Esperi Gig

Me and my VJ buddy Garry met Esperi (aka Chris Lee-Marr) at one of our first gigs a few months ago and we decided to work together and have a go at doing some custom visuals for some of his gigs. I thought it’d be nice to try something a bit different so quickly put together a little test using a kite that my girlfriend Petra had given me for christmas (I had yet to actually fly it at this point :) and the projection mapping technique that I’ve talked about before.

This was all well and good as a test, but the real challenge would be to prepare all the different animations so that they could be quickly adapted to the new positions and angles that the kite and projector would end up in on the night of the gig - I’d have to re-align all of the animations in After Effects and render them all out again in the three hours I had at the venue before the gig started.

In order to be able to do this quickly and efficiently I had to create a separate parent composition in After Effects for each of the 24 triangles, which consisted of just solid, still, constant shapes. I then took these comps and combined, sequenced and animated them in new compositions so that I would only have to tweak the positions of the parent shapes and all the comps that used them would be automatically updated.

I needed to create various other parent compositions too that were slightly more compicated than the still triangles (for example the animations that manipulate the edges of the kite) but the same principals applied. Having to work like this was a bit of a strain on my tiny mind, and it presented quite a few limitations on the kind of animations I was able to produce in the time I had available, as I had to constantly go through the setting up process in my head and decide if I could afford the time it would take to tweak a whole new set of parent compositions on the night.

Here’s an edit of the first gig at the Doghouse in Dundee - I couldn’t use the live sound unfortunately as it was a bit of a poor quality recording, so I put together this semi music video to Takkat by Esperi himself.

I’ll have some footage from our second gig together up soon with the actual audio. Also, have a look at my Central Station blog where I talk about the process and performance a bit more (perhaps more coherently, I’m not sure).