Transcript

Silent Eclipse: Hi I'm Silent Eclipse and I'm a VJ.

Dirty Henry: Hi I'm Henry, stage name Dirty Henry, and I'm a VJ too.

Amukidi: Hi I'm Amukidi, I'm a VJ and the visuals programmer for the Big Chill.

VJ Amukidi

Amukidi: A VJ is an artist who creates and projects visual material at a festival or club. My work evolves around colour and composition but there are so many different ways that VJs can express themselves.

Dirty Henry's VJing Demos

Dirty Henry: I used to think that making visuals and being a VJ was a really expensive hobby, you need to get all your kit , your mixers, your video decks, you name it, but actually all you need is a mobile phone and a computer.

Best kind of images that work for me are stark, simple, graphical images, things like big buildings and street signs, graffiti, all those things work really well when you put them all together and layer them.

When you’ve got about five or six hundred numbered jpgs, they come off the phone, onto your computer. I then use a bit of free software called Virtual Dub, that converts the numbered stills into a movie clip.

Then when you’ve got a few movie clips together, you can start mixing them, and I use something called TZT. Again that’s free and you can use that to layer up on top of one another all these stark images that you’ve got.

The software I use is free and readily available. You can just download it from some websites and it’s pretty easy to pick up.

Dirty Henry's VJing Tips

Now remember, set your camera at it’s lowest setting, so you can take thousands of pictures because you’re not making massive great pictures, you're making a movie clip.

Train the eye to make boring things look interesting.

Experiment with different perspectives and unusual angles

Silent Eclipse's VJing Demos

Silent Eclipse: As a VJ I shoot my own footage and I use it to interpret the music at a club. Once you set up your clips and the DJ's playing you start listening out for the themes and rhythms in the music and you can start mixing your clips to them.

I use a video mixer and I use it like a drum so I beat out a rhythm and it selects the clips for me.

The main thing to remember is to listen to the music and respond with your visual imagery.

Silent Eclipse's VJing Tips

Work the crowd, watch them, and see how they're reacting to your music.

Select images which work well with the music

Practise at home so when you get to the club you can have more fun.