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Video Remix

May 30, 2008 12:00 PM, By Matt Hurwitz

Addictive TV changes the scene with Live Cinema.

The heart of the remix

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.”

Live Cinema

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.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.