pseudotoad__laboratories.frequentlyAskedQuestions
Q: Where does the name come from?
Q: Whatever happened to halcyon_visuals?
Q: Who is/are Amfibio and what have they got to do with you?
Q: What is the minimum I need to start programming my own visuals and throwing shows with them?
Q: How do you get in contact with the musicians?
Q: You actually know all those celebrities you've worked with?
Q: How do you work with your material?
Q: How much time do you have to put in this?
Q: How big are your audiences generally?
Q: How much do you get paid per gig?
Q: Where does the name come from?
Pseudotoad is an ambiguous amphibian lifeform and a word that rhymes with pseudocode.
Q: Whatever happened to halcyon_visuals?
A: Halcyon is a demogroup Petri L is a member of. Petri L and his Halcyon chums initiated the whole visualisation idea a few years back and this group was supposed to be something of a next step for them. We used the group title halcyon_visuals for the first year, but as the other people from Halcyon got increasingly inactive in the visual front, we decided it was time for a name change. With Pauli O and Antti S now handling the graphics and programming chores, it is only logical we don't use the name with a decade of other people's history behind it.
Q: Who is/are Amfibio and what have they got to do with you?
A: Amfibio is "a bunch of explorers of the audiovisual, combining their incredible virtues in arts and science to produce most diverse and unpredictable results" (taken from http://www.amfibio.org). Pseudotoad Laboratories is an Amfibio entity, so we share the same live gear and throw gigs together.
Q: What is the minimum I need to start programming my own visuals and throwing shows with them?
The most important of all, you need something to project your visuals to the audience with. Venues are starting to have fixed projectors and plasma screens of their own, which is a true blessing when you're a beginner. Otherwise, try renting or borrowing a projector of some kind as that's the only choice we see, even the cheapest one cost over a 1000 euros in the shop (the minimalist could of course go with a couple of big old TV sets). As we're talking about programming, the next logical step is to have a computer of your own. The processor, display adapter, size of hard drive etc. are yours to decide according to what you need, but you should consider putting an emphasis of some kind on mobility. We've dragged some huge monitors and PC cases around, we know. Laptops are a good thing and the modern ones are starting to be quite powerful too. The last hardware thing, if you're not bold enough to jack your computer straight in to the projector, and we know we're not, borrow a videomixer from somewhere. It lets you mix several inputs into the screen and will save your life more than once. Software crashes, harsh mistakes, dialogue windows and mouse cursors are just some of the things you wouldn't want to project to the audience.
On the software front, you should get familiar with some good compilers, editors and cross-platform graphics, audio and input libraries. Most of the good stuff is available nowadays for free which you should bear in mind before installing that pirated operating system or development studio. For our choice of software tools, see gear as well as links. We know alternative choices do exist, but we like ours this way. Most of them are open source, a joy to use and most important of all, really work.
Q: How do you get in contact with the musicians?
A: We'd say it has more than anything to do with a term coined ugly: human networks. Usually it goes in these lines: someone's friend or a friends friend is in a band or producing a band who would like to add some visuals to their live repertuare. Or alternatively, a promoter wants some visuals for his happening and the performing musicians might have nothing to do with it. Anyway, someone's heard that we make those sorts of things and wants to order a gig. It is about who you know, or who your friends know.
Q: You actually know all those celebrities you've worked with?
A: Some of them we've toured the land with, some of them we haven't even shaken hands with. As for the people that we've worked with for more gigs than one, it is pretty obvious we have been in some contact with them. It depends a whole lot: if we've been ordered by a promoter and the musicians' stage is 20 metres away from our spot, it might be pretty hard to initiate contact for both sides. This is very revealing of another funny thing: the musicians rarely have a say on what we're supposed to show.
Q: How do you work with your material?
A: There is really little change to rehearse with a live band as it is very typical that we have not been in any contact with most of the musicians before the gig day. So, we write our effects at home and in the Amfibio office and take every use of our CD players whenever we want to hear or analyze the music. Antti S would like to use this change to namedrop his record collection a bit and recommend some good test CD's for audio analysis algorithms. It's all about good production and audio dynamics and various records from KMFDM, Snog, Front 242 and C-Tec have done the trick for him in more than one occasion.
Q: How much time do you have to put in this?
A: Especially the days before the performance (and of course during it) creating the visuals and organizing things takes more time than a fulltime job would. On the other hand, nothing much happens between the gigs.
Q: How big are your audiences generally?
A: There is no such thing as a general audience. The sizes range from small club gigs that might have not more than twenty spectators to festival gigs where the audience could be counted, at least theoretically, in tens of thousands.
Q: How much do you get paid per gig?
A: The price paid for the entire visual crew varies a lot. I'd say we're usually talking about sums of couples of hundreds of euros or there abouts. So how much money does each of us receive at the end of the day? The answer to this one is easy: we get nothing. This doesn't mean we'd pop in to visualize your garden party for free (unfortunately). Clearly the fee paradox deserves some explaining.
When I said we get nothing, I meant it in two ways: we get no personal income but we also get no personal expenses. The visual crew always gets paid, but all the money acquired goes to Amfibio and from there on to new equipment, travel costs, accommodation and so forth. If we need to ride a taxi to get home after the gig or find out we need to buy some extra converters and power cords, that's all covered by the gig fee (as well as previous gig fees). Afterwards, if there's enough money left, we'll all eat out together. What could be nicer than that?
I think it's worth mentioning that I first got involved with visuals in april 2002 and at summer 2002 we were already doing gigs of our own. I doubt this would be the case if we couldn't have used the equipment Amfibio already had. The absolute minimum for throwing shows with your own visuals, a decent computer with a video output, will already cost you ten times more than an average gig does alone. The only other option I see is always borrowing your equipment from schools and places like that, but as you can probably easily imagine, that tends complicate things a lot (not that we've always been willing to admit that - huge props to Noa for having the patience to cope with all our request from his school). So as far as I can see it, we're actually benefiting from working for free. If we wanted to make a living out of this, we would have to throw gigs a hell of a lot more often, and at the same time, have significally less people involved to split the income. Our way, everybody wins.
I'll throw in one particular money sum for a reference. One gig, we had a couple of contributors outside Amfibio, and since we thought they deserved to be paid a share of the fee in cash, decided to split the remainder as well. After the outsiders share and a projector rent we were down to 50 euros for three guys for the entire night. We had used 20 euros out of that to eat, so after the splitting, each of us received 10 euros - that is for clearly over 18 hours of work, stretching the gig night up to 6 am in the morning. As you can see, sums like this are quite insulting, a lot more insulting than receiving nothing ever would be. Although the sums would be higher with less people involved, I just think visualizing would be a lot less fun that way.
Finally, if you do want us to visualize your gig or club or party, I think the fee of couple of hundreds of euros I already mentioned is a good place to start.
Q: Should what you're doing be considered art?
A: First of all, what we're doing has a lot do with computers, compilers, application programming interfaces, algorithms and technology in general and people tend to label things as these close to engineering, or alternatively down right science. In this aspect our thing has a lot more to do with the artistic method than say, computational mathematics or game engineering. There's no use to blab more about that, since Paul Graham has written an excellent article on the subject where he plausibly compares hacking with painting. On the other hand, many people in the visual world do consider themselves artists and constantly label their doings multimedia works of art or video installations or so forth. This is not a route we'd like to take either: we prefer our work to have a considerable amount of mass-appeal, in a sense art projects in our opinions lack. You should compare the situation with the music world: not all the musicians are writing audio pieces simply to be heard in art museums, or solely working as sound technicians and studio engineers. To put it short, there is a lot we should learn from stadion rock.
Q: Is your gear sponsored?
A: Pseudotoad is not in any way endorsed by the manufacturers. Often we wish we were. Everything we have is bought with the gig fees from regular shops and/or owned by someone of us or Amfibio.