“There were a lot of ‘aha-reactions’ that made the people look twice once they saw the live effects going on.”

Docklands Festival takes place in Münster, Germany at the start of the summer festival season. Sound familiar? We featured Docklands 2017 in our showcases as one of the first European festivals to integrate Notch. We heard that Uwe Schroeder and the visualprime team returned to the festival, armed with Notch, and the intention to ‘set the screens on fire’ – we had to find out more.

VJ duo Uwe Schroeder of visualprime and Tasso Treiss from Okinawa69 teamed up again to bring innovative visuals to Docklands 2018 main stage. Their focus this year would be live-cam visual feeds and creating exciting I-Mag FX and graphics to interact with and embellish the feeds.

With a brief pre-production period, Notch was their weapon of choice allowing them to ‘achieve high-quality results in a very short amount of time’. After moving production over to Notch last year the team said there was no chance of them going back to a ‘regular’ set-up. Familiar with Notch’s software and a real-time workflow, finding the right look for the festival was the most challenging element of the production. Uwe and Tasso wanted to make a visual statement. They also wanted their visuals to fit seamlessly with the vibe of the festival. With Notch, they were able to experiment and create rudimental design sketches. Notch’s real-time rendering allowed them to deliver instantly on their ideas.

Once live at the event Notch was used to combine multiple disciplines of live visual artistry. Notch software facilitated mapping of FX onto live camera feeds. Blackmagic cinema cameras and hardware was used to capture live footage, which was then pre-mixed and routed to front-of-house. Notch BuilderPro, Resolume, VDMX, an Analog Way Nextage16 and a VJ Video Mixer were used to bring everything together before it was put into Notch via the disguise 4x4pro. Visuals were displayed at a resolution of 4136×720 on curved screens on the sides of the stage as well as a big centre screen in the middle of the stage.

“People attending festivals are quite used to visuals these days. What they are not used to is the combination of live images and visuals brought together the right way with all the real-time effects from Notch.” -Uwe Schroeder, visualprime.