This article came out before I started blogging but it is a good article on VJing http://remixmag.com/artists/remix_visual_bliss/index.html

DJ Mag's Top 20 VJ's Results are in!!!

THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR VOTING!
Grant comes in #6 for the UK edition of DJ Magazines' Top 20 VJs Worldwide. He is also voted the top North American VJ.

Thanks to everyone for voting. This is a step up from last year's number 7 ranking for Lumens/Dimension 7/Lightrrhythm Visuals. Results will be published in the December issue. You can get a sneak peak
here:
http://www.djmag.com/djtech015.php

Finally, I get hired to do outdoor projections in my own city. From the middle of Sept. to Oct. I was projecting on building around San Francisco and the bay area. To make things different Red Bull had two huge inflatable pile-ons (the same type that were used in the Red Bull Air Race) at each of the projection sites. This required 2 extra people to follow me around and setup these up each time we lit up a wall. Note: I took this picture before they got the pile-ons setup. I wanted to capture the last bit of evening light.

Red Bull's Opening Party for Hatch Fest. More shoots of the lobby of the Baxter Hotel. The following day Sean and I taught a class on VJing 101 and continue outdoor street projections for the festival.

Hatchfest 05 Bozeman MT. Bozeman rocks! I returned to Bozeman this year for the 2nd annual Hatchfest film fest. This year I brought Sean Cooper to help illuminate the Baxter Hotel. We setup 4 screens and one stretch fabric installation. I did an A/V set while Sean VJ'd. Mike Relm headlined with an A/V turntable set using a Pioneer DVJ. Mike had the place going off. Outside on Main St. there was a fashion show, fire performers and a performance with a Tesla Coil. It was like a mini Burning Man in downtown Bozeman.

From left to right Mark with Olga (VJ Oxygen) Kevlar, Oli (VJ Anyone), Ben Sheppee, Xarene VJ Culture, Dev and Nika (Ctrl Labs), Nate Pagel. Hanging out in Tokyo, our last evening together. More posts about the actual shows to come

Official SF Love Parade afterparty. 8 screens 2 15x20ft 2 10.5x15ft 3 7.510ft and one circular screen. 3 vj suites and matrix router. 24 hours straight from setup through performance to strike. 9 hours of performance and 3 VJ's (VJon, Sean Cooper and myself)

Renegade video projections

Here is a pic of the inverter, projector and laptop. We are renegade on top of a roof over looking the Art, Eats and Beats in Pontiac MI. At one point the promoter of the event saw the projections and started screaming in frustration. Pepsi was their sponsor. Casey from Simplistiks working the magic on the inverter. Down below 200,000 people are milling about.

Detroit Outdoor Projection

Outdoor projections for Red Bull in Detroit. I'm using a 5000 lumen projector that pulls 9amps. I was using a super powerful inverter and pulling power directly from the car's power but the 9amps are too much for the car's power. So I bought a honda 2000w gas powered inverter that is super quite. It does the job nicely and I still have power for a small sound system.

Please Vote!

It's that time of year again.
UK's DJ Mag is selecting it's 100 DJ's and last year they had the top 20 VJ's. In 2005 Dimension 7 was voted number 7 worldwide. Last year's selection was voted on by a jury of top VJ related industry figures. This year they are opeing it up to the public to vote.
checkout
http://www.djmag.com/djtech009.php
The voting is based on how much the VJ has contributed to the VJ community, the artists public profile and aesthetic.
Go to the link and vote for your top 5.
Now for my own selfish promotion, please vote for me. :-)
I often play the roll as both curator, organizer and artists. The balance between creator and administrator is a hard balance to maintain. However, the reward of promoting the VJ community to a larger audience has been a motivating factor in my work.

Upcoming Events

www.vjculture.com

Sept. 2-10th Outdoor building projection for Red Bull Dragster Days - Detroit MI
Sept. 23rd Love Parade Official After Party San Francisco CA
Sept. 24-Oct. 9th Outdoor building projections for Red Bull Air Races - Bay Area, CA. Reno NV.
Oct. 5-9th Hatch Fest. - Bozeman Mt.
Oct. 14th-17th Xingolati boat cruise - Long Beach CA to Ensenada Mexico (http://www.xingolati.com/)
Oct. 18th-25th Lightrhythm Visuals Release party - Tokyo Japan
Oct. 31st Halloween in the Castro (Vjing for half million people in the streets) - San Francisco CA
Nov. 5th-7th Remix Hotel LA

Get Freaky June 2005 @ 1015

I have to give it up to DJ Goldilox for taking this picture. She is an amazing DJ and photographer. checkout her pics at www.djgoldilox.com Anyway here is a picture from the Get Freaky at 1015 in June. I create 3 circles that hung above the DJ booth. At times I had live camera feeds of the DJ in the center screen and flash animation of the DJ's name on the outside circle screens. To achieve this I used a mac laptop running Arkaos. I sent a mix to the laptop through the V4 mixer and then converted it to firewire through a dv bridge. Then the signal went out the s-video port straight to the projector. The room had other screens as well. You can see those in the background. I could put up different signals because I was using two V4 mixers. I had live camera on each side of the DJ. Quick cuts from right to left camera gave the live feeds a litttle extra.

The big bad Dell logo

The problem was that it was really crowded in the booth and people kept bumping into my laptop. This would cause the svideo cable to fall out of the back of the laptop and then the projector would go into default no signal mode. A huge Dell logo would project on the DJ booth with blinding white background. This happened twice and I decided it was in the best interest of the party to power down the projector so it didn't happen again. The crowd would boo when the logo went up. Days later I was reading one of the forums on tribe regarding the event. This guy actually thought it was a paid promotion for Dell.

Morning carnage. The dance floor was packed at 6:00AM. These boyz know how to party. Sean Cooper and I started Setup on Friday morning. We worked until 1:00AM that night. We started again Saturday morning at 11:00 and worked until Noon on Sunday. More than 24 hours on our feet running around in soft sand. I have to give it to Sean. He worked his butt off. Without him we wouldn't have pulled it off.

The lighting company installed a sharktooth scrim for the projectors. Due to the possible high winds coming off the beach. It almost seemed like 10,000 lumens was not enough. This shot was taken just before sunrise.

This is a pic of the Absolutely Fabulous booth. Notice the razor blade sticking out of the mirror coffee table.

From the inside of the booth at sunrise.

Picture of the DJ VJ and lighting booth. Each of us had our own room.

Sean and I had to wire 21 plasma screens. each tent had it's own plasma. Each tent also had it's own theme from a TV show. The hard part was digging ditches in the sand for the cables. As much sand falls back into the ditch as you dig out. It's like digging 3 ditches for every one.

A shot from the dance floor

For the first couple of hours we had Miss Richfield 1981 as our host. Sean Cooper on camera followed Miss Richfield around the event. She had me rolling on the floor.

TV was the theme. Not a hard theme to find content for.

Paul from CTA lasers (D7) shows off some tunnels as the doors open.

Just before the doors open.

The dance floor tent was lowered to install the lighting and projectors. Walking on sand for 3 days is exhuasting. Your shoes are continuely filled with sand.

The beach was only 30ft away, but I was so busy for the first 2 days that I never got my feet in the water until after the event.

July 31st Fire Pine Island Party on the beach on an island off the island of Long Island. 2 5K projectors double stacked for 10,000 lumens of brightness. 21 plasma screens stretching out over 500ft. 6 DA's and 1000's of feet of BNC cable. Not to mention a full video suite. All of this was carried on the plane.
Jet Blue, it's the only way to fly. TV's for each seat and they let you bring 3 bags at a max of 70lbs each. More than any other airline.

Roller Disco Bear Video still

Here is a still from the final movie with Matt the roller disco bear. The final video is 11 minutes long and has work by Ben Sheppe, Austin Cable and myself.
The DVD will be released through Red Bull North America. It will be given to the field marketing managers around the US. Eventually landing in clubs and RB Events. I will soon have a short clip up on the vjculture.com site and on the video.google.com

3 weeks

www.vjculture.com
It took Google 3 weeks to post the footage of Tech TV and video riot.
It's free to view. I also uploaded a track I did for Ben Sheppee's Hidden Partition DVD.
I set the viewing price at .10 It's still not live. I think Google is having problems working out the pay structure. Additionally, I saw a report that someone hacked the system and had a code for viewing paid movies for free.
I've moved to LA for the summer. Finally got DSL, it's amazing how dependent one becomes to the internet. Maps, email, news, etc.
On an unrelated note: I had my inline skates stolen today. I caught the guy 3 miles away. It was so random, I saw him go down an alley while I was driving by. After some yelling the sucker had to walk home in his socks.
Arkaos 3.5 is out. So far I'm enjoying the new freeframe effects. It's about time!!

Google Video Player

www.vjculture.com

Google introduced today it's new video search engine. It allows the user to search for videos that have been uploaded to it's server. checkout http://video.google.com/
For the past 4 months users have been able to upload video in mp4 format to Google's server. Now you can view the movies using Google's own video player that is embedded in the browser. You will need to download the player first.
As a content creator you have the choice of setting a fee for people to view your videos or it can be free. Google will take a small percentage of the fee. Not sure what that is yet.
This will be a great tool for showcasing demo reels and projects with clients.
In my previous post I mentioned I am working on a Red Bull VJ mix. I will upload the video for the client to view and pull it as soon as they have checked it out.
I did a basic search for the term "VJ" at 9:30AM PST. There were only 36 movies that came back. Only 5 or 6 on them were actually a VJ mix or demo.
Since the VJ community is one of the first to embrace new technology like this I'm sure within a month we will see significant growth in VJ demo reels.
I checked out a couple of videos this morning. They all loaded within a couple of seconds. Quality varied due to the original content. I have uploaded two videos. One is the Tech TV coverage of Video Salon and Video Riot. (Do I have the rights to show this? It's questionable, however, most of the footage they are using I do have the rights to). The other video is a music video I did for Ben Sheppee's Hidden Partition DVD. (Audio is by Park Ranger). Now I'll wait and see how long it takes to be displayed on the Google site.

Working on new VJ mix for Red Bull DVD

Working on a new video for a VJ mix on a Red Bull DVD. Matt (my rollerdisco bear) is taking a break from a hard night on skating in the dunggy basement bathroom of a secret location.
The DVD will include still from Joshua Brott and video from Ben Sheppee and Austin Cable.
Airstream curtesy of Nick Glase.

Last one before Burning Man.
Friday night I am building a multi-circular screen installation, it should be interesting. I will be using Arkaos's live camera input and the Edirol PR-80 to create masks and still allow real time mixing on the main screens and on the circular installation. Additionally, some of the videos I created for Bassnectar (Lorin) will be showcased. This is an epic lineup, never in the US has there been such an amazing roster of breaks artists. (oh, except for the last Get Freaky).

Photo by christian Delfino The Big apple, Webster Hall with Cakewalk and Public Enemy. Edirol invited me to provide visuals for the U-Mix-it / Cakewalk party at Webster Hall held during Remix Hotel. Big thanks to the Smoke and Mirrors VJ Collective for setting up all the screens and projectors.

Modified V4

Yeeeah, that's right boiii!!! Ba da bling bling!! It had to be done at some point. Notice the little jewels on the ends of the T-bar. Now that's Liberace style. http://www.liberace.com/gallery.cfm The angle T-bar was modified by Sam at Club Science. I asked him to build me an anatomically correct T-bar function for right handed flippers like me. The gold knobs are custom knobs for guitars. More diamonds to come.
WARNING: you will void all warranty by doing this. The V4 has it's motherboard attached to the top cover, so you have to dismantle everything to paint the cover.
Or you can buy the V4 overlays directly from Edirol for $50.00. http://www.edirol.com/products/vaccess.html
Now all I need is a phat gold chain so I can wear this thing around my neck. Ever Since that Public Enemy show in NYC last week I've been inspired.

and of course I will be giving a demo of the CG-8.

Video Salon June 7th 2005

We have been talking about it for years, finally it's now happening. Midi has been intergrated into Motion and Final Cut Pro can switch between camera angles. Currently, I use Final Cut in my VJ setup. I like streaming DV res images over firewire. It reduces the load on my graphics card and keeps my images clean.
On Tuesday June 7th Video Salon is proud to have Barry Munsterteiger demo Motion 2 with midi and Final Cut Pro 5.

Video Salon
Over 5 years old
Tuesday June 7th 2005
8:30PM-12:30AM
150 Folsom St. (@ Spear st.)
$5.00 suggested donation
Cheap drinks

Bring your laptops and unplug, free wireless.
Plus, bring your media for jamming
Demos this month
Motion 2 w/ midi
Final Cut Pro 5 for live environments
Demonstrator Barry Munsterteiger
(teiger design)
Is an animator/designer, he as worked with Motion 2 extensively and is one of the first to demonstrate how Motion and Final Cut Pro can be used in live environments.
Barry will demonstrate Motion 2 with the Evolution UC-33e and Evolution MK425c
The new features in Final Cut Pro will allow users to switch between camera angles, up to 16 angles at a time. http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/

Hardware demo Edirol CG-8 by VJ Culture.
As much as we wanted to we couldn�t show you the CG-8 last Video Salon. Now we can, come checkout the latest by Edirol www.edirol.com

This is going to be a big one! (Held during Apple�s WWDC).

Plus, our resident DJ's
Alaric and the IK crew

=================
FAQ:

WHO IS VIDEOSALON:

Video Salon is an open community of visual artists
representing SF's thriving VJ scene. Video Salon is YOU.

The event is hosted at Dimension7, a San Francisco VJ
institution.


What is Video Salon?

Video Salon is an open community of video artists who
come together monthly to share ideas, show their work and collaborate with other artists in an informal and social setting.
We have 3 video mixing stations setup for anyone and
everyone to show their own work.
Mix video live to the DJ�s or do your own thing.

OUR MISSION:

To embrace a broad spectrum of time based visual
artists including CG artists, experimental filmmakers, live visual performance artists and installation builders.

To promote technical experimentation and aesthetic
development within our community.

To create an open dialog encouraging mutually
beneficial critique, cross-pollination and collaboration

Ascension 5 LA stage

Never mind the aerial performers, I'm trying to find the best picture I have of the stage. I'm always so busy working the event I rarely have time to take pictures.
On one of the screens we had setup a mock amber alert sign. People could text message to the screen. The font and style of the screen looked like an amber alert sign. (You can see a corner of that screen in this picture. Off to the far left.

Red Bull Ascension 5 LA

Wow, what a week. I arrived in LA on Monday afternoon after driving down from San Francisco. During my drive I hooked up two DV cameras. One pointing out the front window on a tripod and the other pointing out the back window. I then digitized the camera feed straight to my powerbook and the edirol PR-80. 5.5 hours of content. When I arrived in LA I started editing and speeding up the footage so the drive time was about 6 and a half minutes. Tuesday morning we started setup for Red Bull Ascension 5 (LA). Ascension for the past four years has been in San Francisco and this was the first time Ascension has happened in LA.
Everyday I would get up at 8:00 and edit until 10:00AM when the venue opened and we could start setup. Brien from OVT and I would work from 10:00AM until midnight. Then I would go home and edit until 4:00am. We did this Tues. Wed. and on Thursday (show day) I edited in the morning and then was working at the venue for 20 straight hours. This was a 17 projector setup we screens that had to be hung as well. All cables were routed overhead so you can see why it was such an intense setup. The stage looked like the Hollywood squares stage and in the top 3 panels we had screens. In each cube there were performances throughout the night.
In this picture you can see Brien's circular screen and the 5 stage screens. The content on the screens is vello's from V Sq. Labs. We had to dead hang the 16ft radius screen, that took 2 days to setup about 6 people to bring it down. Ascension is one of those events where there are over a 100 artists involved and the months of planning. Every inch of the space is consumed with some form of art. More links to pictures coming soon.

Ascension 5 LA May 19th

Now in it's 5th year. Red Bull Ascension has moved to LA. This time around I'm working with OVT Visuals and Vello from V Squared Labs along with VJ Arcane.
We have a sick setup and I'm sure I'll post pictures as soon as I return. Plus, I designing custom content for 3 tracks from Bassnectar, a special time lapse drive of my trip from SF to LA.
checkout www.redbullascension.com

Federal Appeals Court Scraps FCC's Broadcast Flag Mandate

As Nelson would Say, Ha Hah! to Hollywood. Federal Appeals Court Scraps FCC's Broadcast Flag Mandate. checkout the full story here. http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_05.php#003552
Mad props to the eff.org for all their hardwork helping people everywhere to build HD recorder boxes without the broadcast flag. Video Salon was/is going to hold a build session in June... We will wait and see, I'm sure Hollywood isn't going to let this go. But, for now we can celebrate.

How Weird

Once again Howeird Street faire took over the streets of San Francisco. Now in it's 6th year. We setup a 20x20 tent in the middle of the intersection surrounded by 4 sound systems. Inside the tent we blogged, VJ'ed and chatted online all via a wireless connection. 1000's of freaks showed up to dance in the streets of SF.
There are a few street fairs in San Francisco where dancing naked in the street is acceptable, Halloween, Decompression, Folsom St. Fair, Pride, How Weird and Bay to Breakers.
checkout: http://www.howweird.org/index.html
movies to come soon.

In this photo I have a midi controller that uses keys instead of sliders and knobs. I like using a keyboard when I'm running applications like Arkaos. Having keys to trigger clips or trigger the live camera feed is a nice way to keep sync with the music from an external source. I usually run a firewire cable from the Edirol PR-80 straight into my laptop running Arkaos, then I create various comps. in the program and trigger the live feed via the keyboard. There are just enough knobs to control the various CC# variables in Arkaos.

Club 1015 on April 15th. While most people were wrapping up their taxes, VideoJon, myself, Sean Cooper and Erik were working around the clock to setup a truly immersive environment. 2 slide projectors were controlled by a dimmer that rotate a picture of a shark and a scuba driver around the room. 4 vertical screens and 2 horizontal screens were flown about the space. The vertical screens in the corners created depth in perception as the viewer was able to see through the horizontal layered screen. We used a total of 14 projectors, 3 laptops, 1 Edirol CG-8 and 2 DVD players. From setup, performance and strike, we spent 22 hours straight inside the club. Slide overlaid on top of video created a seamless image 10ft x 33ft.

What the hell is going on? 6 video projectors, 8 slide projectors 2 10ftx33ft screens hung horizontal.

lightbox in the VJ booth at 1015 for the Marine Parade party w/ Adam Freeland, evil 9, Bassbin Twins

mixing on the rear view mirror

VJ Culture @ the Red Bull House in Miami during Winter Music Conference.
Checkout http://www.redbullhouse.com/ and www.womb.tv for an archive of the events.

Building Projections in Milwaukee

Outdoor projection campaign for Red Bull in Milwaukee.
I just picked up a 5300 Lumens projector that is liquid cooled. This Panasonic projector has the best scaling and resizing of any projector I have ever seen. It also has great networking capabilities and can be left on for days at a time.
Big thanks to Casey from Simplistik/AVIT North America for helping out and hooking up the projector sale.
We had to purchase a special invertor to handle the power requirements of the projector. We had to use a pure sine wave invertor with at least 1500w min. Special 2 gauge cables were required to deliver the power to the invertor.

fly bar

fly bar
Originally uploaded by VJculture.

4:00PM to 11:00PM 5:00AM to 10:00AM
That was a the schedule for the Red Bull House in Miami during WMC.
It was an ambitious undertaking that was side tracked by the man.
Big sound systems next to Jewish retirement community don't mix and after 3 days of the scheduled 6 the house was shutdown. But before it did we had some great parties. Checkout www.redbullhouse.com
In some ways it was a blessing in disguise. I was about to clone myself on Thursday so I could split my responsibilities between Red Bull house and Remix Hotel. Both were going off at the same time. Pictures coming soon.

Off to Miami for the WMC, 2 palettes of gear for 2 shows a night. Remix Hotel and Red Bull House.

Goldie 2

Here is a set of pictures from an installation I did with "Goldie2", my gold fish.
I used 5 video projectors, 2 MX-50 mixers, 2 laptops running Arkaos VJ, my motorized car mirror installation, 1 blender, 2 fish, a live camera, a inflatable pod and my circles installation.
The live camera was zoomed in on Goldie2 which was rotating on a mirror ball platform.
The live camera was fed into two laptops running the same VJ application. At the same time
the camera feeds were also sent to two Panasonic MX-50 mixers which created a realtime mask and multipled effect.
The Arkaos VJ application was triggered by a midi keyboard (PCR-30) which controlled various effects in realtime. The keyboard was also connected to the blender where one of the two
fish resided. If a viewer hit the key marked, "Danger, do not hit this key!" a sound of a blender
would come over the sound system and a realtime visual effect of the fish being blended would
be projected on the installations. This startled numerous viewers as they thought they were chopping up the fish.
The motorize car mirrors were controllable by the viewer as well. They could move 4 seperate images
around the room via the car mirror control.
22 images total were being projected simutaniously.
As the fish would swim from one side of the camera frame to the other the whole room would shift in color.

the blender and keyboard

The fish bowl and mirror installation

Goldie2 in the circles

12 circles