I just came across a little video from Signal a few weeks ago. Me and Chris Plant (aka Catweasel) joined forces for what turned out to be a top night. We both brought a bit of interactivity to the night, me with a feedback monitor, Cat with some vvvv tracking magic as demonstrated in the vid below on top of some of my visuals. Thanks to Penelope McConnell for shooting the video, hope she doesn’t mind me re-uploading it here
After sadly having to be cancelled due to a lack of venue, Project X Presents Digital Dystopia is finally on this Saturday. The show has been a long time in the making now and is set to dazzle the audience like nothing else can. The full omnimedia experience, as its been dubbed by the team, crams music, stand-up comedy, visuals (with yours truly), installations, poetry and physical theatre into a one night spectacular.
The team have been busy all week on production working well into the night. There’s a great buzz going on around the event with a half page articles in the Metro and The Birmingham Post and Channel 4 doing a feature on us amongst others.
I’ve been working closely with Marc Reck on his sets and also with Daz and Anne of Mamma Matrix. Expect visuals ranging from a dancing Max Headroom to evil big brother style madness.
Saturday 13th September
Busk, Gough Street (opposite The Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham)
Following on from playing at Bloom a few weeks ago, my other festie of the season is coming up this weekend - the mighty Shambala. I went last year as a punter and have to say it was one of my best festival experiences ever, so I’m pretty excited about this one. It also sold out a few days ago, which is pretty damn impressive considering how much other smaller (and some bigger) festivals have been struggling this year.
As I posted before, last Friday I was doing Signal at Green St. I was up ladders right up until opening but it got sorted in time and looked pretty sweet in the end:
The kind, kind man that is catweasel lent us a 2 x 6 matrix which really made the night. It enabled us to switch the feeds going to the TVs and projectors on the fly. Also big thanks to Paul for bringing over his light-box and an extra lappy.
Here’s a little vid from earlier on in the night:
After a couple of hours kip I was off to The Hare and Hounds, for Sumo Sound System’s debut on Saturday night. The night couldn’t really go wrong with three of Brum’s most talented DJ’s at the helm, and I don’t think any one was disappointed with the results. From my point of view it was really nice to just turn-up and plug into the two plasma’s (a rare pleasure).
I’ve just finished putting the finishing touches for a little gallery site for my good friend Newso. He won Secret Wars Birmingham a while back and has been going from strength to strength ever since. We wanted to get the site up and running in time for his Bare Ape exhibition at Jibbering Records which has its launch tonight and runs until 24th Sept.
It all came together surprisingly easily, considering we both obviously have our own visually strong ideas. We both throw some thoughts in, liked each others and got on with it. The gallery sections of the site run on newso’s newly setup flicker stream and based on tags, are split into different categories into flash galleries on the site. This way he can keep easily adding his work to flickr and not have to worry about updating his site.
Hopefully they’ll be a chance in the future to a bit more collaberating together and maybe get him to help me out with a bit of visual content. Visit the site here.
Busy weekend this week. Sumo Sound System is a new (and ridiculously named) night starting at the Hare and Hounds this Saturday. Loadsa party atmosphere guaranteed + some lovely (sumo!?) visuals. Cheap as chips too.
Signal will be playing host to Pyramid Transmissions for its third outing this Friday 15th. I’ll be at the VJ desk as usual with ADJ and others providing the tunes. I was also given the chance to have a crack at the flyers for this one, hope they’re going down ok
Bit of a last minute post, but i’m doing visuals tonight at Signal.Transistor.Rhythm. After a stressful week i’m really looking forward to a good party. Andrea Parker, Bitstream, Daz Quayle and ADJ are up this time around.
22 Green St, Digbeth, Birmingham. 21:00 till 5:00, £3 before 11, £5 after.
After a punishing shoot schedule we have now finished the fillming for “Finished with the War”. We’ve got some great footage and i think everyone involved will be pleased with the results. Big thanks to all the dancers for working so hard, to Sean for providing the beautiful space, to Marc for the inspirational music, and to Catweasel for sorting us out with some redheads at the last minute. I start post production after the weekend, ready for our first screening on Thursday 10th July. I don’t think i’ve ever been envolved in such a whirlwind of a production!
I completed the flyer design for our Finished with the War project today and sent it off to the printers. We’ve had two days of rehearsals and shooting is due to start on Monday. It’s all looking very promising and I’ve got lots of exciting kit booked for Monday. As long as everything goes to plan, I’ll be using a Canon XL H1 and a Libec JB30 jib arm with dolly, etc, etc, great stuff if your a bit geeky (which i am).