Ian McDaniel has had his hands full lately with heavy-duty visual support for Swedish DJ/producer Avicii. I caught up with him recently while the tour prepped in Las Vegas to learn more about his company, and I got an inside peek at what it takes to produce enough content to fill a 62-foot-wide stage during a two-hour DJ set.
PLSN: How did you get involved in this Avicii project?
Ian McDaniel: A few years ago, we worked with [Avicii production designer] Alex Reardon on a Disney on Ice gig in Lakeland FL, and we recognized that we both liked dance music.
What makes this project so unique?
This is a whole different ballgame than what we’ve done in the past. We’ve been using our own media server for years. They are not something that’s marketed; it’s just something we use. We do have a few out on tour, and we ran the BEP [Black Eyed Peas] tour with it. That show is timecode-based, and it’s HD-SDI out; it’s very standard video. This show is anything but standard. Since I’m a DJ too, I recognized what a DJ would want to do with their set and have video chase. There are plug-ins for Serato that give you a single video output out of the same laptop that you’re DJ’ing off of, but I haven’t seen anything that can control multiple media servers. And so I started searching and thinking how in the heck am I going to do this. Also, it took a quite a bit of time to figure out the math on wrapping an image around the face.
You’re using Cinema 4D?
Yes, C4D for the 3D stuff, then we take everything into After Effects and do the final mapping and color stuff there. Then we transfer them to the media servers; we use Modul8 and MADMapper as a through-siphon. And we’re definitely pushing Modul8 to the extremes of what it’s capable of. Our raster size is huge — our biggest one is 3810 by1080 — and it’s keeping up.
Our media servers are 12-core Macs with lots of memory; fast hard drives, etc., to handle these clips. We’ve gotten support from the people that make Modul8 [Garage Cube] too, and we also have a programmer who is making a module for us called Generate that allows us to do time-stretching on the fly, so when the DJ speeds up and down, the video follows that. Seth [Robinson] and I put our heads together, and he also developed several applications to re-route everything, so that when Avicii is DJ’ing, it switches source and clock. It’s beautiful.
So the mapping is one part of it, but the content is another. Do you use multiple programs to create the content?
Yes, C4D and After Effects are the two main programs, as well as a little bit of Final Cut Pro if it’s just quick editing, but the majority of the content is made in C4D and everything goes through After Effects. We literally brought a mobile farm of MAC Minis that chew away on all the C4D stuff. I think 14 are over there [laughs]. It’s our little fan heat center over there. We also have towers here too that are more powerful, but we literally just pick up our office and move wherever we need to go for any of these gigs.
So how do you come up with the ideas for the content for each song? Is it a collaboration with the DJ?
In this particular one, he (Avicii) gave us quite a bit of freedom. We just kind of sat in a room, came up with a bunch of ideas, and we got all the content artists together and just all figured out we can do this or this or that, and just came up with concepts for every song.
And you do all the filming as well?
Yes, we did. We rented a RED Epic for a few days and caught a lot of content. Some of the artists came with me, and we shot a lot of content. We rode roller coasters with GoPros, and I did the sky shoot in Daytona Beach just to get the upside down shot. When it comes together, it’s dizzying onstage, because the projection is so massive, it’s just pretty cool.
How long do you think one song in the Avicii show on average would take for you to completely do?
If it were just one person doing everything, anywhere from four days to a week. Quite a bit of time. But we’ve hired on some freelance artists, and in addition to the onsite people here, we have two or three people offsite as well.
So what’s the most rewarding part of this for you?
Actually just getting to see it, to see the mapping work. Because mapping to a rounded surface with no straight edges or lines but with lumps and everything else, it was a huge challenge to figure out that math, how it’s going to work, and the feathering. Then we)used MADMapper to really get in there and tweak all the little points and make it wrap around perfectly. That was probably the most fun for me.
For more photos, go to go to www.plsn.me/avicii2012.
Also www.vidaroo.com/production.
