Production designer for the show, Grier Govorko, gave V-Squared Labs a free hand to design what they thought would be most appropriate based on their work with other artists such as Sting, Beyoncé, Blink-182 and Korn. "I sat down with Vello and a list of possible songs, I think there were 23 possibilities at the time," said Govorko. "I had in my head a list of ideas in terms of basic visual concepts. Vello and I went over these ideas, elaborated where possible, and I whittled away the numbers as we went through. 23 tunes in a month was obviously too much to try and pull off, so I chose 11 tunes that I thought from past experience would be sure to get played."
'Californication' featured Brahm Revel's comic book-inspired animation style, mixed with photographic montages taken and assembled by Virkhaus. Tristan Maduro and Gene Shih gave a hand-drawn look and feel to the story of a time-traveling dragon for the song 'Parallel Universe.' Sunny Lee created primary-coloured and highly graphical works for both 'Emit Remmus' and 'Can't Stop.' Ron Brookler produced a punk rock-inspired piece that incorporated hand signals and photographs for 'Suck My Kiss' with his signature gritty flare. Matt Daly brought his unique style of character animation to the table on 'Purple Stain,' creating spherical and spline-based figures that danced a 'Chili Pepper' inspired ballet.
As well as creating and designing the visuals for the show, Virkhaus oversaw a dramatic upgrade to V-Squared Labs' Edirol real-time video editing and playback system for the tour. "We added networking capabilities to the Edirol," remarks Virkhaus. "It meant that we could avoid the whole online editorial process, by using FTP to send files directly to the system once they are rendered. It also meant that we didn't have to bother with renaming files or anything like that. We just dragged and dropped the file and pressed play."
Virkhaus also added a Firewire to serial digital (SDI) transcoder to the Edirol rack. That meant Govorko could mix two SDI signals directly. By avoiding online editorial process and directly rendering the loops in DV format, V-Squared Labs' work onsite was finished with an entire day to spare. "We originally designed our system for VJ'ing," says Virkhaus. "Here it is in the rock/lighting universe, and even after massive abuse, it has never failed once!"
"My experience in the past had been with standard-type pro switching and hard drive storage systems," says Govorko. "They are just not designed to be used in the live video playback world of rock and roll. Vello showed the Edirol to me, and I was instantly impressed: a graphic interface, instant replay, variable speed on the fly, simple coloration etc. All of this in a very small package, physically. To be honest, there was nothing not to like about the Edirol system."
A full review of the Red Hot Chili Peppers show appears in the August issue of Lighting&Sound International magazine.
(Lee Baldock)
