Fri, 21 Oct 2005 12:00am

Event | Video and Lights for The Buoys

The first Buoys show took place in Leicester at the Phoenix tonight. It was part of the second Bathysphere Nights event, which featured The Dead Texan headlining.

My contribution to The Buoys' performance was video projections and live lighting control.

The video projections were based around my usual themes of flow, rotation, connectedness and the subjective passing of time, and I had produced a completely new set of materials for this event.

The lighting control was also completely new, but more in the sense that this was the first time I had attempted to to take charge of the lights for a live event like this!

Technically, it was all done via the magic of DMX. For the show, I enhanced my usual live video mixing Max/MSP/Jitter patch to allow me to control the lighting rig via an Enttec DMX controller (which worked flawlessly).

I kept the lighting simple. Twenty-four lights (Par Cans) were arranged in six banks of four, with the outer two banks being used for sound responsive 'chases'.

The central four banks were used slightly differently. These were configured to 'wash' the surround of the projection screen and the stage with coloured light that reflected the colours that could be seen in the video. I did this by using the Cyclops extension to Max to track the colours in the video and produce four representative RBG values. I then set the light combinations in each bank to match these values.

I think it worked OK. The effect I was after was to attempt to break the video projection out of its usual rectangular box through the use of responsive light and this was certainly achieved in part In the future I would probably prefer to use combinations of 'colour changer' lights rather than attempting to mix the colours via 'gelled' Par Cans, but it was a good experiment.

There are pictures and video clips on The Buoys Web page.

Author: Sean Clark