VJ Night

There might have been about 20 people there to watch the show. Around 8 VJ Scobot started out with his opening set, which was mostly fast edits between a few dozen clips. Some of the clips were recognizable, like from Bad Boys or Team America, others from anime sources, and some footage from marginal productions of decades ago. Something from early incarnations of 'The Rocketeer'? Scobot later explained that his software allows keying of clips to keys (and presumably effects and transitions also?).

After 20-30 minutes of that the music wound down and Scobot introduced DJ Deeb, the guest VJ Spyscience, and what VJ Night is all about. An interview with Spyscience followed, video taped by one from the 911 crew (though it's not clear whether the interview will ever be put on the internet or anywhere else, it's just for the archive). Spyscience used some software I forget the name of, which is also clip oriented but drag and drop along with an external USB device with sliders and knobs is used. Most of the clips where provided with the software, one he had made himself. His computer locked up a few of times and Scobot had to take control of the video for a while during rebooting.

After that a Q&A sessions followed, and the event was over by about 10.

Overall the event was interesting, though even as Scobot admitted the traditional role of VJ work is to make a side-show, not to be shown in a theater to an audience focused directly on it. I thought the format works but that VJ sets should be a little shorter, since they can get repetitious. Another nice thing might be to have continuous split-screen, one view showing the VJ output and the other focusing on the VJ and what they're doing, although the layout of the space allows the audience to effectively look over the shoulder of the working VJ.

I found my personal preference is for visuals that are the opposite of recognizable clips from tv or movies, but purely abstract instead. I'd like to see someone do a set with more live-generated visuals (rather than live-editing-plus-effects on a lot of clips).