We’ve been commissioned by pixlmusic to create a 20 minutes piece to be performed twice during the evening. The content is a mix of 2D / 3D visuals, and also a part with mapping and architecture related projections.

This project was really interesting on the technical side, as the schedule wouldn’t allow us to produce everything on site as we normaly do, so we had to develop a new technique to do the mapping completely remotely, without calibrations or tests on the actual building before the production.

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a Crea Composite / AntiVJ coproduction:

Visuals production:
- Yannick Jacquet (Legoman)
- Jérémie Peeter (Shirü)
- Joanie Lemercier (crustea)

Sound: Thomas Vaquié
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Here’s a short extract of the performance:

We now work in a really nice open space at Pervasive Media studio, with a large desk do to origamis, models and mess around with techy gadgets, a meeting space, to plan projects and discuss ideas, and a wonderful chillout area, to read magazines, relax and play Wii..

We share the space with HP labs, BBC, winners of the Media SandBox grant and freelancers, and it’s an amazing opportunity to share ideas and start collaborations with other creative people involved in similar projects.

So if you are interesting in working with us, or want to discuss a visual project, drop us a line and feel free to come down for a tea.. We are just between the Imax cinema and the planetarium.

By the way we also have meeting spaces in Brussels and Paris, so if you’re not in UK we can arrange something anyway.

Many thanks to Clare Reddington and Emma Scott, Pervasive Media Studio, and Ished for making it happened, and for taking us out of our small home studio.

I’ve been away from this blog for a while, busy with new projects, editing videos, preparing the new year, and I didn’t have a chance to stop until now..

Great news, I’m proud to announce that we’re about to launch AntiVJ, a new visual label, which is a platform to produce projects based on the visual element. This project is a collaboration with some artists I really like. We became friends and realized we are sharing the same ideas and vision of our work, so we decided the collaborate more put a name on it.

AntiVJ is a visual label initiated by European-based artists whose work is focused on the use of projected light and its influence on our perception.

Clearly stepping away from standard setups & techniques, AntiVJ presents live performances and installations where projection on volume, visual mapping, tracking and augmented reality, stereoscopy and holographic illusion are providing to the audience a senses challenging experience.

Visual artists on the label:

Yannick Jacquet (Legoman).
Joanie Lemercier (crustea).
Olivier Ratsi (Emovie).
Romain Tardy (Aalto).

Here’s a short video : AntiVJ Teaser 08 featuring recent projects:

++++ Le Mans (France), August 2007
3Destruct Louvain la neuve (Belgium), June 07
Inode Nancy (France), December 07
Light up Bristol Bristol (UK), December 07

The french strikes didn’t really help (no public transport in France that day), and it’s been a long journey: bus, plane, lift to Rennes (thanks Wahn !!), then driving for 2 hours and I finally arrived safe in Caen in the evening (the 10 energy drinks I had in the car really helped keeping me awake).

There I hooked up with Aalto, Ratsi and Lego_man, who were

taking care of the visuals in the ”Klub” room of this big festival, on a massive installation they helped to design: the big room has litreally been created by building 3 walls made out of big square screens, to create a very geometrical semi closed space. Then 7 seven video projectors were projecting images on the all around, using a multiprojection setup (which means that each wall could have a different visual on it) and playing with the mapping technique, then they could also “map” visuals on the big squared screens and play with masks.

Photo report
Ok, you might find it quite difficult to picture, I guess the best explanation is a set of photos

Technical setup:
- Custom screens and installation.
- 6 x 8 000 lumens video projectors + 1 x 12 000 lumens.
- hundreds of meters of vga and RGB cables.
- 8×8 VGA Matrix switcher, signal amplifiers
- 4 laptop computers (all Apple, running on Modul8) with multi output support.
- 7 different video signals (with a dualhead and a triplehead 2 Go)
- Loads of different Midi controlers.

The result was a very impressive and immersive setup, the crowd was literaly surrounded by amazingly well produced visuals (ratsi, Aalto and Lego_man all have very unique visuals, but with some commons points in style and subjects, and their content blends really well together) and this setup created a very cutting edge experience for the audience.
To be honest the audio lineup in this room was good, but didn’t sound “that” special, and it’s funny to realize that sometimes the visual element is starting taking over the music side, and I’m convinced that many people that will come back for the visual lineup, and because of the great visual experience they had, which left much more souvenirs than the usual silhouette of a dj pushing records.

Video report
Here’s a short video (edited by Lego_man) which might talk by itself :

It’s a bit of a shame that the Lighting was a bit random and didn’t really add anything, organisers might have better switch that off rather than having multicolored oldschool and disco patterns overlaying the projections sometimes, but anywayyyyy….

It was great to hookup with Pikilipita (which actually is from Caen, before he left to London to hack gameboys), grominet and other nice friendly people.

Radio interview
Aalto and Lego_man have been interviewed on a local radio show (at 4AM during the festival), and I was around to show some support while ratsi was busy playing live.
If you don’t fluently understand french, here’s a good opportunity to practice..

Download the podcast. (french only)

Plus de photos sur Flickr.