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!

If the consoles have changed the club continues to trust the 3 ArKaos media servers installed by Sebastien to display visuals on the LEDs of the DJ / LJ booth and on the various Plasma screens around the place. And apparently, Nicolas Bailly put these to a good use: here’s a video from a light show he set up at the club on Pryda’s track “Miami to Atlanta”.

Nicolas also has a very interesting blog (in French) about lighting design, check it out if you want to know more about him.

Vickie Claiborne

The September 2009 issue of PLSN features a long article about MediaMaster and the ArKaos Media Servers written by Vickie Claiborne, lighting designer, programmer and training specialist for consoles and media servers.

For those who never heard about Vickie, here are some highlights about her background and experience; Vickie has been developing training programs recognized worldwide for lighting control consoles and digital media systems. She has created and maintained a consistent training curriculum for many products from leading manufacturers, including Maxxyz, grandMa, ChamSys, Wholehog2 and Wholehog3.

Over the years she has been actively working as consultant for many leading industry names such as High End Systems, Martin or PRG. Claiborne’s programming experience includes the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony as well as numerous live concerts, broadcast events, and corporate industrials.

And last but not least, Vickie is the Lighting Programmer from the Emmy Award winning lighting team for CNN 2008 Presidential Debates.

In her article, after briefly presenting ArKaos she writes about the MediaMaster software itself and the ArKaos Media Servers, explaining the main features and detailing what’s new in version 1.1., finally concluding with the following:

Easy to Use
What has impressed me about MediaMaster from the first time I opened the application up to today is how user friendly and intuitive the application is.  Any programmer with a basic idea of how to select a fixture and manipulate a channel can very quickly build a great look.  Give that same programmer an hour or two with the software, and they can build many complicated looking images that would take hours in a video rendering software application.  I specifically like that the software runs on just about any current Mac or PC, and that ArKaos now has a hardware solution for pro touring applications.

ArKaos MediaMaster is a powerful, easy-to-use and downloadable media server at an amazingly affordable price.  The software has been completely redesigned so that lighting designers and productions of all sizes can utilize the power and flexibility of this media server when looking to incorporate video into a show.

Vickie clearly highlights in her conclusion the most important aspects we like to put forward about our products: ease of use, performance and affordability.

We at ArKaos have always had the feeling that our show and lighting products are not known enough in the USA, and with such an article from someone like Vickie this is clearly starting to change!

For further information about Vickie you may visit her website at vickieclaiborne.com.

Designed specifically with the show and lighting market in mind, MediaMaster 1.1 now comes with improved frame blending support allowing extremely smooth video playback even at slow speeds and software genlock making it possible to play several HD movies at up to 60 fps without dropping a single frame.

Other new developments include higher possible output resolution (up to 4096 px), Alpha Channel from source, support for grandMA’s MA-eDMX protocol, improved SoftEdge blending and more..

If you want all the details, we’ve got a nice Press Release for you. And if you just want to use it, it’s here and it’s a free upgrade for MediaMaster 1.0 users.

Finally – in order to make this announcement a little more attractive – here’s a QuickTime with some extracts from the Australian Idol TV show, they’re already using MediaMaster 1.1 running on 2 MacPro servers to drive the visuals on the stage. It’s a compilation of videos found on sharing web sites (hence the quality..)

MediaMaster has become a very popular media server software for TV stages because of its handy content library system that can accomodate up to 60.000 visuals and because it’s a very easy solution to have the control on both the visuals from the walls and all the lighting equipment from a single DMX console.

Now just five days later, on 15 Aug. he was already VJing live for the ZôL concert at Metamorphoses, a French Electronic music festival and it went great, check out the video below!

Okay Charlie is not a beginner when it comes to playing with video but we like to think that we succeeded in making GrandVJ a powerful but easy VJing software with a very short learning curve.

They have setup a very creative system to trigger visuals involving a NuVJ, a video camera, a MediaMaster controlled from a GrandMA console and.. a custom controller made of a simple plexiglass panel with duct tape, the so-called “PixelFucker controller”..

Philipp from LoopLight explains his creation:

Installation schema

I have setup ArKaos MediaMaster, ArKaos NuVJ and grandMA ultralight in one network session. The headlights were Jarag-5 in a matrix with par30 and 52 Movinglights with CMY. I made a led mapping patch in MediaMaster to control both the Jarags and the CMY of the movinglights.

MediaMaster was fed with two input streams:

The first input came from a camera filming a plexiglass panel divided in two areas, the left side was for Jarag and the right side for the CMY.

The second input was fed with the output of a NuVJ that I used to trigger SD Clips.

In MediaMaster I scaled my live input from the camera to match only the left part of the plexiglass and configured different effects like Edge detect, Greyscale and Contrast so that, by moving my hand vertically and horizontally in front of the camera (behind the left part of the plexiglass that I was using as guide), I could dynamically create visuals in combination with the SD Clips played by the NuVJ.

For the CMY, I prepared four large Colourwheels in different bright colours so just by moving them in the right half of the plexiglass I could change all CMY in the moving lights.

As you can see it’s a great example of creative processing involving video, lighting and a good dose of creativity.. And that’s exactly what the guys from LoopLight are known for!

If you read this article from Momo The Monster himself at Create Digital Motion you will understand that VJing when done professionally is a very serious job which requires good software, quality hardware, nice visual content and an incredible lot of planning and organization – in case you didn’t figured this out already..

Momo explains how he’s been part of the VJ crew in charge of playing visuals at the Coachella festival for the bands that had nothing prepared and details the whole material and organization they have setup.

The article: Reflections on Being a VJ at Coachella: Mega VJ, VJ Gear Round-up

As a part of their creation process they make a very advanced use of ArKaos software’s blend and mask modes to map visuals on onto architecture or objects.

They have once again caught our attention with one of their latest installations, a stunning visual show in Breda’s cathedral. It’s a beautiful mix of painting projection, light sculpture, perfect mapping and great music made by a team of very experienced professionals..

But enough words, have a look at the video; it’s really worth watching to the end!

Credits goes to Yannick Jacquet (Legoman), Joanie Lemercier (crustea), Romain Tardy (Aalto) and Olivier Ratsi (Emovie) from ANTIVJ. Original music is by Thomas Vaquié, played on organ by Gerard Maters and the lighting design is by Giacinto Caponio.

Finally, we couldn’t resist adding another video to this post; the TV report from Dutch television where you can see the ANTIVJ team interviewed while setting up the show and explaining their background and how they evolved to this concept (the presentation is in Dutch but the interviews are in English). It also briefly shows some of ANTIVJ’s other very interesting realizations.

For more, be sure to check out Crustea’s YouTube Channel, ANTIVJ on Vimeo and the ANTIVJ Blog.

ArKaos visuals at Prodigy UK Arena Tour

Richard Shipman – professional lighting designer and long-time ArKaos supporter – has just accomplished another successful performance, this time for Prodigy during their UK Arena Tour in April.

Check out the full article at Digital Production Middle East, and if you want to know more about Richard Shipman, have a look at his Lighting Designer interview we published back in 2006.