We first spotted a great home demo on Vimeo that he did after using GrandVJ since just one day, then the week after he was already taking GrandVJ live on stage for the ZôL concert at Metamorphoses, a French Electronic music festival.

Well last week we were at the MixMove Expo for DJ & Club Culture in Paris and we met Charlie Mars there, he was participating to the first France VJ & Videodesigner Championship with our GrandVJ software.

Charlie had to compete with eight other French VJ’s and he won the championship thanks to his talent, his very creative content and.. with the help of GrandVJ.

Read below for his impressions and a few pictures (kindly provided by LeCollagiste – Merci Laurent!).

It wasn’t easy for me to approach a “VJing Championship” because “Championship” relates to sport and sport is not really my thing, because competition means that there is a winner and I don’t really like when there are losers, even if I’m the one who wins, and even though being the winner is kinda cool: it’s a plus for the Ego and motivates for continuing, but ok I digress..

We (the participating Vj’s) were primarily here to defend a discipline that still lacks recognition (some event organizers still think that VJ’s play for free..) and highlight the most creative aspects of VJing, this championship was a great opportunity to do so.

It is always difficult, from my point of view, to judge a creative work on precise criteria, the verdict is necessarily subjective and I think that each participant had its own, well affirmed style. Yes, I saw some very good stuff, the level was high.

Personally, I give more importance to content than technique, that’s why I use GrandVJ; it’s simple, totally stable (very important, especially when like me you have 68 loops per deck on 20+ decks..), with a fast and fun learning curve, but still without forgetting the technical tools necessary to the quality of the projection (frame blending, keystoning, time sync, etc..)

My setup wasn’t anything very complex, an Alienware laptop (Core I7, 4Gb Ram), two MIDI controllers: a Novation Launchpad and a Korg Nanokontrol, my multicolour hood and of course GrandVJ. That’s all I need to have a lot of fun, mix on instinct and cut like a lumberjack.. And that is very good!

Charlie is the guy with the funny colorful hood, of course we spotted the GrandVJ software interface on his laptop, with the Korg Nano’s..

So we sent him a little message to know more about him; read the full post for his explanations below the video.

Charlie explains:

The visual mix on the Samsung LCD screen on the desk was made with GrandVJ, of course I re-embedded the mix on the screen when rendering the final video to get a better image quality than what you get when filming a screen.

It only took me two takes of live mix on the 2 minutes music track from Zôl to get the result you see on the screen and actually I bought GrandVJ just the day before! Now I really intend to continue to use it..

In the past I have used ArKaos VJ MIDI then tried some other VJing software but I’ve never been really satisfied.. But when I tested GrandVJ that was all I was looking for. It’s fun, efficient, easy to use, adaptable, perfect when you need to be reactive and play instinctively.. And most importantly, it’s stable; no sudden crash!

My usual setup is very basic, I like to play quick with raw content, I prefer spending more time to prepare my loops, to film them and invent them than to configure software and controllers..

I’m using NanoPAD and NanoKEY controllers from Korg, with 24 loops per bank. I use the NanoKEY for opacity and as for the effects I’m mainly using Zoom Bass at the moment because I found it great to give the tempo a kick when it’s getting down after a speedy one hour mix!

I’ll definitely take some more time to dig GrandVJ and its functionalities but as it is I’m really glad I found such a great tool.

If you like it, keep an eye on Charlie Mars’ creations for more stuff like this, now that he’s getting used to GrandVJ :)

He can be found on his own web site but also on Vimeo, YouTube, DailyMotion and MySpace.