Wednesday, March 15, 2006

VJ Update

I've been working with the Neuromixer AV MixerPro software that was suggested to me here by a random commenter. It's been an amazingly great program, and I've learned a lot from it in a short amount of time.

To date, I've done two very short VJ sets using AV MixerPro. One was at the bar Cuba here in Plymouth, where I did a short set for the OpenReel demo night. It would have been nice if they'd given me more than two songs for a set, but then again, my compression rates were all wrong and kept shutting down the program.

Getting the compression rates fixed (for the most part - I'm still fine tuning) I then did a VJ set for my Independent Film class. I was working with the film Moolaade and amping it up a bit to turn it into a propaganda piece against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). I used short clips from the film, as well as short film facts that I created in Flash and iMovie titles, and other animations created in Flash. I tried to tell the overall story of Moolaade in 10 minutes, but make it really impactful. I'm not totally sure if I succeeded in my quest, but the colleagues were impressed. This was a stressful operation, doing it all live and on the fly, and trying to insert all of the appropriate information in sync to the music and visuals. Just goes to show that VJing can be used more powerfully than it often is, but much forethought needs to go into the operation.