Livid’s resident Video Designer Jay Senk has been performing with Latin Grammy winner Juanes for most of 2005. With an arsenal of seven cameras, a Tactic, and original video content, Senk has been acting as both VJ and Video Director in shows ranging from soccer stadiums to the American Airlines Arena. 

Where are you now on the tour, can you tell us about the latest show? 

We’re in Spain right now, just did a show in Madrid at Palacio de Deportes. One of the most excited and energetic crowds I’ve seen on the entire tour, hands down… Tons of good vibes there.

 

How have the crowds in different parts of the world responded to the visuals? 

Since the show was custom designed with the artist, we really had the opportunity to include visual elements that ran varying degrees of direct representation of each song. For a track called “Que Pasa”, Juanes wanted to use still images that illustrated the social anxieties of his native country Colombia. The black and white images, most of them portrayals of war and urban strife, are cut up to the screens on the beat of the song. It’s interesting to watch the crowd’s reaction, especially in some of the Latin countries we’ve been in. It’s a very powerful part of the show, and you can feel the connection between what the artist is saying and what the crowd is feeling.

What does your setup consist of?

The visuals are powered by a Mac G5 dual processor tower with a flat panel display and mixed using a combination of the Tactic workstation and an Edirol V4 mixer. I use a tri-panel LCD monitor for main cameras, and multiple micro cameras are selected with a comprehensive signal switcher. 

 

Vjing the same show every night can get pretty repetitive I imagine. How do you keep it interesting? 

I’ve got to say that when I fade up the video to the screen for the first time in the show and 10,000 people start cheering, it’s definitely a certain kind of rush that never gets old. For me, the most interesting part about doing repeat performances of the same show is the on-the-fly decisions that present themselves. If I’m using a live camera feed of a Juanes guitar solo, it’s a spontaneous choice between the different effects I can use to really push the limits visually. It’s always fun to switch things up and take the show in a different direction.. different cuts here, different filter layers there. Plus everybody knows rock n’ roll isn’t perfect, so there’s always something keeping me on my toes during the show. 

You have a unique position acting as video director and visuals creator at the same time, how do you balance the two? 

Well as with any job, the more familiar you get with your gear and your surroundings, the more comfortable you feel using those tools. I’m fortunate enough to have excellent camera ops for every show, so the chemistry is there naturally. Bouncing back and forth between the Tactic and the V4 has become very rhythmic, and so it’s really all about timing for this particular show. The visuals were created to work seamlessly with the tempo of the music, so the real challenge in the beginning is finding those points where the sound and video start to play off each other. After you get that, you’re free to concentrate on the more creative aspect of things – effects, camera angles, etc. 

What is your artistic background in? What made you want to manipulate moving images? 

I studied fine art since high school, and later got involved in multimedia and video production. Becoming exposed to works by artists like Bill Viola and Craig Baldwin really got me into the medium, and I produced some interactive video installations in my undergrad. I’ve always been interested in sample culture in the audio world, and it was great to see what artists like Coldcut and DJ Shadow were doing, using live video in their shows where it wasn’t just a loop. They were time-oriented, song-specific video cuts and scratches, an idea that really appealed to me. 

 

Do the images have themes or relation to the music for this tour? 

Absolutely, which is interesting because much of the video designed for the set list, upon Juanes’ request, is abstracted and non-representational. The opening track is a song called “Suenos”, which means “dreams” in Spanish.  We shot and composited footage of a first-person view run through the woods, which works with the track’s lyrical content about dreams and disorientation. In “Mala Gente” (Bad People), there’s a fire theme that was designed for the warm lighting of the stage.   One of my favorite parts of the show is mixing the fire into the crowd, they go bananas. 

 

Do you have any advice for other visual artists starting out?

If I had to give a pointer (and as cliché as it sounds) it would be to not worry about defying convention. It’s the abnormal, unique things that really stand out for the audience, and when you can get somebody to say “I’ve never seen something quite like that before”, that’s what it’s really all about.

 

For more information visit http://lividdesign.com/

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