Dan Conway is one of the founding members of Soupa and provides visuals for a range of clients including Deadmau5, Pendulum and Eric Prydz.
Soupa catches up with him to find out more about his exciting work.
Do you have a process when setting up the visuals? Firstly, we draw up with the client exactly what they want from the light show – this is then translated into schematics and a pixel perfect template.
Do you work out a storyboard? I find that for the majority of projects a storyboard would take too much time to come up with so usually the tempo or stage area/shape will give me inspiration. Although saying that I'm producing a video for the band Pendulum at the moment, and that has to be second-by-second storyboarded as we're midi-triggering every frame to the band's live instruments!
Where do you source your images? I used to be pretty naughty and grab anything from anywhere but these days as the clients are getting bigger, I have to produce everything from scratch but this doesn't mean I can't find inspiration in other artists' moving images
How do you create your visuals? Coming from a cell animation background, I found that the now defunct Adobe Image Ready and its frame by frame gif animation lent itself to the laborious work I was used to – then a mate gave me an After Effects tutorial and I've never looked back! It's like Photoshop with legs on – very fast, powerful legs! I still draw and always have a sketchbook at hand - as I think this is still the best way to extract those gems from your mind!
Is there a lot of editing involved? This depends entirely on how well you've thought the project through or if the project demands pin point accuracy or if the deadline is 9am and it's now 7am! I love to get in there and edit edit edit 'til I'm happy with how the visuals expand and marry with the sounds. Seeing something not work once kicks you in the gut hard enough that you learn the value of precision
The original discordance vids were all initially made in Image Ready – everything you see is a gif animation then I edited and overlayed and overlayed again and again etc etc in Final Cut – a nice easy editing program which I still use occasionally if I need a break from after effects
For those of us who don't know – what's midi triggering? Midi triggering... imagine, each 4 bars of a tune OR each chorus OR change in tempo and then imagine every time these happen a new part of the motion graphics gets triggered. So initially I produce a solid 6 minute video, from which I can edit/ separate off into 20+ loops that correspond to changes in the tune (mood/tempo/chorus etc
Our coding genius' then connect these to segments in the tune that when played by the band trigger said loops making for a totally sequenced sound and vision experience – even if the band wishes to play a little faster or slower that evening
I work a lot with Immersive on this; http://www.immersive.eu/
Can you tell us about any specific projects you've worked on?
For the Deadmau5 2009 world tour (http://www.immersive.eu/live/tours) I produced a series of white on black loops geared towards 128 beats per minute, to be shown on a bank of LED batons and a central LED screen. This entire area for coverage was only 615 x 115 pixels wide but when laid out onto a physical stage this could be spread massively.
I also worked with Eric Prydz @ Matter in the O2 – for this I had to produce another series of white on black loops but this time the template was 1920 x 1080 (the actual pixels of the projectors we use so instead of LED, this time we used projected light).
Also instead of a flat surface, we built a faceted wooden structure and bent the light to hit each surface.
