Niagra Falls

Rack Building

Once again we are configuring our video devices ready for the coming Duran Duran world tour.

A day at the races

More fulldome - this time at the racecourse in Doha.
The Bobboes were beautiful.

The line up from hell

A relatively simple task.. lining up 8 projectors with blends on a flat screen.  Luckily I dodged the bullet on this one and it was the French projectionist who had to deal with the utter chaos caused by the venue manager turning on the AC halfway through the show, thereby moving the screen 4" out of place and destroying the perfect line-up.

Souq Waqif

Despite the best efforts of the migrant workers and ex-pats, we managed to put together a cracking Fulldome show for the Children's Festival in Qatar..

Duran Live

Gig Review

pic by Ozzie

Duran Duran

Loading in for the UK tour today!

Assassins Creed

3 days at Pinewood Studios on standby as stand in assistant to the assistant Projectionist.

Paris Attacks

Thankfully, good friend and long term Tour Manager for the Orb Steev Toth, escaped unharmed from the tragedy that befell the Eagles of Death Metal gig in Paris last week where he was working.
Glad he's ok, devastated by the events in Paris.

Music Cube

What indeed could be more perfect than a gig where you can't hear the band.
Behold the Sennheiser Music Cube.
Now if only we could figure out a way of keeping them in there forever....

IAS

Yup, it really was 4 days at East Grindstead at the Church of Scientology.
They were having issues with their projection systems, not anymore of course...

I have to say, for all their bad press, these guys were an absolute joy to work with. Wonderful people.

Versus Versace

An interactive sound activated in-store installation, designed and programmed by deepvisual.

New Showreel 2015

deepvisual Showreel 2015 from deepvisual on Vimeo.

More from The ORB

It's Fulldome Time!

While you can buy a fulldome alignment system these days, it's around $60,000 cheaper to ask me to do it for you.

The Orb WXSW tour

Rudimental

Rudimental at the Paaspop festival. PTZ cams by you know who.

One-eyed Jack

Something happened that shouldn't.
I copped a high power laser in the eye at rehearsals and spent the next 5 days looking like a pirate.
Luckily the damage wasn't serious.

Rack Building

One last afternoon of quiet before its off to Production Rehearsals and once more the whole summer will be over before you know it in a blur of loading bays, truck stops and sleepless nights..

Moonbuilding

The Orb are back, with a live preview of their new album Moonbuilding at shows in London and Lisbon.

(photo Tom Wall)

Node @ RCM

Every once in a while the most amazing opportunity comes along and the chance to work with synth supergroup Node at their first live performance for 17 years was just too good to miss.

It was an absolute joy to work with such wonderful people and the next morning I felt as though I had been elevated to the lower pantheon of Projection Deities.. yup, I was that high!  and just on the buzz from the show...

Node

Node Live

Synth supergroup Node are returning after a 17-year hiatus to perform a gig that will see them using "the largest collection of vintage analogue synthesizer equipment ever seen outside a recording studio" at the Royal College of Music in London.

Ultrawide Projection

Two ultrawide panasonics providing a 7m x 3m HD image from 2m away.
Not bad huh?

Xmas season

Just when you thought it was all over until next year... It's party time, for everyone else anyway. For my sins, I got to construct an audio reactive EQ just before the band came on..

A voodoo doll for H&S

Health & Safety Nightmares.

It doesn't have to be this way.

There wasn't even a problem.

We had a truss rated at 4000kgs and a 30kg screen. But the venue insisted on 'paperwork' to show that the truss could 'safely' take the 30kg load.

So the screen lay on the stage for over two hours while we all waited for H&S to be appeased.

The knock-on effect of this was the event being cancelled half way through due to a very simple problem that would have been immediately spotted had not so much time been wasted during the day over nothing.

Xmas @ T5

A comical moment when the Airport's media dept became a little over-protective about their design remit when I asked them what font they used. Maybe they were worried I might open my own counterfeit airport a few miles down the road.
Anyway, it looked great ( of course) and the client was delighted - as usual.

Post Tour-matic stress

yet again, the overwhelming silence and the novelty of being in one place for more than two days at a time. Throw in some unshakeable jet lag and you can easily find yourself up at 3am plotting the next round of visual mayhem. After all, it's just a matter of time...

The Orb - 25th Anniversary Tour

All good things must come to an end ...

and so we finally come to the last few shows and the Grande Finale of the Orb 25th Anniversary tour.

We started in April 2013 and just kept on going right on into Oct 2014

Almost anything can happen during the course of 18 months on the road and this time was no exception. High drama, high jinx and mucho mayhem came to pass, but we came out of the other side with all our fingers and toes and sense of humour still intact.

The band have played some blinding shows and have consistently delivered solid sets to delighted audiences..

.. and the visuals weren't that bad either...

Tomato Factory - Santorini

A perfect venue at a holiday island, but dreadful weather pushed the gig back a day. All the same, deepvisual & long term cohorts Insight Lighting delivered a flawless projection onto the old Tomato Factory at Vlicharda Beach, Santorini..
As you can see below, a good line up slide takes all the hard work out of projection mapping.

I had spent most of my time there wondering where the volcano was, so you can imagine my surprise when the plane finally took off and I saw the 12km wide Caldera of which the whole of Santorini is a small part of.

Product launch - Lagos Nigeria

16 screens amid the chaos of an African TV show. One of the  projectors failed 5 minutes before showtime and we had a replacement up, working and mapped within 15 mins...
My first time working with Arkaos Media servers.. can't see me rushing out to buy one anytime soon, but they work and that's what counts...

Fuji Rock - 2014

Fuji Rock - 2014 and another blinding show by The Orb

Years & Years

The new 'Years & Years' promo required a particularly tricky projection mapping, so who else to call in but deepvisual. A fun day running around a disused pharmaceutical factory in East London was had by all.

Halo - brought to life

deepvisual were asked to bring a video game character to life for a corporate conference in the US.
Needless to say, we handled the tight deadlines and the tricky brief and brought in a first class product.

You won't get a medal for it...

Whenever I see someone being reckless at work, I remind them that crew don't get medals for bravery..
However, that isn't always the case. Here is my medal from The Transit Kings - for their only ever live performance headlining at The Big Chill.

Bombay Sapphire - world's most imaginative bartender

Yup, one of the odder gigs for deepvisual, doing cameras at the world's most imaginative bartender competition. It was a fluid affair and a joy to participate in.

The Orb - Rainbow Serpent Festival - Australia

"If there was a performance that you wanted to catch, it would be ambient house pioneers The Orb, who celebrated their 25th anniversary at Rainbow. With stunning visuals flying out of the LED screen behind the duo, their show was an eclectic, cinematic, and purely captivating journey"

from beat.com.au

Shakespeare's Birthplace

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It's 2 x 20k Christie Roadsters and a Dataton Watchout system, projecting a Xmas montage onto the Bard's birthplace..
Much ado about deepvisual!

In fact, so much ado, we made it into the Guardian - top UK Xmas lights

The Orb - Hebden Bridge

"The visuals are hypnotic and beautiful. The rippling bass lines shift smoothly and almost imperceptibly, pulling you into the music. You are drawn in so far that it’s almost like a rude awakening when a number comes to a close."

from gourmetgigs.com

The Orb - Chicago

The Orb - 25th Anniversary tour of America

The Orb US tour is of to a cracking start with a series of amazing West Coast shows.
Details on The Orb website here: 

Orb vs Lee 'Scratch' Perry at NuMusic Festival Stavangar

First ever live showdown between the Giant of Dub and the Giants of Ambient.
Sat Sept 7th - NuMusic Festival Stavanger

Bad weather results in cancellation of Orb show in Edinburgh

A deeply disappointing cancellation. The Orb tried to get the gig moved to a different stage in the park, but in the end H&S closed the entire site. Luckily no one was hurt, but an unfortunate start to the 25th Anniversary Tour.

MIA promo projections

Content by none other than Mr Weirdcore, projections by, well, you know right?

Orb & Kakatsitsi drummers from Ghana

The Orb & Kakatsitsi out for another jaunt in Edinburgh at the end of the month.

Charli XCX 'Untitled' magazine shoot

Mr Rhodes and my good self had enormous fun running around The Scotch of St James with this delightful young lady..

The Orb - 25th anniversary tour

Ten week tour of the USA & the UK starting mid September on the west coast and going through until the end of November

details here on the Orb website

The Orb - Glastonbury 2013

The Orb show at Glastonbury feat. Kakatsitsi master drummers from Ghana, was a sensation, as were the rest of the Glastonbury warm up shows in Cardiff & Bristol.

Glastonbury Video Stasi

Imagine my surprise when literally days before the Glastonbury Festival opens, I receive this email:

Sorry if this is a duplication email, but are you planning on using the

screen at West Holts for The Orb? If so, I need to recieve (sic) all content by

Tuesday. I have to get all footage signed off by the festival legal

department... 

Hmm, so as a precondition for The Orb being allowed to play, I am expected to simply hand over my entire video library - my life's work -  in an easily pirated format, to a complete stranger who doesn't have enough time before the show to watch it? 

This isn't going to be so easy. My work with the Orb is a visual improvisation, drawing on moods in the music and following the band as they dip in and out of the set list. I have days worth of content that I draw on as well as creating a great deal of it in real time via video synths and all kinds of tricky cleverness.

Just the  logistics of buying a hard drive, copying the files and then arranging it to be delivered takes us past the Tuesday deadline. Or I could upload it, but that will probably take us past the festival and into July. And really, I need to watermark it all to prevent it being stolen or used without permission - this happens a lot more than you would imagine - I've had very bad experiences in the past at major events with footage being copied, altered slightly and reused.  So thats going to take the best part of a week and will be completed after the festival ends, maybe even by the end of the festival season. And of course, Glastonbury wont be paying a penny towards the costs of these weeks of unnecessary work.

And thats just The Orb. Even if by some miracle all this comes to pass, on Tuesday there is going to be a portacabin in a field in Somerset with a good two months worth of footage in different formats on different hard drives from the 200 or so visual performers that will be working there over the festival. And that doesn't take into account the ones who use realtime video systems and visual synthesisers. Besides, even after all this fuss and box ticking, there is absolutely nothing to stop anyone changing the footage prior to the show, so why bother?

So I have to ask myself, is this the shape of things to come? We already have the Police in London insisting on being informed of what kinds of music will be played at events and refusing licenses on that basis. Added to this we now have inept attempts at self policing by event management, which at best amount to little more than censorship and at worst, force video performers to hand over all their content in an easily pirated digital format to an anonymous 3rd party with no safeguards whatsoever.

I have a feeling the Orb show may just well start with a disclaimer:

We would like to inform the audience that all footage being used in this performance has been vetted by the festival legal department. 

As a result of this you will not be exposed to anything radical and you might as well stay at home and watch the adverts.

footnote.
Having spoken to a very reasonable chap who was  aware of the 'lack of insight' of festival management in bringing about this whole situation (apparently Morrissey is to blame for trying to protest about dairy farming) , we are currently able to make a compromise using stills for approval ( which is ridiculous of course), but next year is another story.

E3 Square Enix video game

As video games move into immersive environments, so too do the presentations at gaming conferences. E3 in Los Angeles is the most important date on the video games calendar with all the major companies launching their new products - this with year XBox 1 and PS4 coming out.

deepvisual was asked to initially demonstrate a proof of concept for a detective game and the client loved it so much that I was brought in to execute the complex mapping of the game set onto the interior walls of the demonstration theatre. Extrusions were added to create extra depth, with a wonderful trompe l'oei where the video meets the set. It was a lot of very difficult complicated work that simply had to be 'right first time' -  and of course it was.

The Orb & Kakatsitsi drummers from Ghana

Entering into a new dynamic, The Orb have leap frogged their fascination with all things dub and have gone direct to its African core. Together with the Kakatsitsi drummers they have crafted a live reworking of Orb classics that takes you from world weary England and lands you smack in the center of Ghana. The drummers ae amazing, the dancing magnificent and The Orb of course, as ever, sublime. If you see one show this year, catch this one as The Orb are on fire.

Lana Del Ray

The shadows aren't shadows, they are projections - by deepvisual of course!

TV Mania Promo.

Ooops.
I forgot to post the Beautiful Clothes video.
Just dont ask me how long it took to edit.

Chilly Gonzales - Cadogan Hall, Chelsea

I clearly remember saying during load in, that its the small gigs with one projector that are always the most difficult.

Sure enough, nothing in theory could be easier and of course nothing could prove to be more difficult. The main problem being the camera 10m up in the air, where we cant focus it. It has a remote control, but the range is only around 3m, so its out with the tallest ladder you have ever seen and up I go. Now usually, I have a good head for heights, but this ladder swayed around 20cm per step and got worse as I got higher. Thankfully my nerve held long enough for the IR remote to spring to life and we had a perfect show, Mr Gonzo, being the consumate entertainer. I'd never heard of him before and I was very impressed.

Promo Videos

Work in the film industry is invariably top end, but with big budgets comes long hours and high pressure. Directors are used to being surrounded by highly skilled professionals with a can do attitude, so you'll make yourself few friends if you keep a crew of 50 waiting while you re-render the files that are often provided for playback. 

Thankfully as well as being a core component of live visuals, Modul8 is an ideal tool for fine tuning projections in real-time and with projection spilling out into everywhere, its no surprise that high power projectors are now popular methods for providing instant backdrops on film sets. While deepvisual have been working as projectionists on films for many years,  recently we've also  been asked to provide playback as well, in the form of versatile and instantaneous video manipulation via the magic of Modul8. Directors can now have video parameters tweaked instantly to their requirements.
LT clip control module is invaluable for this particular kind of work, enabling accurate cueing, pause and playback all in one panel.. no more setting the playback speed to zero to pause a clip. You'll find a MIDI controller handy too. The Korg Nano comes with me to every gig.

One thing the DOP will be needing is a scan rate from the projector that matches the frame rate on the camera. This isn't as easy as it sounds as the conventional refresh rates of computer monitors and projectors create horrific scan lines on projected footage in camera.

If you find yourself using adult projectors like the Christie Roadsters, you can set the EDID out to camera friendly rates such as 1080 25p, otherwise you'll be needing the services of a DVI parrot or my personal favourite, the Kramer EDID recorder. Failing that, you can always fall back on SwitchResX.

Another very important thing to remember is to read the call sheet before you turn up and make a point of learning the first names of everyone on set. That way you'll fit into the production family like a long lost friend, which will come in really handy when you need help lifting the projector onto that scissor lift..

photo - Stereophonics - Rewind 

Abqaiq

Working overseas is never quite what you expect it to be and our multi-projector show in Abqaiq, 60 miles out in the great sand desert of Saudi Arabia certainly was anything but routine.

From hoards of Termites eating the MDF projector stands, to bolts of lightning from the heavens, to the theft of much of the video infrastructure, it was challenge after challenge. Of course, it goes without saying that deepvisual rose to the occasion and delivered a perfect  show. 

The Orb - Brixton Electric

A spectacular evening's entertainment to a packed house with The Orb on tip top form playing their first two albums live.
Technically a very challenging day for deepvisual, but an absolute joy to be able to work the seeming endless possibilities coming from the combination of Modul8, Resolume, Syphon, onstage PTZ cams and the mighty Vixid..
It was through the doors of The Fridge that I wheeled my very first flight case all those years ago and the day was a tumble of memories, all of them good. Twenty odd years later, a zillion shows and a half century of countries worked in, it was good to be back home.

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