Transcription (2 part)

Hi ! Sakchin from MomentFactory here. I'm talking to you about our adventure with Nine Inch Nails. It was a great experience working with Trent Reznor, Rob Scheiden, and the team from Nine Inch Nails. Trent wanted to make the stage an instrument. He wanted also to be able to manipulate the visuals of the stage with his movement with the music, and really integrate somehow the stage and the performance and the music into one universal kind of language, one synchronicity. So we adapted our interactive system called XMS that to be able to accommodate his special request.
The MomentFactory interactive system which we call XMS is basically really a system that's made to communicate. So we have one part that's called the brain that actually talks to various types of languages, that takes inputs and outputs, and basically we can talk with the lighting, we can talk with the sound, we can talk with the video, we can talk with the band, and all of this information comes into the system and out of the system with instrument parameters.
One of the ways we worked with Trent and Nine Inch Nails was because they were in Los Angeles and we were in Montreal, we made them a few quick little videos to show them what the system could do in order to give them guidelines into what the possibilities were in the time limits. We did all of this work in about 3 months.

Basically how the workflow structure worked is that Trent basically decides and then Rob Scheiden which is the art director from Nine Inch Nails helps design the content and gives the direction for the images and then Roy Bennett actually designs the stage and lighting and all the system for the stage design and MomentFactory design interactive sequences in the show. Basically, there were two touch screens that hide transparency, and one LED screen in the back, and this screen could be moving up and down and there was a whole bunch of moving lights and a lot of different other toys that Roy was playing with. Roy wanted to use the stage as a musical instrument so he developed a semi-type of touch screen which was basically a sequencer on the stage so on the LED screen there was a graphic sequencer as soon as the drummer would activate some button they would turn red and when the tempo was flying by the red line, the white line actually that's along was the tempo and that would activate specific sounds. So as the drummer would activate the different cues, the music would start.
In only Trent wanted to play with video noise on the screen what he did was to develop a system where his presence opens up certain part of the noise, so we can see through him, so his presence actually lights up specific lights and it opens up a black hole in the noise in the screen. A little in the song, as he moves and it gives velocity to the noise, and the noise sequences go from the back to the front so it's almost like a tornado of video noise that goes around so he's really free to play on stage, come in and out where he wants, so it's a performance tool that was designed.