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Video Scratching on M-M-Macs
By Leander Kahney |
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A couple of years ago, three New York video artists were trying to get their experimental films shown in the city's art galleries and movie festivals, but they didn't like the staid atmosphere these events engender. So they took their movies to raves and nightclubs, and in so doing, they've not only become leading practitioners of the new art of video-scratching, they're finally being invited to perform at festivals and art galleries.
Jack Hazard, 27, Bruno Levy, 22, and Richie Lau, 26 -- collectively known as Squaresquare -- are one of the leading U.S. crews scratching and remixing live video. Just as scratching and sampling has forever changed music, video scratching is starting to revolutionize musical performances. The process is remarkably similar. Using a pair of Titanium G4 PowerBooks and Apple's Final Cut Pro 3 video editing software, the Video DJs (VJs) can match the rhythm of any video footage to the tempo of the music. Using a standard video-mixing desk, the VJs blend and cross fade between two feeds, one from each PowerBook. A video-editing jog-shuttle allows them to scratch the video; so Fred Astaire is made to go through the same graceful twirl back and forth to the rhythm of a drum and bass track. "We can make a direct association between the music and the video," said Hazard. "Motion becomes dance. Any motion becomes rhythmic." The video is projected onto a club's giant screens, often flanking the DJ or performer. The trio have played clubs and raves from New York to Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Miami, sometimes up to four nights a week. The largest crowd was 10,000. Their sets will often last six hours; they once played for 12 hours straight. "I think they're phenomenal," said Caroline Hoste of Music2Productions, a worldwide management and booking agency based in Vancouver. "Watching the crowd respond to the visuals as well as the music makes it the ultimate musical experience." Hoste said she'd been to clubs all over the world and has only seen one other act – the Morpheus Project of Vancouver – to match them. "(Squaresquare) are the cutting edge," she said. "When I saw their stuff kick off in New York, I wanted them to do all the stuff for my clients." Video scratching was pioneered by a U.S. multimedia crew called Emergency Broadcast Network in the late 1980s, and refined by Coldcut and Hex, a pair of U.K. collaborative multimedia producers and musicians. Coldcut has created a video-sampling software package for Windows PCs called VJamm. Midivid is another similar, MIDI-controlled software package for PCs. Squaresquare use all kinds of different footage for their performances. They mix pre-recorded sequences and 3-D animations with live footage from the club, including the DJ and the dancers. The footage comes from lots of different sources – '40s musicals, kung-fu movies, nature documentaries, newsreels of the space shuttle. They mix in a lot of pop culture references, from the Simpsons to Pee Wee Herman dancing on a bar. The effect is transforming. Old black-and-white footage of a circus clown spinning on his head is mixed with footage of contemporary break dancers. "In that context, he's not a clown any more," said Hazard, "he's a break dancer." "(Clubbers) grew up watching MTV," added Hazard. "They can’t hear a song without seeing a movie in their heads. They hear music and they want to see an accompanying movie. They just accept it. They've been watching MTV for 20 years." Squaresquare avoid drug-like visuals. "There's a lot of psychedelic junk out there," said Levy. "We try to stay away from that. We try to give people imagery they can relate to." "It's not just for LSD trippers any more," added Hazard. As well as the PowerBooks, which have about 100 Gbytes of storage space apiece, the VJs use a pair of 200-Gbyte Firewire hard drives; giving them about 600 Gbytes of video clips to play with. "The PowerBooks give us incredible flexibility," said Hazard. "They've become video samplers. What was being done with audio sampling years ago, we can now do with video mixing." Because they have access to so many clips, they often let the music trigger the visuals. If a didgeridoo suddenly starts playing, they search their clip database under "D" for didgeridoo footage and instantly mix it into the feed. Hazard likened the effect to call and answer in jazz, except in this case it's between the DJ and the VJ. Levy said it had a dramatic effect on clubbers. "In an empty club where no one is dancing, if we make the clips dance, people get up and dance too." The trio are starting to accompany live acts, which presents the challenge of finding visuals to illustrate a three-minute song or tell a short story, like a music video. They were recently approached to play at a New York film festival in January. "We've come full circle," said Levy. Squaresquare will be performing at a Wired News-sponsored technology showcase called Lapdance during Macworld New York. - - - Wired News is sponsoring the coolest party at Macworld. On July 18, Lapdance will feature some of New York City's hottest PowerBook DJs and video mixers at the Remote Lounge in the East Village, beginning at 9 p.m. It's free, open to all and there will be a two-for-one special on drinks (with voucher, available at Macworld).
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