Drawing and technology

A while back, when I occasionally threw a few songs together for parties and called myself a dj, I started thinking about visuals to match the songs. Then I managed to get to see Hexstatic performing on a barge in the Wellington lagoon in 2006 and wow! Not the abstract visuals I'd seen at festivals and clubs, but cleverly cut video crazily repeating and transforming with the sound. This was what it was all about.

My research showed hinted at their  sophisticated setup with macbooks and dvd mixers, and others like Coldcut VJ Fader started to make  their own customised software like VJAMM.
It did seem to be very technology-focused though, especially as the likes of U2 made huge claws and a giant screen for their 360 tour. Luckily there was also a move away from generic looking video un-related to music, as bands started incorporating their own ideas and art into the background visuals.

Hexstatic, Wellington, 2006. Pic by Lyndon Hood, Scoop.

Ultimately the trigger that got me from DJ to VJ was seeing a random Vimeo video about a praxinoscope, where a set of drawings on an LP sized sheet were filmed at a certain speed while spinning on the turntable. This created a lovely, organic animation. I was now officially hooked and
I started (after doing the maths to check it would work) sketching the 33 frames that would make an animation. Setup a performance, borrowed a projector and off we went.

Here's a bunch of laboriously drawn praxinoscope/zoetrope style sheets..

Hand drawn animations on LP sized sheets

In theory it should have been simple but using a modern digital camera meant that getting the filmed image to the projector (even via a laptop) was fraught with difficulties. Sometimes the Blackmagic HD box would capture the signal and sometimes not, and it seemed that the Panasonic GH series HD output was very easily turned off. But it  mostly worked and it was fun to operate at gigs alongside the dj - here is some of the animation . captured, mixed in with some After Effects animations that were also used live.

Space Doctor and Zoe Trope - A phonotrope sampler for the Paekakariki 88.2 FM fundraiser from Science Films NZ on Vimeo.

One of the downsides, apart from the camera cable technology problems, was that the animations at 33 drawings apiece were terrifically time-consuming to create. I have no problems coming up with quirky ideas but redrawing them over and over was a lot for a part-time hobby, alongside astro-photography, an astronomy radio show and running/football.

Then I saw the work of Tapebox/Sculpture! Computed created super-trippy visuals that had so much going on.  As well as being inspiring these awesome pieces also hit me hard in the realism-plexus. I wasn't going to be able to create this level of awesomeness in After Effects; and even if I could I would miss the pencil drawing aspect of it all.

So where to next? How do we incorporate hand-drawn art with technology for live VJ-ing? How did we (Kuki Koori)  end up at Splore 2018, twelve years after Hexstatic's gig there?

The answer is in part II...