Live show visuals

[laborcamp]

I posted this in performing modular live thread, but, it belongs here too:

[Album] piotr szyhalski / laborcamp

my custom AV-drill!

The manic spinning videos were projected on a big two-projector screen, with performers on both sides of the screen, positioned just so, that the “vortex” of the spinning images aligned with their heads…

The drill videos stop suddenly every now and then, revealing various locations when they were shot. I was thinking of these brief moments that allow us to orient ourselves in space, only to be immediately thrust into the madness again…

During a different section of the event, the same projectors facilitated a large text slowly slipping out of the center of the screen:

Projected text provided a textual counterpoint to a live voice (a kind of call and response relationship). The material I used to make the screen, and the custom designed font is echoing my work on the Banner Project I have been maintaining since 2015:

here is the “Banners In Action” album:

Labor Camp

]

For the first part of the performance, the giant screen effectively cut the space in the venue in half. Eventually the screen was lifted up, and the rest of the event contained no projections.

I should add, that the live movement components, to me, are as important “visuals” as video or anything else that is happening (for example during the entire event, we are also printing posters that at the end are distributed to the audience.) So, the “material” and the challenge of this form is to attempt to consider all the elements in relation to each other, with some sense of cohesion or/and intentionality.

Posters:

[jrdnrndl]

No, not that DMX.

I’m preparing for a 2019 full of live performances, which will consist of hardware (octatrack, synths, fx) working in tandem with my eurorack rig. As part of my show, I’ll be including strobe and multicolor lights onstage, along with projected visuals. I’m devising an overall strategy to give myself fine control over the dynamics of the lighting based on various realtime input. I figure that this will look like MIDI events piping through a laptop or hardware DMX controller and out to the lights, which is easy enough to conceptualize with my octa, but I’d also like to have the option of CV-controlled events.

Let’s say that, as a simple example, I have in my patch a gate that opens the filter on a voice, and that I want a strobe light to activate as long as that gate is open. Do I want a CV-to-MIDI module that goes to the controller? What might be a good option?

Has anyone done this (live lighting with modular) and have some tips or avenues to investigate? Can anyone recommend software or hardware lighting controllers? I’m a newbie in this world. Thanks!

[jnoble]

I’ve done it, yes: I built a 5X3 bipolar matrix mixer around a voltage-to-dmx board. It works great!

Mine is centered around generating RGB, but in principle you could do whatever you wanted.

[thom]

Do you happen to have a video of your system in action (and would you mind to share it) ?
I’d really like to see that !

[jnoble]

I don’t have any video, sadly. I haven’t used it in quite some time–bringing lighting and the modular to gigs is more than I want to deal with.

[carltesta]

Do you plan on using a computer to control the DMX lighting? I’d suggest using OSC instead of MIDI for the lighting as there are often buffer limitations involved with MIDI. I’ve had a lot of success using Open Lighting Architecture OLA to send DMX via OSC commands. If you have an ES-8 or something else like that you could send CV into the computer and then translate the CV into OSC to control the lighting. I’ve done this before with very simple single channel lights (no RGB).

[jrdnrndl]

This is very helpful and along the lines of my skill level/needs. Thanks I’ll check it out!

[thom]

(…) bringing lighting and the modular to gigs is more than I want to deal with.

I can totally understand.

[jrdnrndl]

I guess I’m a glutton for punishment, ha! I tend to bring way too much crap to gigs.

[m.jaeger]

Perhaps my favorite use of visuals. I like strobes.

[jrdnrndl]

Alva Noto is a huge influence.

Also recently inspired by Jung An Tagen’s live visuals (epilepsy warning):

And the legend Ryoji Ikeda (epilepsy warning also lol):

[shellfritsch]

i just posted some excerpts from the visuals i made for kaitlyn aurelia smith’s live tour of the “the kid”

it was all practical special fx photography with video processing. no computer animation.

the visuals ran from a second computer - projected onto a big screen behind kaitlyn - and were synchronized with her performance via midi.

i had a lot of fun making these. most of my film work is very premeditated with lots of planning and intense focus on the execution. this was a nice break from all that. i went into the studio every day not really knowing what was going to happen. so many surprises!

i think visuals are a wonderful opportunity to enhance and extend a live performance. in the case of this project there was no stage lighting and kaitlyn was more of a silhouette (when we could get the venue to provide good projection, or even better a video wall).

[Jonny]

These are great. I imagine that they were very immersive. Love that they contain no computer animation too.

Hope I get to see Kaitlyn and you perform one day. (psst …pass through Pittsburgh next east coast tour!)

[Puscha]

Some amazing ideas here! Inspired!

I’ve been using minimalist, slow documentary footage of nature that I’ve shot around the world. Not the most exciting idea, but I’ve been to some incredible and photogenic places that make it much more interesting, such as Iceland, Tasmania and Antarctica.

Here’s an example of some Southern Ocean footage that I’ve been performing with, also used in this music video:

[chapelierfou]

I’d like to share here a video of one of my gigs, during the last tour.
I’ve been reluctant, for years, to introduce video in my live shows, because I always thought that the musicians are the show. I mean, when you go see a classical orchestra, there’s no light show, and it’s by no means boring. To me, the importance of the light show is usually meaning : “I admit my show is boring, let’s distract people with flashy lights and trippy videos”.
For this tour (the Muance Tour), I finally decided that it would make sense, with a few conditions :

• the scenography should visually echo the album
• musicians should have a way to interact with the lights and video, at least sometimes
• synchronicity is quite important but improvisation in song structures should also be possible

So, given that the album is structured around a six-note pattern (opening the first track “Philémon”), we build ourself four “sculptures” inspired by Sol Lewitt, filled with 6 led stripes, so we can underline the six-note pattern (that I called the “Philémotif”), which comes either as loops or as one-shots “jingles” depending on the context.
Also, I was sending OSC data to the video/light guy, synchronized with Ableton Live’s MIDI clips, or linked with drum pads (for one shots, played live), or MIDI faders/knobs info when it made sense (see “Temps Utile” for instance at 19’35’’).
Lastly, the sound of acoustic instruments is analyzed at the mixing desk (with a dedicated computer and soundcard) and generates data to control video parameters.

VIDEO :

[instantjuggler]

really great set design! in general i’m impressed and love how clean you’ve kept the rest of the stage elements as well, not just the live visuals and infrastructure design. all your instrument tables and cables look so good… the whole stage really supports your music and performance. so hard to do, keeping clutter out, and having a simple image. respect!!!

[chapelierfou]

Thanks,
it’s all hand-made and we had quite a long thinking with the whole crew. Yeah, the furniture itself would be a long story to tell as well. We designed it so (when preparing stuff backstage) we could setup in something like 15 minutes.

[kza]

Man I love this whole video and music and visuals and arte recording. Big up!

[karol]

I am really impressed by what I have seen in this thread. From my experience as mostly solo player it helps me a lot when I don’t need to sequence visuals separately so most of the time I try to send to the visualizations the same midi data that I send to instruments. Mostly I have been writing simple stuff in processing.org that reacts to midi using midibus(http://www.smallbutdigital.com/projects/themidibus/) but after some testing I had really great experience with Lumen (https://lumen-app.com) I think that especially for solo musician it is important not to try to develop everything ourselves and having a tool that already synthesizes video helps a lot and a big plus is that Lumen reacts to midi.
Here is one of my test videos where I used octatrack to create audio and used midi tracks from octatrack to drive visuals. I think that for such small setup (octatrack + computer running only Lumen) the effects are really good (sorry for the horrible video compression of youtube which does not make the visualizations a justice)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHdEDX-WxUQ
I know that I stress this a lot but having one place (octatrack) to sequence music and visualizations helped me not to change “contexts” while playing song and also allowed to improvise a little with visualizations by changing triggers etc.

[Cromatica45]

Hi!

I’m looking for an HD projector to use it in my live performances to show live visuals created with Touchdesigner when playing my modular rig, and also to do outdoors experiments with video mapping and things like this. I would like to have one to use it on my experiments, and only rent bigger ones in bigger live shows when needed. My target price will be 3.000$.

Any recommendations here from people using them in live installations or performances?

Thanks a lot!