Lester for the shout-outs!

After having my laptop stolen twice, I had a couple of months to recover my clips, hardware, software, and to being again.

This time I considered how a VJ team would help a lot. People could help watch the equipment, help render video and help perform. When given the chance for a solo show, it adds up to a lot of work for one person. So, making a VJ team made perfect sense to me, since a lot of promoters want one goto VJ. Also sometimes VJs have incompatible equipment.

The VJ crew I got together is called Super Mega Ultra Crew or SMUC. My friend Svebor, aka VJ Minus and my friend Christina, aka VJ Hotbot are part of it.

Together we made a composition for Big Bang Boom, a circus/dubstep event by CirQlar. We each performed in 30 minute increments, which worked out well and turned out to be super fun.  Hotbot  helped sell some tickets and rendered a few clips. Minus helped with rigging.

The end result was a 30 foot projection (diagonal) with my 4000 lumens projector onto the ceiling above the stage. I felt that this was the first time my beamer had been used to its full potential. The other times, this overly bright projector competed with blacklights. In any case, it looked great. Later we experimented with projecting onto the stage with a mask.

Dreamscape offered an opportunity to re-develop my style after having put together some new content for Trifecta NYE and Blue Moon January 2010.

My approach had changed since my laptop got stolen. Rather than trying to make all my own content for any situation out there, I was now attempting to create a unique experience for each event. I would look at the theme and try to create something new and back it up with things that I found.

For this event, I found a lot of footage of timelapse landscapes and combined it with some flash text from the flyer. Since I was doing the introduction, I started it off with visible chilled out landscapes and ended it with lots of effects in an abstract multi-layered composition. At the very end I did a versus set with Lester Alfonso and it turned out great.

After my set I put my laptop on the VJ table, which was on stage, but exposed. I assumed it would be fine and left it there with the other VJs who were performing. When I looked for it a few hours later it was gone and nobody had seen anything. So once again, my laptop was stolen along with some of the content. I had this event documented because the footage was still on my camera.

Lessons learned:

• lock your gear
• get a gig case
• backup your work

What followed was a battle to recouperate. I almost gave up on being a VJ, but I decided to keep trying because some things are worth it when they are difficult. Luckily, I had bought this laptop on a credit card and it was stolen while the purchase protection was still in effect. So, I got a new one without having to pay again.

Dimension Drift was my ticket back to being a VJ. My roommate’s laptop and my laptop had been stolen in the last week of October in a brazen house burglary.  Along with them, months of my original 3D animations, my process work for the Cut and Paste Competitions, all my VJ loops, and all my documentation of previous events.

Tomasch and Boris were nice enough to invite me to play at this event. With only a couple of weeks to prep, I got as much content together as I could. My old style was gone however. Most of the unique animation I made were no longer part of the composition and instead I had VJ loops graciously donated by the VJ community.

Previous Undocumented Events:

• Blue Moon January 2010
• Shakti Collective/Drumlore/Timewave Trifecta NYE 2009
• All Stars Festival August 2009
• Organic Family One Channel August 2009
• Blacklight Activists Why Not Wednesdays 2009
• Om Festival 2009 (VJ Debut)