Sometime last year, my partner Britney sent me an archive she had come across while surfing a Dance Dance Revolution fan forum. It appears to be a fan-maintained, color-corrected, annotated clip library of all of the video backgrounds from the DDR MAX era of games. It’s a really rich collection of motion graphics, animation, CGI, kinetic typography, and more from a clear early 2000s-era Japanese aesthetic. I didn’t really have any idea of how this could be useful to me at the time, but I held onto it because it seemed like it would be something really fun to play with.
Back in the times before the coronavirus pandemic, I had at least gotten so far as to decide that this would be a really fun excuse to buy a projector, get into Resolume a bit more deeply, and experiment with different project layouts and controller mapping configurations. I used Resolume Alley to scale up and transcode the archive of 853 AVI files from some weird dimension they loaded into a PS2 with to a standard 720p at 30fps. It took months just to get all of the clips into Resolume, start weeding out redundancies that could be recreated within Resolume such as boomerang clips, and start building pages of coherent looks.
When the whole world entered lockdown, I started pouring my free time focus more directly into this project. I decided to commemorate my upcoming 31st birthday with a full-on Twitch stream of a two-hour VJ set that raised money for charity. This incentivized me to channel a constant stream of daily refinement into a creative project, which has been really important to staying sane while the whole world is on pause.
The VJ set itself went really well. I understand that this clip library is a little different from the kinds of assets you would normally acquire to build a VJ clip library, because so many of them are really really dense, full-framed scenes that cannot easily composite with other elements without becoming totally overwhelming. So the resulting layout is a bit “shallow” in that I can really only pull off at most two compositable layers at a time.
This project let me take a very wide slice into Resolume Arena, with a very low-stakes, satisfying outcome. There wasn’t even any realtime audio-reactivity present in the final project, and I think the final broadcast only showed off maybe 70% of the clips that I had. The fundraising aspect of it was also a success; we went 40% over my initial goal!
Overall I used this project as a means to get in touch with the separation between work and play, and I hope to continue it forward both in energy and concept in the future.