Ed: My VJ Day spilleth over a bit, so just a little more VJ coverage before we return to the usual music stuff. -PK
Holly Daggers is another superstar VJ, having toured with folks like Fischerspooner and the Black Eyed Peas. (Holly’s probably reading this, so maybe I shouldn’t mention the Hillary Duff thing — bad mojo.) Don’t miss the free Creative Commons VJ clips and futuristic fetish visual inspirations on her site. Since Holly makes better eye candy than, for example, I do, she’s found ways of inserting herself into her VJ imagery, in several videos famously in a nurse’s outfit.
Of course, to insert people into videos requires chroma-keying, the “weather man” effect that has a well-earned bad rap for looking cheesy. The problem is inaccurate chroma-keying, in which the camera has trouble distinguishing foreground from background. That’s where the Reflecmedia Chromaflex comes in; it’s a special reflective surface that helps the keying process. I got to see Holly using this with body-painted and costumed dancers at a recent Crobar gig, and the effect looks terrific. The magic comes from the 3M Scotchlite material used in reflective jackets.
Software versus hardware: Holly and I have a little disagreement going. Holly is a hardware person: if the VJ tool runs on a computer, she doesn’t want to touch it. She argues that hardware is more reliable and outputs better-quality video, and of course I staunchly disagree and say that . . . uh . . . well . . . actually, usually I try to change the subject because I know she’s got a point. One thing we can agree on is the general coolness of the Korg Entrancer, an $800 piece of gear that melds a KAOSS pad with video capabilities. Rock-solid. Add an Edirol V-4 and you’ve got some great VJ hardware; even a lot of software VJs carry some of this around. See Korg’s Leslie Buttonow write-up what happens when the Entrancer first hit Holly and Eric Dunlap’s Eyewash VJ party. (In a word: think drool.)