VJ UNION: Adem Jaffers (vjMandala)

Cyberdelia 2 Cyberthon: my two bob's worth

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 02:45:09 +0000

In the wake of the Max-Q ‘Monday Night by Satellite’ music video, and during the production of Third Eye’s music videos, ‘The Real Thing’ and ‘Pray’, a period spanning c.1987-90. At the time, Director Jeff Jaffers and musician Ollie Olsen lived together at Marine Parade in St Kilda. They hosted weekly gatherings at their home centered around emergent technologies. This informed the exciting ideals of the time.

These informal gatherings brought together interesting and regular guest speakers to discuss all things Tekno-Cyberdelic. Covering topics ranging from modems, computers, chaos theory, cyberpunk ethos, virtual reality, science fiction, futurism, techno/acid-house (electronic) music and other related topics.

This marked an incredibly formative and mind-expanding time of collaborations. For me, a passionate dive into digital and analogue video art, the underpinning impetus for the Cyberthon Public TV events to come.

Excerpt taken from the full “my two bob’s worth” article written by Adem Jaffers.

Originating Cyberdelia 2 Cyberthon blogpost.

Clathrate Gun

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 02:02:57 +0000

After 10yrs since VJ Mandala and Zen Paradox (Steve Law) had collaborated live at the Psy 20th anniversary club event, they came together once again in a live-stream event to celebrate the 30 Sonic Years anniversary of Psy-Harmonics.

One of the tracks within the Zen Paradox 1:20hr mix, at aprx 30min in, the sonic masterpiece titled 'Clathrate Gun' was extracted and audio re-striped with original to be represented here as a standalone music-video piece.

The VJ mix to track was predominantly created using an animation of a white outlined square zooming in.

This animation was triggered to continually restart playback via midi note triggers extracted from WAV and placed alongside Steve's audio mix playback track in Ableton.

Animation was then manually augmented live using various Resolume effects, predominately SATIN. With some Audio reactivity connected to various RGB & glitch effects.

The overall aimed at complimenting Clathrate Gun's intense sonic onslaught by creating the hypnotic & stark graphic shards aesthetic.

Watch on Vimeo.

Rave Fantastic

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 23:25:48 +0000

This year was the first time I was invited to teach some of the practical aspects of VJ'ing and operating complex vision systems.

So this Monday 28th Oct is the first of 2 VE student assessments; where students get to show their production talents in this unique series of productions - titled Rave Fantastic, a homage to Rave culture.

With the help of Richard Tropea as DJ curator, and Mad Rod at the (host) helm, the 6 selected stalwart DJ's for 2024 should provide students with a musical education they would not normally be available to them in this context.

All 6 productions will be live streamed. See event details below.

I invite you to support these students by way of comments on the various streaming platforms. As like me, their nerves are high, they are under the pump, they are very excited and want to do well.

Enjoy!

Visit the
Rave Fantastic Eps 1-3 Event Page for stream times and platforms
Or
Rave Fantastic Eps 4-6 Event Page for stream times and platforms

Meldown

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 05:00:39 +0000

I wont attempt to write too much about these two c1991-1993 videos, which emerged out of the Acid House era c1987-89ish that engulfed the nooks and crannies of Melbourne's club and early Rave scene.

Suffice to say they were landmarks within their genre, and have not seen the light of day in the online sphere since their inception some 30 years+ ago.

I will say this, one of the most interesting things about how the videos came about in my mind was how the Jeff Jaffers had Directed 2 music videos for the band Third Eye.

And as a process of making any kind of music video or film there is often more footage shot or material generated that can fit within the edit of a short music video.

Jeff utilised his own imagery and the commissioned generated material by video artists Troy Innocent, Karen Ansel and Adem Jaffers for music video clip, and the musicians Gus Till and Ollie Olsen who created the two Third Eye tracks, created two 30 min videos with unique soundtracks, whilst repurposing many of the material, including off the cutting room floor to edit the Meltdown series.

The videos do speak for themselves.

Third Eye 'Real Thing' music video
https://youtu.be/HPhneeAma8Y
Resulting long-form Meldown video.

Unfortunately Third Eye 'Pray' music video not online.
Resulting long-form Meldown^2 video.

Resolume + Ableton = nDVme

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 14:11:06 +0000

The Good the Bad the Funky

Creating a nDVme [Non-Destructive-VJ-Mix-Edit] music video using Resolume & Ableton.

As a child, on the occasional Saturday night I would often head to the loungeroom floor with a swath of pillows, a big bag of salt and vinegar chips and a bottle of soft drink to watch a Spaghetti Western on TV. The classic that I refer to here is The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

A cult film that defined the Spaghetti Western genre directed by the genius Sergio Leone, accompanied by an incredible music score composed by the master Ennio Morricone. And of course who can forget, the actors that made it such a cult classic, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef, with their exciting gun slinging, viscerally gritty and hyper-realistic penetrating gazing performances.

When music producer Lil Rossco sent me a link to his tGtBtFunky remix of the original Title track for The Good the Bad and the Ugly, I immediately jumped at the opportunity to offer to create a homage music video for this much loved childhood classic.

Being inspired by the production of the MELTDOWN 1 & 2 videos, created by Director Jeff Jaffers for Third Eye, I have been experimenting for many years, since the mid 90's at least, with making short-form and long-form videos using non-traditional editing methods. Up until this point I had used OctaMED Mod tracker on a Commodore Amiga.

Then after discovering Ableton, I was excited to deep-dive into how I could use audio and midi to drive an audio reactive and midi triggered video using a DAW combined with VJ software, to create an ‘edit’ process (ie nDVme) where I could continuously play on loop, whilst jamming and tweaking in realtime – a process similar to and also inspired by the music production process.

Like Private Investigators are frustrated wanna be Cops, one could say that VJ's might be frustrated wanna be Music Producers :0

Here is the nDVme process I used to create tGtBtFunky:

Firstly, I ripped an online low-rez full-length cinematic version of the film. My apologies Sergio et al, I can't afford the licensing rates for such an epic film :(

I imported it into Adobe Premiere Pro, where I began cutting up the movie into small loop-able moments, which there were many, approx. 170 clips, even after being highly critical and very selective. Tip my hat to Sergio’s cinematography, the use of close-ups made for compelling cinema.

All clips were then exported at their downloaded native 1280x544pxl low-resolution using a DXV3 Codec.

I then took the films animated Titles sequence and manipulated the Titles - replaced Ugly with Funky.

Also replaced credit frame characters for 'Music by' & 'Directed by' using a downloaded Western Font and cut/paste/cloning in Adobe Photoshop to recreate some characters.

Then re-inserted and animated frame components to match back into original Titles using Adobe After Effects.

All DXV clips were then imported to a Resolume V7 1280x544pxl Comp at 25fps and laid out in an 8 column, 22 layer formation (see green outline below).

All clips were set to BPM playback, timelines trimmed to their optimal aesthetic key in/out moments and playback speeds set.

Next task was to begin the overall treatment (look-feel) by experimenting with various base effects until a desired look was achieved (see yellow outline above).

In the next stage I began setting up the effects that were to be audio & midi driven (see red outline above). Some effects are only visible when there are certain pixel value conditions met. As the sampled film clips were shot under various lighting conditions, I added effects to individual clips to achieve a more consistent and balanced level when Comp effects were applied (triggered).

Lil Rossco supplied a very detailed, color-coded and appropriately track named Ableton project with all the audio wav and midi clip stems used to create his Funky remix. Gotta love a neat well organised project!

Once the project was opened stems were re-arranged into groups of 'audio or midi', then colour coded to suit my working methodology (see green outline below). A couple audio and several midi tracks were discarded for various reasons, namely their prominence in remix and more than 13 tracks could get messy to manage.

The MP3 version of the remix was also added into project. Note that the version used in video clip is mixed differently to the Soundcloud release.

In creating the audio remix, in Lil Rossco’s own words:
The idea for the remix concept arose when I heard the original track and thought "that would sound sick as a westcoast style synth", so I dropped the midi in Ableton and... here we are.

There weren’t many midi parts so I kept the ones that worked and reassigned the samples accordingly. I used a Kontakt pack called Spaghetti Western which replicated many authentic cowboyesque sounds. Added a sprinkle of foley/fx, a hefty dash of kickin' bass and mix thoroughly.

Yeehaw!!

Plugins etc: Ableton, Kontakt (Western Sounds), Massive (Westcoast Synth) & Drum Rack – Percussion.

Next stage was to manage the audio for reactive input to Resolume and simultaneous monitoring in headphones.

Because Ableton was sending out a single L/R stereo output, and Resolume could only take a stereo input, which becomes mono when both channels used as an FFT trigger; a simple but incredibly effective methodology was employed.

A method that began during a music video for Shinjiku Thief's ACMI project Amalgam, where upon request, Darren Ver Hagen EQ’d tracks to crudely separate the frequency bands distinctly for 5 instruments, to enable the selective envelopes when using Resolume’s FFT triggering on effects parameters for specific tracks only. To avoid all the effects parameters to jump around continuously to a summed audio track like a 1980's disco light.

With Lil Rossco’s sage advice, FabFilter Pro-Q^3 was used specifically for its ‘brickwall’ EQ ability (see red outline below).

Where only the desired section of the tracks full frequency range could be homed in on, flat-lining the rest. Though before this frequency range was brickwalled, pitch control was used to move the area of wave form interest to a desired frequency band location first – then brickwalling used to clamp band. This simple method enabled 13 selected audio stems to be arranged so that they don’t overlap (see orange outline below).

Given the bands of interest were pushed and pulled around, the summed total of the audio out sounded nothing like the remix. So, I had to pan all audio reactive stems to right channel and the mp3 remix to the left channel.

The right channel was selected in Resolume FFT for triggering and the remix was monitored in the left headphone channel. That way I could listen to the remix and the reactive tracks simultaneously or separately.

From this point forward the fine art of audio-reactivity became a matter of tweaking the various FFT frequency band value ranges in Resolume (see green outline above), various combinations of effect parameter value ranges (see blue outline above), Gain and Fall levels (see red above outline), effects parameter playback directions (see yellow outline above)

And finally whatever other effects parameters I wanted reactive, whilst simultaneously tweaking the FabFilter gain (see yellow outline above) to achieve an optimal overall desired and balanced triggered effect for each stem & effect combination.

The idea was to have an overall striking look to clip. Then to have some effects operate very subtly - to not only be in sync, but to fit the feel of the sound, and to also have some effects be very pronounced.

Resolume effects were named with their Ableton audio track counterpart and visa-versa for ease of tracking and debugging relationships (see red outlines above).

Once all the effects were roughed by using a couple of selected clips on loop. The next task was creating the nDVme, by firstly adding 22 midi clips in Ableton (see red outline above).

One midi track per Resolume clip Layer, named accordingly, for tracking and debugging simplicity. Within each midi clip 8 notes were inserted starting at channel-2, note-C2, working up the scale, switching to channel-3 when notes ran out on channel-2.

Then each midi note was mapped to each of the 8 Resolume clips along a single layer, then the clip name changed to reflect the midi note mapped to it – again for tracking and debugging simplicity. Only one of Lil Rossco’s original midi tracks were used to drive an effects on/off Blocking.

Now that the stage was set. From this point forward it was only a matter dropping midi notes along the automation timeline to correspond with various stem changes over time, using the wave forms as visual guides (eg Claps) to drop midi note triggers, or by just listening to the feeling of the remix to trigger clip changes and create clip loops.

This whole nDVme performance part of the process took about a full day of tweaking overall, continually looping the entire remix, adding, deleting, moving notes, tweaking EQ settings and effects parameters over and over until the desired final montage homage was achieved. The pre production to about 3 days overall.

When to cease tweaking is the dark-side of the VJ creation process. Many a VJ have never come back out of the VJ hole, so be warned! :)

I then reset the Resolume Comp to 1920x1080p, cropped slightly to remove some effects frame edge spill, centered and scaled the 1280x540 comp to fit. The final video (only) playback was recorded in Resolume using a Pro-Rez 444 codec. The resulting MOV was taken into Davinci Resolve/Fusion to trim top and tail excess recorded footage, added start/end fades to reveal original untreated footage, striped the clip with the original 44kHz WAV remix, then mastered hirez & lorez outputs.

That's it for this iteration. I have many ideas on how to improve this nDVme process. Just need another inspiring track to do it with. Until then, I hope you enjoy the tGtBtFunky video as much as it was to make!

This article is reposted from my blog at AdemJaffers.Art

PS. In case your wondering about how to pronounce nDVme, it's 'en dee vee mee'.

R3TROGR4D3

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 11:23:15 +0000

[rĕt′rə-grād″] adjective

Moving or tending backward.
Opposite to the usual order; inverted or reversed.
Reverting to an earlier or inferior condition.

Arriving some 32 years after Garry Hughes (DJ Uzi) and Adem Jaffers (Tekno Mandala aka VJ Mandala) had originally jammed together for the first time at Le Rox Nightclub in S.A. (Aust) c1991.

They returned to collaborate virtually in a one-off retro a/v live-stream titled RETROGR4D3. Jamming sounds and vision from the past – revamped for a more contemporary age.

DJ Uzi streamed a/v live from San Francisco, where a/v feed was received by Tekno Mandala for remix in Melbourne and re-streamed.

As an added special retro-appearance, long-time Cyberthon collaborator Till Gangemi (Don’t Shoot the Messenger aka DSTM) was also live in the Melbourne studio with Tekno Mandala for a 2-way mix fusion – in glorious SD PAL 4:3 ratio.

The mash up of old analogue and new digital tech between these two veteran VJ’s comprised of a Numark AVM02 mixer, Mac Pro, PC Desktop, 2x PC Laptops, Metta Machine Video Feedback rig fitted with a Canon MV900 MiniDV, A400 Pi AmiBerry Amiga 1200 emulator, Amiga 4000 with an IV24 Genlock, an Amiga 1200, Fairlight CV video processor, VHS player and a couple webcams. Using a swath of new/old school software such as VMix, Resolume, Scala and Elan Performer in the pipeline.

With enough ceremonial incense and mantras offered to the Tekno Deities, R3TROGR4D3 was a time-warped blast from the past.

This event was hosted by Cyberthon Recon Unit; which kicked off at 6pm AEST, live-stream commenced at 6:06 PM AEST and to rumble until 8:08 PM AEST via the R3TROGR4D3 Rumble Channel ONLY!

As a result of the audio stream technical issues, it was decided to restripe audio with a pre-recorded Mixcloud set by DJ Uzi.

During this process there were also cosmetic improvements made, including adding an edit of studio-cam footage captured in-situ.

The resulting release is a playful homage to a more innocent and adventurous time at the Melbourne Raves, and an expose of the DJ and VJ’ing artforms that drove the scene.

Also see remastered live-stream on authors blog <here>.

Machine Art x Music 2.01

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 04:05:51 +0000

In this 1920×1080 HD version of original 1080×1080 ‘Machine Music x Art 2.01’ live-stream ; and 2 years since their last lock-down remote live-stream event; and post Xavier Morel’s master class set at My Aeon the previous weekend; Xavier and Adem Jaffers (aka VJ Mandala) took this unique opportunity to once again come together for an a/v jam – this time [LiVE] from an undisclosed studio location in Melbourne.

Due to catastrophic software crash at eleventh hour, disabling midi loops to drive parts of show – the visuals were mixed manually, ol scool, using an APC Mini and Launch Pro.

On top of that, due to a series live-stream audio mastering glitchs, the remastered mix audio was restriped from the Rumble stream version, with minor gain added.

Am amazed it made it to air!

See remastered live-stream on my blog <here>.

Link to artists appear within blog ling above

TLE Retrospect c98’: Tiny Little Engines of Creation

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 05:15:36 +0000

Using VJ performance techniques to generate a storyboard for an animated and partially audio triggered 3D music video.

TREATMENT:

TLE is an audio/visual experience realised completely using only 3D animation; with two main objectives in mind:

The first being the experimentation with (using) audio waveforms to manipulate and drive the behaviour of characters (objects), lighting and a plethora of 3D parameters.

The second, unconventionally at the time, no editing in Post - at all! Which was achieve by animating sequentially from frame 00:00; rather than animating scenes at random, so that the final rendered frames could be loaded into a disk recorder then layed down along with audio for mastering to tape.

As the primary design approach, the musical track itself - its combined instruments and sophisticated rhythms, timbre (texture) and the actual shape of the audio waveform became the basic building blocks to decipher an abstract visual plot.

With the aid of a (then) recently developed audio-control 3D plug-in, coupled with traditional animation / modelling and the evolving vj performance techniques. A modality for transposing sound to vision emerged to help achieve the rhythmic and unified composition.

Some of the 3D animation attributes that are audio driven are:

Camera - lense size or perspective and dolly.
Geometry - symmetric complexity, shape, and scale.
Texture - colour level, generative texture, bump, specular and diffusion.
Lighting - colour & intensity, animation maps and cone scale.
Volumetric fog - noise detail and layer height.
Paths - deformation of vertices and travel speed used for camera, objects, lights and particles.

By using the VJ methodology employed used to transpose animation from music, the palette of dynamic audio responsive attributes were merged to generate the rhythmic visual (Tiny Little) Engines.

The camera i.e. the viewer are moved via undulating pathways of loops and vortices which pass through the orchestration of shape and colour as the little Engines journey unfolds.

FINAL TRANSPOSITION:

When the audio waveforms were not, or could not be driving 3D or atmospheric elements and their parameters. A system of transposition used to generate a master crib sheet (aka storyboard) was employed for TLE.

This system was developed using VJ performance techniques to notate the sounds ‘gesturally’ in an abstract and freeform way. The gestures then inform the (manual) animation of the 3D elements.

This allowed a somewhat seamless integration of audio and non-audio driven components.

One such example can be seen where orbs with spot lights beaming change to tempo of music. This was realised by vj’ing 2D images using Elan Performer (on an Amiga 1200) live into a disk recorder. Then those frames were applied as projection maps along with audio driven volumetric fog to the orb beams (spot lights), so they animate in time during final render.

Brief descriptions of the Final Transposition tracks are as follows; referring to the vertical tracks shown in image above RIGHT to LEFT:

1) The primary and multi-purpose ABC track contains letters tapped into a text document as a ‘Master Visual Reference’ to different instrument sounds and rhythms. Use of alpha-numeric keys, each unique character representing a single beat at 8 beats per line (1 Bar), with Bars of 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, or 16 representing scenes. In this case fortunately the music was 150bpm, which calculated to exactly 10fr per beat, which made animating at 25fps a much simpler translation process!

2+5) Final animation and music timings are displayed in the FPS and MIN-SEC tracks. All timings were made listening to a cassette recording of track - over and over again!

8+9) The look and feel of translated objects and shape of sounds are shown in the FONETIX - how the sounds could be primitively shaped by mouth gestures. And VISUALIZE tracks - gestural icons drawn in a flow-state to represent sound as (3D) objects.

3+7) The shape and style of object animations for each scene were realised using gestural strokes are shown in the FREEFORM and loosely inspired by the WAVE form tracks.

4) Background colour (and rhythm) are shown in the XYZ track. Noting distinct bumps and flows as track progresses.

6) Background and character colour schemes assigned for the flow/feel are documented in the RGB-HSV track. To keep the human element of creative perception and interpretation intact, the colours selected reflect the tonal values temporally throughout track as perceived by ear – not as a mathematical translation.

10+11) References for 3D scene numbers and file names are shown in the last two tracks.

PRESS

KTX World
VIDÉO Formes 0099

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

DESIGN & ANIMATION:
Adem Jaffers
c1998
PRODUCTION FACILITY:
Unreal Pictures
Inkind support!

ONLINE FACILITY:
Icon Digital & Comcopy
ONLINE OPERATOR:
Mike Swift
MUSIC WRITTEN & PRODUCED BY:
The Visitors - Andrew Till, Ollie Olsen & Geoffrey Hales
PUBLISHED BY:
Psy-Music / PolyGram Music
Taken from the CD Psy-033 (Psy-Harmonics Volume 3)
"Hacking the Reality Myth"
Psy-Harmonics - Australia

PRODUCTION STATISTICS:

3D software - 3dsMax
Grading - Digital Fusion
Disk Playback - DPS Perception
Network Render Engine - 966mhz
Render time per frame - 8:24sec
Animation Duration - 8:30sec
Total frames - 12,685fr
Database size - 5.2gig
Production duration - 22mnths
Hardware Platform - WinNTv4

SPECIAL THANX TO:
David Nelson & the Unreal Pictures crew, Psy-Harmincs crew, James Murray & the Creative Access crew, my mum, dad, Jeff jaffers, Zenep Jaffers, and Melanie Carr.

Metta Machine

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 22:09:52 +0000

Custom built dedicated analogue video feedback contraption - c2015.

‘The Metta Machine gives precise control of video feedback, enabling the camera position to remain static if need be, freeing up the hands to affect the image feedback pathway..’

READ ABOUT BUILD

Ableton Note App

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 04:39:35 +0000

This App has LINK compatible with many other Apps and Mac/PC LINK enabled progs ie Resolume.

Funky App for bustin out riffs aswell - includes Ableton Cloud, enabling projects to sync across automatically to Ableton 11.2.5 (and above) Live Suite/Lite.

Still few bugs, but intuitive and performative!

https://www.ableton.com/en/link/products/#?item_type=windows

Depence visualiser

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 03:33:37 +0000

Depence is one Impressive Realtime 3D, lighting/lazer simulation /vizualisation software.

Demo video is worth the watch.

Youtube Channel:

https://youtube.com/c/SyncronormGmbH

Website:
https://www.syncronorm.com/products/depence2/visualization/overview

Custom Rig - post yours

Adem Jaffers (vjMandala) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 03:10:31 +0000

been slowly but surely building up my custom vj (vfx) studio over the years.

Love to see what your upto.