Video Remix

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DCPTV: Addictive TV's Iron Man Remix

Tolly (left) and Graham Daniels (right) of Addictive TV perform video remixes both in clubs and via Live Cinema in theaters.
Photo: Matt Cheetham

For most VJs, distribution means one thing: spinning images off a Pioneer DVJ DVD turntable at a club and projecting them on screens or monitors. But for London-based Addictive TV, whose award-winning work has been seen around the world, distribution of video remixes comes in the form of Internet virals for major film studios, touring and permanent museum installations and Live Cinema programs, and even Japanese ringtones — as well as the group's continuing work for a rabid base of live-dance venues.

Remixing a studio music recording into a danceable cousin for clubgoers has long been a common practice in the music industry. Since the earliest days of disco, club DJs have spun such discs accompanied by interesting visuals from a VJ collaborator. But the two art forms rarely spoke to each other — until Addictive TV came along.

“We wanted to have a far more integrated audio-visual fusion, where the audio is very much made from the video, so the two things are completely inseparable,” says one of Addictive TV's creative masterminds, Graham Daniels.

As far as their work is concerned, says his collaborator Tolly, “What you see is what you hear; what you hear is what you see.”

Addictive TV has not only been doing live performances of its video remixing (both in clubs and with Live Cinema performances in theaters) to great acclaim around the world, but the group has produced a number of permanent and touring installations featuring fascinating edits of existing and new footage. Hollywood has also taken notice, hiring the company to produce video remixes of such recent movies as Iron Man and Snakes on a Plane to help promote the films. (Go to www.reel-exchange.com to see the Iron Man remix.)

The company, founded in 1992, grew out of the collaboration between producers Daniels, also a VJ, and Nick Clarke, who jointly made arts and music programming for British television. “At some point, we decided we wanted to marry our interests and put the whole VJ visual thing onto broadcast television,” Daniels says.

“The original conception was that it was kind of ambient television,” Clarke says. “There would be no narrative, no presenters — just simply electronic music and visuals.”

The two pitched England's Channel 4 on a new show, Transambient, which debuted in 1998. “At the time, there was a rather dull cable channel called The Landscape Channel, which just sort of had shots of rolling hills and waving grass, set to classical music,” Daniels says. “So we pitched them the idea of something that would be The Landscape Channel on acid. And they completely understood what we meant — trippy, ambient TV.”

While assembling the show, the two were introduced by fellow video artist and VJ Paul Hithersay to Tolly, a DJ composer who put together a piece for the series. “We then began working together more and more, and we eventually developed our live show to what it is now,” Daniels says.

The team members are admittedly not tech-heads, focusing instead on the creative aspects of their work. “We're not fundamentally interested in technology for technology's sake,” Clarke says. “Though we're all a little bit geeky in our particular areas. But it's not where the fundamental interest is.”

Tolly agrees. “I've seen work from artists where I get the impression the artist is actually far more interested in the technology and what it can do,” he says. “They may have some fascinating process, but when you look at the results, it's not particularly interesting. The audience just cares about seeing something compelling that interests them, not the technology used to create it.”

And in today's content marketplace, more than ever before, the audience is the driving force of what content and distribution format is desired.

Addictive TV cofounder Graham Daniels captures footage with a Sony HVR-Z1U for an upcoming Live Cinema piece on ancient dance in Bhutan.

Creating a film remix for either live or online distribution, as one would guess, requires an unconventional approach. “A lot of people that have commissioned us have given us pretty well free rein,” Tolly says. Requests for storyboards, for the most part, tend to remain unanswered.

“What we're doing is far more like composing than filmmaking,” Daniels says. “You wouldn't say to a composer, ‘Hey, can you just sort of roughly compose the piece and give it to me, to see what it sounds like?'' If I do that, I'm actually composing the piece.”

The process is a fluid one. “It isn't until you start making it that you become so involved, and then you just create whatever comes out,” Tolly says. “The piece tells you where it wants to go.”

For commercial work, the team sometimes has to provide a written treatment to help clients understand what they'll be getting, but most clients — by virtue of their familiarity with Addictive TV's work — have a rough idea of what the finished product will be. “Once you've seen it, you know how it works,” Clarke says. “You kind of get the idea of what you're going to get. But specifically, you don't really know until you start the process.”

For specific film remixes, the team will whittle down, essentially, a 2-hour movie into a 5-minute dance track. “We try to keep the main narrative elements, so you can see the whole thing progressing,” Tolly says. “But at the same time, it's still got the musical beats to hit.”

“It has to work in synergy with some form of narrative, in that you're getting across what the key characters are, roughly what the story is about, what the theme of the movie is,” Daniels says.

Tolly and Daniels work side by side on remix projects, each poring over clips and samples and trading files back and forth until the desired result is achieved. “This isn't the kind of thing where one person just writes the music and then someone cuts pictures to it,” Daniels says. “Both Tolly and I do everything.”

“The creation of a film remix has some similarity to making an audio mash-up, though it's not quite so simple,” Daniels says.” We don't just glibly take a sample from a film and chuck it over some music. Instead, it's a matter of holistically sampling from the whole film, completely remixing it, still keeping the narrative, and all without parodying it. You're essentially making an audiovisual dance track out of a large number of samples from a single film.”

For production of its work, Addictive TV uses a number of popular programs for video editing — including Adobe Premiere Pro 6.5, Adobe After Effects, and Canopus Edius Pro 4. On the audio side, the team uses Ableton Live 7, an audio production and sequencing tool; Steinberg Cubase, using Propellerhead Software ReWire to sync Ableton and Cubase together; and Sony Sound Forge. The group's mastering is completed using Sydec Audio Engineering Soundscape.

“We'll both go through all the samples and choose what bits look good and sound good. We'll then just export the .wav files out into Ableton and start creating the music bed that way, cutting the pictures back to it as we go along,” Daniels says.

Using audio from different sources can introduce some editing challenges. “Some recordings have to be time-stretched or pitch-adjusted to make them sound right. And if you're going to stretch audio, you also need to stretch its corresponding video exactly the same,” Daniels says. This is an almost nonexistent issue when doing live remixing in a club, for example, using a DVJ DVD turntable. “If you do it in realtime, the DVJ can really help. Without them, you'd have to do time-stretching in two different softwares, like After Effects and Ableton, and then have to match them back up again. But with a DVJ, because it's on a DVD, it keeps the two — the audio and video — together, and you can pitch adjust it in realtime, and then import that file.”

Tolly and Daniels remix 8mm footage shot by French airline pilot Raymond Lamy in the 1950s for the Live Cinema performance Eye of the Pilot.

Beyond online, commercial, and film remix work, Addictive TV also performs its Live Cinema shows at various theaters, involving remixes of footage assembled from various sources or captured by the team itself. The footage is remixed live for the audience, accompanied by a guitarist (playing a seven-string fretless guitar, to allow for adjustments in pitch-shifting due to varying pitch adjustments in the remixing of accompanying audio).

One such program, Eye of the Pilot, premiered in October 2004 at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and it is composed of standard 8mm film footage shot at a variety of locations around the world in the 1950s. “It was actually captured by the father of one of our producers, Françoise Lamy [Raymond Lamy], who flew around the world and would spend a couple of days in various places,” Daniels says. “And while he was there, he shot all this amazing footage.”

Another upcoming Live Cinema piece will focus on ancient dance in Bhutan, capturing performances by a number of Buddhist groups from various monasteries in the region. Addictive TV recorded the dances in 1080i HD on a Sony HVR-Z1U at 29.97fps.

For the most part, Tolly says, the camera performed well for getting wider shots. But particularly due to its size, its presence could sometimes distract or concern the dancers while attempting to capture closeups. “There are people there who've never seen cameras before or heard their voices on a recording,” he says. “It's sort of like a throwback to the 10th century there.”

There were, however, some who had enough of a familiarity with Western technology to play tricks on their fellow performers. “I was filming a group of girls who were singing, and they kept sort of covering themselves up, very nervous, and I couldn't understand why,” Daniels says. “It was only afterwards that I learned that one of the young monks had told them that I could see through their clothes with my special camera. I had to flip around the screen to show them the footage that we had shot, and that that wasn't what we were doing.”

When all is said and done, content creators and innovators such as Addictive TV have enabled themselves to cross over between live performance, corporate advertising, and high art effortlessly. And in today's wide range of distribution venues, it seems these VJs have created a new hybrid art and commerce genre palatable to the entire scope of today's content-distribution methods.

Because the work of audiovisual remixers is so specialized, development of new software and hardware requires the participation of such artists to ensure the arrival of products that will be truly useful. “A lot of manufacturers are inviting interested parties such as ourselves to provide feedback during development,” says Addictive TV Producer Nick Clarke.

“Others, though, have not,” says Addictive TV Producer and VJ Graham Daniels. “They release audiovisual performance tools without having asked artists what they need and what they think will work, and they just haven't sold at all. It's not that they're not good products. But some manufacturers just didn't reach out to artists and ask, ‘What would you like on this kind of product? When you perform, what tools do you want? What would you need something like this to do?'' You can't just have some marketing guy, who knows nothing about AV performing, making those kinds of decisions. It's a niche market, and you have to find the people who are actually doing it and ask them what they want.”

Addictive TV, in particular, recently worked closely with Pioneer to develop the newly-released SVM-1000 audio/video mixer. “They called us in, originally, to show us the plans and say, ‘Which kind of design do you think would work best?''” Daniels says. “With some areas, they really listened to us, and other of our ideas were maybe a little bit expensive, so they went for the cheaper option. But it's a great tool. It enables you to cut, mix, and effect audio and video at exactly the same time.”

Pioneer had also asked the team to suggest ideas for the types of filters and effects that Addictive TV had developed or made use of. “We gave them some ideas, and it was really great for us to see them come to fruition,” says Addictive TV VJ Tolly.

“One of the visual effects we always like to use is a blur filter — which, when you also heavily filter down the audio at the same time, it kind of looks like what you're hearing,” Daniels says. “Pioneer didn't have a [programmer] inhouse who could create that one, so they had to go outside to find somebody.”

After playing a show in Tokyo in 2007, the Pioneer marketing and engineering teams proudly arrived at the gig to meet the Addictive TV duo. “There were about 30 who came down, which was just so pleasing to see,” Daniels says. “And they introduced us to this girl, who was the actual coder brought in to create that blur filter. When we walked off stage, they all lined up to greet us — like a royal performance, if you know what I mean.”

For many artists, letting trade secrets and working processes out of the bag could mean having to scramble to come up with a new signature style — although that doesn't appear to have been the effect on Addictive TV. “We don't sit there thinking, ‘Oh, my God, everyone's somehow now making stuff like us! Not at all,” Daniels says. “It might make us think of a few different ideas and run faster, but essentially we'll still do what we do.”

“Actually, it's great,” Tolly says. “Because it's helping to bring on the whole AV scene, and that's exactly what we want.” — M.H.

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