dpwolf/blog

Today I played live visuals for Legs For Fish at Thornbury High school. Kent Macpherson from the band is a music teacher there and organised a performance / presentation for the kids from music, media and IT classes. We played three improvised AV sets and the kids seemed not to hate it
As Paul from the band said, it makes you acutely aware of how self indulgent this sort of improvised performance is when are doing it in front of a room full of kids who aren’t necessarily there by choice. Some of the kids seemed to dig it and some asked some good questions. “Why do you do this?” “What does it mean? The pictures just looked like colours and shapes.”

I used the Quartz Vidget I prepared for the Liquid Architecture gig in July as it works fairly well and made it easy for me to show the kids what I was doing without the confusion of showing a huge messy Quartz Composer patch. After each set we took questions. I showed how I can grab any two video files or sequences of still images and mix them together, manipulating colour, brightness, contrast etc. as well as layering multiple copies over each other. After the second performance I showed very briefly how Quartz Composer works by dropping in a video file, connecting it to a Billboard and then running it through a couple of effects.

Looking back at the QC presentation I gave at Electrofringe after this one I realise I should have shown heaps more examples and started much more slowly in Newcastle. Assuming no prior knowledge meant I explained things much more clearly, and I introduced things in a much more logical order (having slept the night before also helped!).