It was great to join the party and VJ at this super London venue for Joe Kay (Soulection) and friends. Great tunes new and old, pop and obscure. Really enjoyed playing on the huge 5k super widescreen for the whole night and creating some content collages that suited the varied musical styles.
Radio 1 Dance music ‘legend’ DJ Danny Howard commissioned More Eyes to provide a VJ and content for these two shows at the ever popular UK festivals Leeds and Reading. I collated a show from stock content which I programmed to work tightly to the BPM and create a show to suit his House music set.
Unfortunately the Leeds show didn’t happen due to our stage being shut after a severe storm the previous night which devastated many areas of the site. Two days later Reading was great fun though and I got to meet up with some colleagues and friends who were all working there on the same day.
Great to watch it on BBC iplayer after the show when it was made available to stream. The camera directing for the imag screens was really pretty bad though, until requests were made to the OB unit, was it a training day for the BBC?
It was just one show but the highlight of my summer was to create the content and perform with this talented musician and his band. Nice to visit Victoria Park in London for All Points East festival again too.
I built some sound reactive compositions with Vuo which I loaded into Resolume as Freeframe image generators. Based solely upon the artists logo it was a a simple but effective visual set which gained momentum with the music and I was happy to see it getting some attention in some TikTok posts
A short notice show covering for a VJ who had been taken sick, I was rushed out to Belgium on the Eurostar with a days notice and flung in at the deepend with an artist who’s name I hadn’t even heard before.
Nigerian pop star Ayra Starr had a show at one of Belgiums largest ‘youth music’ festivals Les Ardentes. It was a good crew to work with and I pulled it off without too much difficulty, slight issues plugging into the E2 processor using custom EDID’s during a short changeover but we got it up and running with a bit of reprogramming.
Another great set of shows covering for More Eyes during peak summer ‘silly season’. It was great to work on this show with it’s minimalist content consisting of colour fades and tasteful particle simulations which really complemented the young lighting designers work. Brilliant to visit Isle of White festival, Tivoli Gothenburg and Skelleftea Summertime in Sweden.
The highlight of this trip for me was experiencing the mid summer nights in the North of Sweden at Skelleftea for the first time, it remained dusky all night long. We also stayed in the famous Wood Hotel which won numerous awards for it’s architecture, shame it didn’t have blackout blinds though.
More Eyes were contacted by the show designer Ace Bowerman to supply a VJ for this summers breakthrough pop artist for her big show at BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend which this year was held in Luton.
We received huge content deliveries from the production company in NYC and I programmed the set, incorporating camera feeds with my own custom LUT effects, alpha keyed layers and some stunning 3D renders for the 3 x 4k resolution screens. Great to watch it after the show when it was available on BBC iplayer for a streaming audience.
The Australian DJ and producer needed a VJ for two European shows and I was happy to cover these on behalf of MoreEyes. First was a trip to Gothenburg’s Port Du Soleil, a pop-up summer club in one of the cities oldest venues in a central park location. The screen set-up sounded great on paper, almost complete immersion in LED, from large ceiling strips to wrap around panels on all the walls.
I was provided with all of the details and prepared my output mapping in advance only to find it almost completely wrong when I arrived at the venue. Virtually pointless preparation, panels had been removed, lefts and rights had been mixed up, different resolution panels in various areas, strips where sections were jumbled up. It was a real pain in the proverbial, the house tech was a church service lighting op and was friendly but very little help.
Strafwerk festival in Amsterdam was almost a complete waste of electricity for the visuals during the daytime in my opinion, five long thin strips of panels placed at a 45º angle rising up and out above the crowd in a semi-circle. FOH was too far away to have a good view, the FOH structure had a transparent roof, it was a very hot summers day and the sun on the screens and the heat made everything harder than it should have been. I passed the baton to the house VJ who did an adequate job of flashing the panels now and again using the Chaser plugin which was pretty much all that was visible, the supplied content was not suited to the set-up at all.
Great to work with 4Wall at my hometown music festival for the second time. I helped build the LED screens and VJ’d on one of the smaller stages for the weekend so it was a low stress, fun time and nice to easily get home to my own bed after each day.
A highlight for me was working with Under the Stars, a charity that uses creativity and the performing arts to enhance the lives of people with learning disabilities and / or autism. The band who played were a raucous psych/punk ensemble who enjoy every minute of their solid performances.
I joined the American DJ and Producer Kayzo on two of his European shows, Ministry of Sound in London and Nameless Festival in the North of Italy. All custom 3D animated content was supplied by the artist.
The screen set-up for Nameless was a sight to behold, multiple giant chevrons, triangles and rectangles filling one end of a cavernous hangar of a structure. There were some questionable rigging ‘solutions’ to make it all hang together but I do wish UK festivals invested in more elaborate screen designs.
I was contacted by More Eyes to takeover this European tour at short notice from another company who were not providing an adequate service. One person was camera directing and doing very basic playback to the multiple screens, they were trying to do two jobs and doing them both poorly.
More Eyes were commissioned to create some custom 3D animations, including a tightly synchronised intro and projection mapping style ‘trompe l’oeil’ effects which were key to making best use of the multiple blocks of LED screen on stage. We were also supplied with a bunch of music video content that was poorly prepared and needed a lot of tweaking to make it look good on the stage. I was joined by Nick Carter as camera director who did a sterling job alongside me.
It was a pleasure to work alongside a great crew and make some good friends over the month or so of this tour. The misogynistic messages of his lyrics is not something I endorse but the musicianship and professionalism of everyone involved was fantastic.
I see Curtis has come out in support of Trump over recent years, disappointing to say the least.
I worked in partnership with Suffolk County Council’s health improvement facilitator Imogen Sherwood as part of the ‘Suffolk How AreYou?’ campaign to create eye catching projections at three seasonal events in the county.
The projections were the highlight of the campaign which included extensive community outreach, traditional advertising, local Radio, TV and printed media. The campaign focussed on healthy eating, exercise and outdoor activities with the aim of improving public health and encouraging active lifestyles.
I created site specific projections which were displayed during the Christmas light switch on events in three towns. The site in Ipswich Corn Exchange was a prime location for an architectural projection mapping. I employed the talents of Gary Mellor at Blue Spec Media to help me with the large amount of After Effects animation.
The multi-talented filmmaker, musician, artists and director Zahed Sultan invited me to create the stage set projections for this show at The Albany Theatre, Deptford after I spotted a post on social media looking for my skills.
The Haramacy residency program and multi arts festival was held on the 27th April 2019. The program brought together 11 artists from Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in London for a 4-day residency to collaborate and create works that would be performed on the fifth day.
I designed and fabricated the triangular screens using a mixture of rear and front projection materials. I worked with the artists to create content for the triangular screens and use the design successfully.
Working for We Make Stuff Happen as video content manager at this annual event is challenging and exciting. The schedule is always tight for the huge logistical task involving temporary road closures and a large crew to rapidly build the stage and ancillary equipment.
I have taken care of video content displayed on stage and sent out to the screens along the street including a tightly synchronised countdown to the switch on itself in 2018 and 2019.
I have freelanced with Transition since 2017. The first job they sent me out on was at Hammersmith Apollo to set-up a pair of projectors and screens for an Erykah Badu concert.
They have employed me as VJ for the main stage at Beat Herder Festival in 2017 and 2018, LED technician and Camera Operator for multiple stages at Parklife Festival and Manchester Pride among many other events.
Highlights shows with them have been at Wembley Arena and La Seine Musicale in Paris for a Korean boy band. While I was VJ at Beat Herder I had the pleasure to perform alongside many musical greats including one of my all time favourites Lee Scratch Perry.
Working for an agency called Cake I undertook the challenge of displaying the outstanding new feature of the Nokia 8 smartphone: The ‘Bothie’ dual camera function allowed users to use and display video from the front and rear camera modules of the device at the same time. The one big snag being that the device had no video output functions built in to the operating system.
A short period of research and testing resulted in success. Utilising a screencasting app on the phone in combination with a Syphon enabled screen capture app on a MacPro, we were able to capture streams from two roving phones at an adequate resolution and frame rate with minimal latency.
Due to a booking to VJ at a music festival in Croatia I was unable to be there for the delivery of this job so I left it in the capable hands of Insight Lighting, Neal Coghlan and Jules Shapter.
The venue for the event was Beat nightclub where I took care of clients large and small for a couple of years thanks to both VJ Mowgli and Sleepytom whom both had a hand in creating such a good edge blended set-up in the venue.
The lovely Henry Trew whom I had got to know while he was running Dalston Roof Park had a big hand in organising this small but beautifully formed festival which raises vital funds for Jamie’s Farm to host outdoor education trips for inner-city children.
I helped out for a few years and really enjoyed adding some projections to an experimental space with a collection of artists from the studios where I worked the first year. In 2016 I designed the ‘main stage’ in the barn for the first time. I found some materials on site and constructed some organic shaped screens which hung above the stage to be mapped with projections.
In 2018 I was joined for the fun by Brendan from Insight Lighting, Gary Deepvisual and Hanzo of http://initstudio.net/ and we filled the barn and yard with lighting and projections for the whole weekend.
In 2015 I was sacked from a job, dumped by my girlfriend and also given notice to leave where I was living, all within a week. Pretty bleak. I decided to turn all of that negativity into something positive, distracting and useful!
I wanted to realise a long held dream of organising an audiovisual festival. Initial plans were conconcted and emails went out to the people whom I wanted to help make it a reality. After a year of hard work and commitment from a small team of directors with huge contributions from the community of artists and volunteers Splice Festival was first staged from the 3rd to the 5th June 2016 and continued for three editions.
http://2016.splicefestival.com/
http://2017.splicefestival.com/
http://2018.splicefestival.com/
Zak Norman of Black Box Echo came to me with an interesting challenge…
He had built a show using the most impressive and cumbersome Quartz Composer patch I have ever seen and wanted me to understand it enough to be his understudy should the need ever arise.
We spent a couple of days together and I wrote an instruction manual which would hopefully be enough to let me get the show up and running. The system used structured midi data sent to QC from Ableton live which was directly synced to Tom’s laptop on stage. The twisted logic that Zak implemented ensured that every show would be individual. Before each and every performance he would input a set of localised data, such as weather conditions and city population, from these data points the programme would make choices such as allocations of colour or distortion etc.
Zak had employed the talents of the best QC programmers in the game, Anton Marini and George Toledo to create some of the generative compositions within his megastructure and it was a pleasure to see how it all combined to produce some impressive results.
Thankfully I never needed to be understudy but I did get to do one show alongside Zak at Lovebox and the instructions worked about 90% of the way. It was also nice to put a face to the name Pesh who was projectionist for this show.
Konstantinos from Urban Visuals pulled me in to make some realtime 3D animation for this gigantic projection mapping in Switzerland. It was the 210th anniversary of this historic private bank. Working alongside Brendan from Insight Lighting and Tom Wall from Blinkin Lab to generate enough content for a long show we each made individual sections in our own unique styles to build a momentum over the duration of the night.
For this inaugural year of the British Film Institutes fundraising gala event The Light Surgeons tasked me with programming a realtime filmstip video effect. Quartz Composer at the ready it would be a fun job.
The Light Surgeons raided the BFI archive for suitable short action shots which were converted into small image sequences. I used the composition within Madmapper which gave me the flexibility to place each strip where ever I wished on a four H.D. projector output.
This installation was part of the reception area and an even grander installation was in place for the main event upstairs. Working with Insight Lighting to install the system with projectors supplied by QED productions was great and the 16mm projections from David Leister set the whole thing off to a tee with the authenticity only found with the smell, grain and sounds of real film.
Commisioned by Insight Lighting to create a custom control system for their video mirror system to make a synchronised dynamic panorama display and dance floor lighting. Created using Quartz Composer with Kineme’s ArtNet Plugin I made a patch with controls which ran as clips with Resolume Arena. This allowed sound reactive imagery to be dynamically moved around the space and also align at set positions to create a dual output screen.
Lots more photo’s and videos on Insight’s Flickr
Joe Catchpole 