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- Hello, I'm Julien [Julien Vuillet aka Mr.Vux] from AV:in and today I'm going to interviewЙ
- Joanie Lemercier from AntiVJ.
So, I run the visual label AntiVJ and we are now
seven artists and producers, and music producers to work together on audiovisual projects.
- So, Joanie we going to speak about one specific project which I know a tiny bit about.
So it's latest Flying Lotus gig in The Roundhouse.
- It was an interesting project. It was actually a collaboration with a musician
and music producer Flying Lotus. And we got in touch about six month ago. He heard about our work
and wanted to do something together, and personally we all were quite big fans of his music.
So it was really inspiring to work with him and build this projects from scratch.
We had many constraints, so it was interesting to just sit all around the table and see
how we could make something that we could tour with quite easily.
We wanted to do some projecting mapping as well, we wanted to have some audioreactive content, real
time content, so we had to build software from scratch and the whole framework to be able to
bring his music into the show and bring the visuals and music together and have, yeah, everything kind of connected
with MIDI- and audio- analysis and that kind of stuff, so...
It was a bit of a stressful project, because we didn't had much time
to do the whole thing, but yeah... it was really interesting technically, artistically and I think
we're going to have to work more on it. We want to redevelop some bits of it,
but yeah, it's quite an interesting project. And Julian was actually working on it,
he helped us to produce some content and work on the software as well,
so it was nice first experience together as well.
- There were quite a few extraordinary people in that project, so how easy it was for you
to manage, when you have to deal with all them, because there were quite...
maybe 10 people were involved in that project?
Well... actually for us, as the label,
we all started in AntiVJ, five visual artists, we all started
working alone as VJs in clubs and festivals,
so we were all quite independent,
so when we started working together we were actually already in different countries,
so we kind of started building projects remotely and we 32 00:02:52,309 --> 00:02:56,77S work a lot with internet, with Skype, and all the different kind of forums,
and FTP stuff that you could use to make some collaborative projects remotely.
It's always a bit tricky, because there are things that
you can't do remotely, like hardware test, rehearsals.
So that's something you have to keep in mind
and that's why we had to get together in the end of the project,
do some rehearsal in the studio.
It's quite funny the way... when we started AntiVJ,
we worked remotely for many years, so we kind of have a good method for it.
But, yeah, you have to get together at some point in the project
and we'll try to do that more often in the future, I think.
-Yeah, because sometimes you have time zone difference, which doesn't necessarily make it...
- Yeah. Yeah, yeah. - ... simple.
- Especially there was this guy Nikolay, he's from Saint-Petersburg, he's called unc and
he's a really, really brilliant developer and visual artist.
And he was in Russia, in Saint-Petersburg and I was in Bristol, so we had to communicate together.
Flying Lotus was in LA, so we went there for few days to work with him, but also
working with people in Frankfurt as well, Kyle was based in Germany.
So we were like... Germany, Saint-Petersburg, Brussels, Bristol and LA.
It's kind of a weird way to work together, but again it's quite interesting,
and you actually learn a lot from this experience,
you know what works and doesn't work remotely. So, yeah. Very interesting.
- What do you think is the biggest technical difficulty for this kind of project,
because you have a lot of develop, you have quite a lot of programmers, you have a structure to build, you have to have
obviously hardware to project... - Yeah.
- ...some content is real time, some content is video projection.
So you have a lot of things and what was the biggest technical difficulties about it?
- Well, actually we get really excited on the label,
we are really excited of trying new things.
And I think from the very beginning of the label,
I've always spent most of my time doing some research and developments, some tests.
That's how I started the mapping, that's how I started doing stereoscopy as well.
And now we are very much into real time content and how to build some software and some new tools
to change completely the way we work,
but it's not really easy, and you have to make sure that the deadlines are not too tight.
And on such projects like Flying Lotus, we have some many valuables like the lights,
like building the structure for DJ booth,
video projection and mapping, and audio reactive stuff and MIDI, so there were many things involved.
I don't think that any of these things is a massive major problem.
I think when you have lots of things, you need more rehearsal time and...
- It's when they're all together, it's like lots of little things, which all end up in one big thing.
- I think one of the biggest things we want to do next year
and over the next months is to carry on building some real-time tools,
because at the moment, we use some common 3d software like Cinema 4D or AfterEffects.
You can do nice stuff, but you have to wait for every single frame
you want, or anything you want to produce, you have to wait for the computer to be ready.
And now with the technology and real-time tools, you can do
pretty much the same thing, but you don't have to wait anymore.
The only problem is that you have to develop all these
tools, they don't exist. You can't really find anything.
- It's more complicated, because you have...
when you build real-time content, you have to worry all the time about frame rates.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And you have to care about performance a lot.
- But I think this is something that we want to push in the future.
Probably the next big thing is going to be having this framework.
- So you believe that the future is going to be more real-time?
- Yeah, pretty much, but that's a really personal point of view, but I think the future is
GPU and real-time, and obviously all these other technologies like
3D tracking.
But I think yeah, real-time is going to change the way people produce visual content.
I'm sure like even web agencies and people making web-sites,
and applications for iPad and iPhones,
they are slowly moving from web design tools
to Processing, or Cinder, or openFrameworks.
So I really think that in 5 years time openFrameworks, VVVV, Quartz Composer
and all the other similar tools are going to be the main...
they are going to play a lot in the game of creating visual content.
- So you think that it's going to be in some ways difficult, because
some of the people, there are quite a lot of people doing animation in AfterEffects,
but people doing real-time are not necessarily take it that easy with rendering,
so potentially it's quite a challenge for them. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, I'm sure, slowly people that are doing programming
and like... Actually, I used to do websites myself, years ago.
I used to do ActionScript and Flash and that's how I actually started doing video mapping.
I was just using Flash 5 at the time,
as a tool to map objects and a bit of ActionScript to animate things.
But I saw the limits quite quickly and now I moved to different tools.
I'm quite convinced that
many web developers and developers are going to move slowly to these tools as well.
And also I think the web is going to evolve a lot. In fact, now you've got apps on
lots of devices and it's a part of your everyday life as well.
I'm sure that these real-time tools will get much bigger and probably replace...
It's a different thing, but I think Flash is kind of disappearing and I'm sure all these people,
all Flash developers are going to move to openFrameworks, so...
So I think it's quite an exciting future, but, yeah, there're not many people
programming in real-time at the moment, not many experts, so it's...
it's the right time to try to find them and work with them.
Because there are not many of them, yeah.
- OK. Well, thank you very much. - Cool, no worries. Thank you.