Following up WAAX’s Wisdom Teeth video, we needed a clip which would deliver their fresh new lineup to the world, while giving plenty of focus to Marie’s ferocious presence.
Category: Lighting/Audio Reactive
Tim Shiel composed the award-winning soundtrack to mobile application Duet, a mesmerising, minimalist, and wonderfully difficult game.
Brisbane orchestral composer Ryan Walsh found himself thoroughly addicted to Duet and decided that he’d make things much worse by arranging the soundtrack for a 16 piece orchestra.
Tim asked if I’d be interested in putting together live visuals for the show. We met up in Melbourne, planned out the storyline of the set and how we’d translate the 2D, minimalist visuals of the game into something immersive.
Then I spent a couple of weeks building 3D versions of the game, and making those simple rotating Red/Blue balls into an epic journey through space, building weird mechanical cityscapes and crashing suns into planets.
For the show I did live visuals and also programmed lights via Ableton Live, creating a rather special, immersive 45 minute experience. It was performed for a rapt audience on 15th May, 2015. Here’s a 15-minute section from the middle of the show, with my visuals overlaid in some sections to get a proper feel for the animation style:
Hyper-low-budget, single shot experiment in time ramping.
A dark, hot room filled with smoke and lasers. Who doesn’t want that in their life? Lighting is all controlled via my audio-reactive lighting system, each light pulse is directly controlled by the sound of the instruments and vocals.
Directed, Shot, Edited, Laser and Lighting Programmed by Jaymis
Filmed at Regent Station
Camera gear courtesy of Graetzmedia
After designing and 3D-printing modifications to convert our 3-axis camBLOCK motion control system into a monster 5-axis crane rig, I needed a project to test out the system. Fortunately my buddies Little Scout were about to release their new single, and the aesthetic perfectly fit the multi-pass, audio-reactive ideas in my head.
Motion control gave me some delightfully crane-y multi-pass camera moves, and audio reactive lighting made the band members magically appear only when their instruments made noise.
This clip won Gold in the Music Videos category at the Australian Cinematography Society’s 2013 Queensland awards.
The first public use of the audio-reactive lighting system I developed for Ableton Live. The lighting of this clip was controlled entirely via the sounds of the music. The individual audio “stems” – vocals, synths, kick drum, snare etc. – were routed to different lighting channels to create a perfectly synced yet organic looking lighting show.
Directed, Shot, Edited and Lighting Programmed by Jaymis: http://jaymis.com
The record label contacted Graetzmedia director Dan wanting “lights and pyro” but only had budget to cover a single flame canon.
So I got to work designing, inventing and fabricating on 3 different setups:
Audio-controlled lighting: With the song stems controlling stage lights.
Flame Tubes: My versions of the classic “Reubens Tube” science experiment, with audio controlling 6 separate channels of propane-tubes.
Sparkler Cannons: To enable model rocket igniters to trigger the difficult-to-burn sparklers, I had to come up with my own mixture of gunpowder.