Published in the November 2008 issue
of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 21 - Number 11
It was the mid-’90s and U.K. superstar-DJ culture was reaching a crescendo when the Brit duo of Graham Daniels and Tolly began to realize their shared vision. They kick-started their bastardized mixers and blended their TV and music production skills with the live techniques of VJing and DJing. Emerging as A/V alchemists, together with producers Françoise Lamy and Nick Clarke, they have since gone on to realize international success as Addictive TV.
From producing TV shows such as the seminal Mixmasters series of DJ/VJ mixes and performing A/V sets at clubs and festivals worldwide to their touring live cinema project, The Eye of the Pilot, Addictive TV has pushed its craft to the forefront. From their visual-music event Optronica held in London’s IMAX cinema to remixing blockbuster movies for Hollywood, as they did earlier this year with Iron Man for Paramount Pictures, their achievements are shining a new light on an old mission: to unite sound and vision.
Addictive TV has now played an extraordinary range of venues in over 40 countries and the guys recently returned from Vienna, where they remixed the Beijing 2008 Olympics feeds live for the national Austrian TV broadcaster ORF. Quite a departure from their “regular” gigs, their remix was essentially an experiment to explore the possibilities surrounding live remixing of live event coverage. And as some indication of its complexity, this almighty mix involved the use of four audio and video mixers, including Pioneer’s new SVM-1000 audio/visual mixer, a six-channel Pioneer DJM-1000 audio mixer and two Edirol V4 video mixers, including their own customized unit which has been modified for audio.
Also in Beijing was Addictive TV’s Adidas-commissioned installation, entitled Sportive, which has toured art galleries and museums throughout China over the past year. The only participant to be selected from the U.K. to join the Sport in Art exhibition, Addictive TV raided Adidas’s archives for this project—and with the Olympics now over it’s one everyone can check out online.
Painstaking to produce but a pleasure to watch, the three-minute Sportive video starts out to the beating of a heart—the only sound that’s added here without synchronized visuals. An athlete’s running shoes pound the street, dramatically. There’s a break. A swimmer makes waves, a skier leaps into the air. There’s another break…and more anticipation. The symphony of samples finally unites with the kick of a soccer ball and the “pop” of a tennis racquet striking a ball—beats, bass, melody, all built audio-visually into the mix. But how, exactly, was it done?
“We’d always wanted to make a piece like this, based on sampling sports footage, but it had never been the right time,” says Daniels of the Sportive project. “In the studio, we took a similar approach to all our film remixes, in that we waded through hours of footage looking for exactly the right samples that had both the picture and sounds we wanted and then started the picture and sound composition side by side. Multi-screen seemed the obvious way to go, to achieve our goal of a full AV mix where everything you see, you also hear simultaneously.
“With software for creating tracks, we use Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects on the video side—then there’s Cubase and Ableton on the sound side. Quite often we’ll also use a DVJ-1000 in the studio for time-stretching or pitch adjusting audio/video samples to keep the A and V in perfect sync. It’s a long, old process of swapping files backwards and forwards. We try to keep audio and video together as much as is possible. Keeping discipline with trying to stay truly audiovisual is important to us, we don’t want to make stuff that’s a traditional montage cut to music; we always build the music up out of the sound in an AV sample and try and find an accessible way to present the synced pictures.”
Now you may imagine that projects such as Sportive are made and played in some arty bubble away from clubland. In reality, however, these remixes, like Addictive TV’s movie remixes, are just as likely to turn up (remixed again, live!) in their high-octane club or festival sets as a mash-up of The Streets Vs Elvis or Blondie Vs The Doors.
“Technology is always progressing and enabling a lot more people to do things they couldn’t do before,” says Daniels, “and the mainstream world of ads and film-making is now picking up on techniques that come from our field.”
