Research – Vjing
This piece of research has helped me not only in general film production terms but also more specifically with the ‘portrait of a place’ project.
I chosen to cover VJ’ing as its something ive been interested in for quite a while, but never really knew much about.
This year how ever I witnessed two absolutely amazing live shows, using VJing to a shockingly brilliant level.
These were ‘Aphex Twin’ live and ‘Dj Yoda’ live, both shows have left an impact on me and urged me to find out more.
The videos of ‘Aphex twin’ really don’t do the show justice what so ever as they all filmed from the crowd.
The show was a combination of trippy visuals combined with live feeds of the crowd, cutting certain subject faces and swapping their bodies, or replacing their faces with those of ‘Aphex twin’, it was incredible.
The ‘Dj Yoda’ show whilst seeming less complicated then that of the above, was a lot more structured, every single track and sample fit snuggly with the visuals and provided a hugely comical and surprising twist to the show.
Another act that has inspired me to broaden my knowledge on this subject is ‘Coldcut’.
The British duo are world renowned for both their musical and visual prowess and were amongst the first of those to utilize technology to create an audio-visual show.
Their video’s for ‘timber’ and ‘Natural rhythm’ are amazing pieces of audio-visual work, using editing and sampling to create not only impressive, experimental music video’s but also incredibly interesting music, all from environmental and natural sounds and images.
So what is VJ’ing?
VJ’ing is a fully live, visual performance using various pieces of media to create a real time, changing image.
To put it simply, it is similar to Dj’ing but using film and video clips and/or special effects instead of music.
VJ’ing is nearly always in conjunction with DJ’ing.
Be it as a simple decoration in a nightclub, to a fully-fledged entertainment show, like those I mentioned above.
It brings a new sense to the feeling of enjoying music, stimulating you visually as well as audibly.
The equipment for Vj’ing is ever changing as is technology, but always revolves around a library of media being edited and mixed live.
This could range from old VHS tapes to modern special effects and animation stored on a hard drive to live camera input and images and clips taken straight from the Internet.
Company’s such as ‘Vixid’ and ‘Modul8’ are two of A handful that are actually creating hardware and software specifically for Vj’s.
http://www.vixid.com/index.php?m=134&rub=3&lang=en
http://www.modul8.ch
How has Vj’ing influenced my approach to film making?
Whilst Vj’ing is a parallel universe in film making terms to what project’s I'm currently under going, I believe it’s easy to harvest a wealth of idea’s and inspiration from the craft.
The editing and piecing together of images is very fluent and organic, seeing as much of it is performed live it creates an erratic, unpredictable and almost animalistic style of cutting that I feel comes across naturally progressive and is similar to the experimental path I wish to tread.
I hope to recreate this feeling in my ‘Portrait of a place’ piece, lending many idea’s from the concept of VJ’ing and coupling the unorthodox method of editing with the natural environment found in Edale.
I will continue to look in to Vj’ing further then this project alone and hopefully will soon have a grasp on the basic’s of live performance myself.
Here are some website’s that have helped me along the way :
http://www.vjs.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VJ_(video_performance_artist)#cite_note-15
http://visualmusicarchive.org/
http://www.resolume.com/
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