Gaye Bykers On Acid

My very first walk on part, holding an 8mm cine projector on my shoulder in the front row of a GBOA gig in 1989

Happy Birthday Dear Pop Star

Another walk on part in the lives of the famous - this time Simon Lebon's birthday in Toronto 2011. He ended up wearing the cake instead of eating it. If you look closely you can see the Gucci labels on my Peltors.

Beautiful Clothes - TV Mania

It's nearly 14 weeks since we shot the video for Beautiful Clothes and much love and affection has been poured into making it into something wonderful. It's finally ready and will no doubt be released very very soon..

EART HL I NG Tour 1997

Yes, i did indeed get a walk on part in the career of David Bowie. Thats me on the left walking offstage mid song after fixing a projector on the bass drum.. We got the static effect by playing blank tapes in the VHS machines.

Duran Bootleg - Latest & Greatest - 1998

Another still from another bootleg, this time the Wembley show in the Dec 98 UK tour - being my first time out with Duran Duran. Lead Singer Simon Lebon asked the Tour Manager who the guy was in yellow headphones running around onstage during the show. When told, he then said "Well, this is Duran Duran. If he is onstage he either wears black or Gucci." Which is how I came to have Gucci logos on my ear defenders.
2x xenon HFX 35mm slide projectors & 2x xenon EIKI 16mm cine Projectors

Duran Bootleg - Pop Trash - 1999

Sadly deepvisual have no photos of their Duran projections from the 1998-2000 tours as the negs were handed over to someone else, never to be returned.. Its very hard to find stills or video from back then, but this has surfaced from a bootleg recorded by the in house CCTV at the House of Blues Chicago.. which I am sure is very naughty of them..
Large format scroll film projection from 7kW HFX projector.

The Orb - More Adventures...

Projection Mapping Pioneers

Given the massive explosion of Projection Mapping its hard to imagine a time when this specialised technique was all but unknown outside of a small circle of specialists. If you try Googling for "3D Projection Mapping" you won't find anything earlier than 2007.
deepvisual started doing Projection Mapping in 1993, quickly innovating the ponderous techniques that French companies were using for architectural projection into a simple and effective way of preparing images - at that time large format slides- for projection onto buildings..

of course deepvisual didn't invent Projection Mapping, but we did single-handedly make it accessible to the whole world by posting two videos on youtube in 2007, explaining our unique method for accurately aligning projected imagery to objects. From that small beginning Projection Mapping has snowballed into a global phenomenon.

deepvisual projection mapping Taejon Expo 1993

more on deepvisual and the history of Projection Mapping

Nick Rhodes: Bei Incubi

The Force Behind Duran Duran Reveals His Photographic Talent in a New Series

A chameleonic woman shape-shifts to adopt a multitude of personas in these seductive Polaroids by Duran Duran keyboardist-turned-photographer Nick Rhodes. A founding member of the legendary New Romantic pop outfit, Birmingham-born Rhodes had originally intended the shots to feature on the sleeve to forthcoming album from side-project TV Mania. ” The works on display follow the many metamorphoses of an imagined character—the fame-obsessed daughter of a futuristic, dysfunctional family—as she transforms from a photogenic beauty to an abstract, even nightmarish vision. “One of the main challenges for me was to try to create photos that look like paintings, but without using computers in post-production,” says Rhodes. “Live dangerously—take a Polaroid.
Needless to say, deepvisual have been involved in every stage of this project, including the big party last night.
It's not always work work work...

Studio Shoot

Changeover on set and the Gaffer springs into action. 

Bespoke HD content was accurately mapped onto the set on a one day video shoot for a prominent games company - by deepvisual of course! 

Christie 8k & Modul8

Projection Mapping IHG

A refurbished hotel in central London needed an event with a difference. Cue deepvisual with some bespoke projection mapping on the facade..
4x 20k Christie Roadsters and Watchout

TV Mania

Back in the mid-90s, Duran Duran's  Nick Rhodes and guitarist Warren Cuccurullo had what turned out to be a premonition of a society in which voyeurism was woven into the cultural fabric. In wanting to share their vision of the future, they created its soundtrack in the form of an album called TV Mania: Bored With Prozac and The Internet? Lost until recently the album is on the brink of release. 
deepvisual is currently working with Nick Rhodes on a series of visual TV Mania delights for you all to enjoy.

The Orb

deepvisual has performed live visuals for 90s ambient supergroup The Orb since 2000 performing  a successful run of shows in  Europe, the US and Japan on a variety of screens and stages. Hot on the heels of their latest album with Lee 'Scratch' Perry, deepvisual generate a spontaneous free form visual joyride as backdrop to The Orb onstage.

Duran Duran

Now heading into their 14th year at the helm of Duran Duran's visual onstage presence, deepvisual crafted content from diverse sources into a spectacular backdrop for the band's 2011-2012 World Tour.

The show was such a success there was a DVD release of the Manchester 2011 concert - A Diamond In The Mind.

Behind the scenes, the multiscreen content was run live, with some sequences triggered by timecode, while other sections of the show used deepvisual's touring CCTV system to place intimate live shots of the performers and audience onscreen.

Absolute Hollywood

Always the most challenging of our projects, working in Absolute Hollywood's giant domes draws on skills as diverse as rope access, fulldome content creation and planetarium projection system installation and alignment. We've done some amazing work together including the Four Host Nations Pavilion at the Vancouver Winter Olympics and at events across the globe

Mobile Planetarium - Madrid

A badly installed Planetarium projection system in Madrid was turned around by deepvisual, resulting in a perfect line up and a delighted client. Just by chance, we ended up saving the Planet (arium) on the same day some of the more superstitious members of spaceship earth were convinced was the end of the world. 

Nollywood Film Premiere

Last minute problems with HDCP copy protection almost sank the glamorous UK launch of the Nigerian movie 'Turning Point' .  deepvisual saved the day of course and the hilarious movie nearly brought the house down..

Girls Aloud

An elaborate NDA prevents us from saying much beyond "Aren't the projections on the new Girls Aloud video fantastic"

Hartnell ~ RNIB simulator

Working in conjunction with Hartnell Creative Communication, deepvisual created an award winning interactive game system with a VDMX engine that simulates the symptoms of progressive eye disease, for the Royal National Institute for the Blind.

Musion

The content curators at Musion liked our custom made footage for their Musion Eyeliner competition so much they bought it!

Nokia Projection Art Gallery

How could anyone expect an international projection artist to actually know how to do projections? Enter deepvisual who took all the flash based content that really didn't want to work and made it run like clockwork to timecode.

On tour / Off tour

Willard: [voiceover] Saigon... shit; I'm still only in Saigon... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle.  When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. [grabs at flying insect]  I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now... waiting for a mission... getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter.

Yeah, its not easy being off the road for any length of time. You try to rest a little and maybe catch up on all the thousands of things that need doing, then before you know it the phone rings and a voice says "Can you go to Madrid today?" or "Can you go to rehearsals in Brixton right now and just do whatever they ask? You'll be back in 14 weeks."

SKATE - Somerset House Nov 2010

- visuals by Insight Lighting - mapping by deepvisual

modul8 saves the day

"Don't worry about it", Brendan had said at the production meeting. "The projector company (name withheld) have told us they can do it no problem". The 'it' that would be no problem was the near impossible task of aligning 2 pairs of 4 stacks of 18k (144,00 lumens) Christie HD video projectors on a building with lots of architectural features on many different planes.
Overlaying 4 projectors on the same screen is difficult enough if the screen is flat. Dealing with the parallax from extrusions and recesses may be possible to a degree with the twist cards that some Christies carry, but to do that accurately 8 times in one night???
Well as it transpired, it is possible to do it in one night - but only if the gig is in the arctic circle in winter, where the nights last two months and of course our gig is in London - so inevitably come 3am, the projectionist suddenly realises that, actually it can't be done after all.
We could have stuck to our guns and made them fix it, but that would almost certainly have ended in a failed show and even though it would be totally their fault, it would be we who would have to deal with the fall out.
So after 20 minutes of fiddling in Modul8, stretching and warping the image, I got the line up to almost perfectly match the building - our only problem being the join between the projectors in the middle laying across 3 different surfaces. If we had separate perspective distortions on each output I could have nailed it, but as it was the lineup was only about 6 inches out on one side anyway.
In our favour, the client had no interest in contemporary mapping whatsoever, so we could avoid all the cliches and have some fun with the general theme - top hat and tails.. They paid top dollar for a license to show some buzby berkley clips, so we could rob the archives with impunity.

come showtime and the damned lampies had been up one of the towers during the afternoon and rigged a light right in front of one of the projector lenses, in the process nudging the alignment out.
the projectionist managed to get all four projectors back into alignment with each other, but not with the other 4 projectors - making the left hand side of the screen 10-20 pixels out of alignment - which we didn't notice until the show was underway. never fear- just type in an offset on the advanced output and all will be fine - but of course I made an error while projecting live and lost the whole alignment and one screen disappeared completely - panic reigned, but I kept my cool and figured the whole thing out in the longest 15 seconds of this year, while I calmly faded everything out gracefully, to make it look intentional, fixed it, then faded it back in with the music...
After that Brendan, the driving force behind Insight Lighting, took over and delivered another of his inspiring visual collages made of all things Buzby.
So the potentially catastrophic failure became a roaring success - to the point where Patrick Woodroffe ( Lighting designer for the Rolling Stones) came over and gave Brendan two thumbs up for the visuals.

Central to the success of the projections was not only the mapping, but also the recreation of empty film set backdrops in photoshop. these were then used as difference mattes to remove the backgrounds from 1940s dance routines in post to allow live compositing of individual dancers.
And of course, the bright lights of the Skate arena meant that not even too many projectors would be enough...
8 x 18k Christies