VJ Performance Draft

Little look back to a class named Computer Interface Design. It was divided into two parts - for one we had to create a audio visual performance and for the second one design an actual device that could be used to operate our show or any imaginary one.

I came across the files for my final show and found a video of the visual performance draft. I spent ages on preparing all this. I've been collecting videos for the show. I've shot a lot of videos for this but in the end did not use majority of them. I used jump backs and videos of me dancing and playing various music games from Dance Dance Revolution to Guitar Hero.

When my dancing videos were done I spent a long time preparing for the real show that took place in a nearby bar. The performance was taken well and my part was liked. But I was never graded. I got fail for the class and I can't do anything with that. But I've put so much effort in this and so much time that I won't be able to forget it. I've been doing what I like and created a lot of material that I might use in the future one. I enjoyed the time and I could see that with an effort and idea in mind one can come to interesting stuff.

So here's about an minute long video that shows how it was supposed to look. After this I've done some testing with alpha filters and some other effects that helped me get the effects I wanted at certain point in time. But they are missing in the preview as this was really the first draft. It brings back a lot of memories and I'm really sad that the footage from the bar ended up on a tape that we couldn't get the data from. Also that's the reason I failed the class.

So enjoy this little preview. It does not show all the work that was involved nor the problems I ecountered during that time. All I have now are just fading memories from that period. But this little video helps refresh them and that's why I treasure it so much.

Draft of the Visual Performance

I opened up Resolume and tried messing up with the effects and the videos and this is more or less how the final show will look like. Beware the video is about 6 minutes long. You can just go through a certain parts if you want.



AV show draft

Audio Visual Show

My performance has one primary part and a secondary one.
In the first part I wanted to have a silhouette of a dancer in one layer and in other layers I wanted to have video effects and background videos. For those purposes I was trying to figure out how to create the dancer video. I knew that I could do it in front of a green screen and then mask the dancer with a black color. But that was not in my capabilities so I was wondering of other ways of doing it. One day an idea came to my mind - using threshold filter on the video so everything except the dancer would be white. I tried to record few videos and realized that even the darkest gray becomes white when the filter is applied. Thus I dressed myself in black, put on black gloves and tried doing it once again. It worked more or less.

Dancer video
I took the videos with my camera that can record in 640x480 resolution. The quality of the original videos is good but when the filter is applied and the video is encoded it gets far worse. Here you can take a look at the original video. The video that was processed using threshold filter (cropping and resizing was used as well). The last picture shows a mix of three layers outputted from Resolume.



Game part
The second part was simply about adding gaming videos into the mix. The games in particular would have something in common and that would be the music. All the games are music games of some sort. In one layer I would have me playing a certain game on a controller and in another one you could see the in-game video of the game. In a third layer I would still have some jump backs (the background videos with various visual effects).
I took the videos and did not process them in any special way. I wanted to grab the in-game videos directly from the Playstation 2 on which the games run. But an accident happened in my gaming room - both of my PS2s are broken
- and I wasn't able to grab them at all.



Music
As for music. The dancer should dance to music of some kind. I am a para para dancer so the music chosen should correspond Para Para (note the music games also have Eurobeat music in them as this type of music is popular in Japan and it suits the games well - because of the speed and rhythm). Para Para is a Japanese dance that is danced in clubs and can be danced individually. It does not require too much
space. It uses mainly arms. Legs/feet are moving from left to right to keep the rhythm. This kind of dance is danced to Eurobeat. An upbeat and relatively fast music (around 140-150BPM). Eurobeat originates from Italy where it evolved from Italopop.