Music as an art form
Let me start off by saying I absolutely love music. I play different kinds of music at different occasions: I listen to music when I’m using my computer, I visit concerts and festivals and I practice my juggling whilst listening to music. Then there are two more ways for me to combine music with other art forms: live performance & video design.
Music in live performance
Music can be used to complement other visual art forms, such as a live performance. When you’re deciding on the music for your performance you will have to satisfy many more people than just yourself. Therefore, you can’t just pick any music you like — the music needs to serve a specific purpose. Obviously, you can’t satisfy your entire audience, but as long as you make reasonable choices so the music fits your performance, you can get away with pretty much anything. You will have to carefully select a piece. Here are some of the choices you should consider.
Music or no music
One of the most basic decisions you will have to make is the choice of wether you’re going to use supporting music or not. It might seem like an obvious choice, but stand still for a moment and make sure your motives make sense.
You can choose to make a choreographed routine or one to perform in silence. Performing your routine in silence requires a stronger presentation, clear facial expressions and distinct body language. You can also choose to make music during your routine, using your props for example.
Live or recorded
What fits better with your routine? Music played by a live band or artist, or a piece recorded on a CD? Music performed live can bring a whole other dimension to the performance, but may be harder to come by.
Tr’espace performs an act where a pianist accompanies them, while they are moving around and on top of the piano. Cirque Du Soleil often uses live music, which tells a story and can be adjusted on the fly to match what’s happening with the performance. An example of an act that is choreographed to recorded music is Florian & Jochen’s Get The Shoe. They perform a club passing act in kung-fu style with a lot of crazy sound effects, which they have timed perfectly with their movements, punches and kicks.
Lyrics
If you choose to use lyrics, they should be appropriate and complement the routine. Most of the time, it’s best to go for instrumental.
Tempo
The tempo of the music should match your own tempo. Are there any tempo changes in your routine? Are there any pauses?
Genre
Choose a musical genre that fits with your personal style and routine. You want to avoid excessively used, well-known music like movie themes and pop music. Keep the venue and audience in mind; are you performing for strangers or for your friends and family?
Length
On a more practical note: how long do you want your routine to be? Perhaps you’ll need to edit the music you want to use.
The process of choice Ideally, you will select the music before you start composing your routine to it. Now you know what choices will determine your decision, how do you begin? Open up iTunes (or however you manage your music collection) and scroll through your music, while keeping the above options in mind. If you want to go random, enable “shuffle” and skip along. If you’re a neat-freak like me and have a well-organized library, you could try browsing a certain genre or playlist.
Try diaboloing to various pieces and see how it influences your movements. See if a certain piece inspires you to diabolo in a certain way. Some pieces won’t move you at all, some will mess up your play and others will suit your style seamlessly. Needless to say, go for the latter.
Trial-and-error
I particularly like to perform to music that doesn’t get me all hyped up to the level I get distracted and make unnecessary mistakes. In the past I have performed to Us3’s “Cantaloop”, St. Germain’s “Land of…” and Gotan Project’s “Mi Confesion”. They make me feel relaxed and confident on stage. Some less fortunate choices have been Bomfunk MC’s’ “Freestyler” (yes, I went that road) and Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’”. Although the Limp Bizkit track fitted with the energy I put into the routine, it got me too hyper on stage, which damaged my performance significantly. I have made more unfortunate choices, but let’s not dive too deep into my failures for now It’s all part of the learning process you will have to go through yourself!
Sparked by the discussion on Jesse’s post about quality vs. quantity, the subject of performing came up. This week, I’d like to share my vision and own experience in performing. In the past 4-5 years, I have seen a LOT of shows and performed numerous times myself, which hopefully gives me the credibility to do so!
No matter what your medium is (live performance, video, text) or how big or small the group is, you are asking your audience to give up some of their time to focus on whatever it is that you bring them. This leaves you with a great responsibility, because you somehow need to satisfy your audience through your actions in order to thank them for their time. Here are some essential, basic steps you should consider to accomplish a well structured performance.
Your audience
First, you need to appreciate the essential difference between performing for an audience that knows how that spinning toy works (the juggling audience) and performing for a laymen audience (the non-juggling audience). The juggling audience can be divided into different groups. For example, you could face dealing with an audience that mainly consists of fellow diaboloists, or one that consists of all kind of jugglers. The non-juggling audience can differ as well — from young kids to the elderly or a mixed group. The size of your audience and the distance that is between you and the audience matters greatly as well. Also worth considering is the venue you will be performing at. What kind of stage will you be on? How are your tricks going to look from an audience point of view?
Once you have determined the size and type of audience, you can choose your approach and balance the content of your act between simple and hard, classical and experimental, epic and subtle, and so on.
Stay realistic
Another important aspect about performing you should realize is that it’s nearly impossible to pull off your act without any mistakes. I don’t necessarily mean big mistakes like a drop or a tangle, but there are always things that won’t go as planned. You might forget a trick or mess up a move, which will make it look different. You might have to correct more than you’d like and mess up the choreography. There are many factors in a juggling performance to be considered. You can’t control all of them. You can, however, prepare your performance to keep the flaws and potential drops to a minimum.
Full control
For instance, master your tricks. If you can do your tricks with any diabolo, any sticks, any string, in any lighting condition, and on any surface, then you’re ready to do them on stage. When you’re on stage you have to deal with an unfamiliar environment. Not to mention the nerves and (time) pressure! The consistency of the tricks you can do 9 out of 10 times in practice, will be reduced to about 6 out of 10 times on stage – it makes that much of a difference.
Once again: your audience
Secondly, be aware of your audience. You’re performing for them, so recognize them as your audience. Look into the audience occasionally, build in pauses and poses to give your audience the time to show you their appreciation by applauding for you. If you won’t, your first applause will be during your first drop. Now we don’t want that to happen, do we?
You
Last, but not least, be aware of yourself. You should stand on that stage feeling relaxed and confident. Don’t rush things, don’t panic when something goes wrong. Start off with simple things to gain some stage experience and to get rid off those raging nerves you will experience the first few times. If you’re enjoying yourself, so will your audience. Film your act so you can analyze it. Ask fellow performers for their opinion. Start off with a small audience.
Watching, analyzing, and performing your routine over and over again can make it very boring to you. It’s essential that you keep the energy consistent on stage and that you keep presenting your performance as if it were the first time — although improved by the experience you gained from the first few times!
Guido van Hout, a friend of mine and great performer, once told me he tries to be aware of his pinky toes during performing, just to stay alert.
As a say-goodbye to my old Windows PC (Hello Apple!), here’s an article that describes how to produce supersmooth high quality deinterlaced compressed video in Windows.
First things first
Let’s say you’ve filmed some stuff. It’s sitting on your camera and needs to be put on your computer. Make sure you don’t compress the video at this stage. Re-compressing compressed source video is every self-respecting video maker’s worst nightmare! Capturing your footage as DV will be fine. Although DV is a lossy format, you’ll barely notice with it’s 25mbps bitrate. If you have one of the new Sony cameras, don’t worry either. Although it records Standard Definition video in highly compressed MPEG-2, the quality is awesome. I have a Sony HDR-SR7 myself and I’m really happy with the quality it delivers.
Source video
I always start with checking what source video I’m dealing with. I use Gspot for that purpose. Make sure your project settings (PAL/NTSC, resolution, framerate, field order, aspect ratio) in your NLE system match your source video.
Exporting your project
When your editing is complete, you need to export it for further processing. When working in Sony Vegas, use the “uncompressed avi” template to get a lossless, interlaced video file again. You can adopt your project settings as your export settings. Exporting your project as an uncompressed avi video file will leave you with an enormous file, depending on the length of your project, so make sure you have some free space on your hard drive. An alternative to this uncompressed avi template is the HuffYUV codec (a compressed lossless format). Using other editing software? Google is your friend.
Deinterlacing
Next up is the deinterlacing process. Read everything you need to know about (de)interlacing here. I’m using “method 4b” a.k.a. “bob+weave“. Essentially, this technique separates the two sets of interlaced fields yielding a video of twice the original frame rate. This results in supersmooth 50fps (frames per second) (progressive) video, which is pretty neat (59.94fps for you NTSC folks). As described at 100fps.com, you’ll need VirtualDub and AviSynth. You should end up with another uncompressed file at the end.
Compression
Finally, we’re going to compress the deinterlaced 50fps (or 59.94fps) video with H.264 and the audio with AAC. I use Quicktime Pro to do this. Open the uncompressed, deinterlaced file in Quicktime Pro. Hit File -> Export and choose for the option “Film to MPEG-4″. The custom options pretty much speak for themselves. Higher bitrate = better quality = bigger file size. As an alternative, MPEG Streamclip is free and will do just as good a job. Have a look at The Void’s tutorial.
Other options
Of course you could go for DivX or XviD as your video codec. They are a bit faster, but they’re not nearly as good as the quality/filesize ratio H.264 delivers. Ditto with the audio codec. MP3 and WMA just don’t match up against AAC.
This week, I’ve got a few beginner tips to share. They may seem obvious to many experienced diaboloists, but I’ve had to explain them numerous times, so I thought I’d write ‘em down here. I hope they’re useful, even if you’re not a beginner anymore!
It’s the spin
The speed a diabolo spins at is important to consider. After all, the amount of spin defines the stability and control of what you’re doing. Tricks that speed up the diabolo, should begin with little speed. A fast spinning diabolo getting sped up is harder to control. Vice versa, tricks that slow the diabolo down should begin with a lot of speed or the diabolo will lose its balance and eventually fall off or tangle.
Symmetry? Not necessarily.
The length of your string is also important to keep in mind. I don’t mean the string length from your left to right stick. I’m talking about the length of the left and right string with respect to the diabolo. The left string being the string that runs from your left stick to the diabolo. The right string being the string that runs from your right stick to the diabolo.
Now, when doing a trick, it’s important to realize that the left string and right string are almost never the same length, because most tricks cannot be mirrored. Let me explain what I’m aiming for with this. The position of the diabolo, the sticks and the string is practically never the same on the right side as it is on the left side of your body. Thus in order to learn or improve a trick, you need to be aware of the left/right string length ratio.
Example: infinite suicide
Infinite suicides speed up the diabolo, so try to keep the initial speed of the diabolo as low as possible. Secondly, (assuming you are right handed) the right string should be significantly shorter than the left string, because your right hand needs to make quick, accurately timed turns around the axle of the diabolo. Therefore, you’ll automatically try to keep the “circle” as small as possible. Starting off the trick with a long right string is not going to help you control this trick. (As an aside, the shape isn’t really a circle, but that’s another story.)
Example: integral suicides Integral suicides add another string length factor. During the set-up for Eric’s integral suicide (or the Tomicide), before swinging like a madman, you have to deal with 3 different string lengths:
(1) The string that runs from the left stick to the diabolo.
(2) The string that runs from the diabolo to your right hand.
(3) The string that runs from your right hand to the right stick.
When going for the swing, string length (3) has to be relatively short to successfully enter an infinite suicide. I have found an extension to Eric’s integral suicide where you grab the same string with the same hand mid-air to let both sticks travel around the diabolo for one more cycle. This shortens string length (3) even more. So, if I chose my initial right string length too short, I wouldn’t be able to execute this variation. Note: my string length (3) is pretty long in the video below, but you see how I need to correct the string length to avoid dropping.
This realization allows you to tweak your tricks by exaggerating certain string lengths to create, for example, slack string suicides, which is a largely unexplored field. I put an example in the video below.
It’s all part of the learning process you will have to go through yourself!