Always striving to grow the local user base for its middleware tools, Unity Technologies Japan has put on all sorts of workshops aimed at fostering community. And with the recent launch of vjkit, which makes short work of creating and mixing live-triggered VJ elements, its recent Open Class workshop series gave participants the chance to collaborate with musicians and DJs at a club event in Tokyo.
In the lounge bar at Fuze, held at Shibuya’s 500-capacity WWW venue on 27 December, a mess of visual mixers and game controllers cluttered a VJ desk as artists performed on a balcony stage flanked front and back by video screens. On a Mac running Unity, the VJs cued up the effects they’d made during the workshops – from psychedelic swirling backgrounds to game graphics. Individual visual elements were then controlled using several Korg nanoKontrol mixers, with parameters assigned to the various knobs and faders to be manipulated in real time.
“Since Unity is already a well-known tool among the game audience, we teamed up with them to introduce ways to use Unity outside of games, and that is how this whole project came together,” Hiroko Minamoto, CEO at 8-4, Ltd – a game localisation company that helped organise fuZe – told us ahead of the event.
The two teams of VJs in sub room learned how to use the vjkit at Open Class, with Unity staff on hand to show them the ropes. Hiroki Saitoh and Macotom3, the two musicians who performed against the backdrops in fuZe’s sub room, were also present at Open Class. Tickets were priced at 6,000 yen (£35) for one class or 12,000 yen for the full course of three classes and participation at fuZe.
Unity Japan set up workshops to allow musicians and VJs to learn the basics of vjkit, the tool powering their work at Fuze.
“We had classes of about 40 people at the workshops and they learned to make visuals quickly from components using our custom asset, which anyone can download for free,” Hiroki Omae, local VP at Unity Technologies Japan, told us at the event. “To make the more complex scripts I’m afraid you still have to read some books…”
Just like you’d expect of club VJ visuals, different elements were overlaid together as loops and mixed in and out in concert with the music. We saw cute imagery of the Earth in space surrounded by multicoloured wireframe stars and triangles, interspersed with random pigs and running muscle men in their pants, then scenes from a space shooter game, then images of a brute running around a cartoonish field of vivid greens and blues.
Unity also brought an added level of interactivity that a regular VJ package never could. A knock-off Kinect clone made by Asus allowed revellers to take turns controlling an on-screen polygon character with their dancing bodies, while a SNES-style game controller was passed around so that audience members could play a game demo that was being phased in and out, to prove that everything was happening live. Indeed, anyone who stuck around after the sub stage had closed down could get a hands-on with the Korg mixers and see how it all works.
The main room featured sets by innovative electronic artists such as De De Mouse and a DJ set by Thor and Ichi The Killer actor Tadanobu Asano, and one performance – a collaboration between musicians Takashi Numazawa (a session drummer for Chaka Khan and Shiela E) and Koji Nakamura (from pioneering electronic-rock band Supercar) and multimedia producer Hideto Yamada – was backed by more Unity-generated visuals.
Fuze’s on-screen displays were often interactive, controlled by a hacked Kinect or SNES controller.
“This audio-visual performance is made with Unity 100 per cent,” said Minamoto. “We applied sensors to the drum set so the visuals could be generated from the drums in real-time. The music for this performance is a track from Numazawa’s solo album (Entropy, Vol 1. – EP), released on 15 January.”
This being Tokyo, the crowd didn’t exactly go crazy (how undignified that would be!). Rather, as the studious-looking collection of seemingly tech-savvy punters bopped politely to the music, many of them showed an interest in how the imagery they were seeing on-screen had been made. And more than any dancefloor meltdown, for Unity, that was the point.
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