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Made with Love in TouchDesigner V99 C:\Users\deadmau5> | Derivative

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Posted on: Apr 23rd 2019

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Made with Love in TouchDesigner V99 C:\Users\deadmau5>

isabelle

An alumni of the Ontario College of Art and Design and the Beal Institute For Strategic Creativity, Isabelle’s background is in research, design and film making. She joined the Derivative team in 2008 to assume the role of scouting out and writing about the growing body of work produced by artists and designers using TouchDesigner. Closely engaged with the community and its members’ evolving needs and objectives, Isabelle detects early signals and trends to inform development, facilitate connections, alliances and the production of educational initiatives and community events.

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Made with Love in TouchDesigner V99 C:\Users\deadmau5>

Less than 5 months before the premiere of his new Cube V3 show Canadian electronic music producer and DJ deadmau5 aka Joel Zimmerman paid a visit at the Derivative office in Toronto with the plan to build the entire show from scratch in a real time environment, specifically with TouchDesigner.

He had already invested solid – and very public time – learning the software in mind-boggling 18-to-48-hour work sessions on his Twitch.tv channel punctuated by cathartic bouts of gaming, his opinionated and adoring clan in tow. You could not look away… but also Zimmerman's self-reliance, agility and sheer stamina was perhaps what was most impressive as was his swift handling of TouchDesigner's infamous 'learning curve'.

deadmau5 Cube V3 premiere at Ultra Miami Festival. Photo credit: aLIVE

Credits. Photo credit: Leah Sems

The Mau5head makes an appearance at Toronto rehearsal. Photo credit: Leah Sems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32K1DzdplEc&feature=youtu.be

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Long story short, a few months and a sh*t ton of WORK later - "I put in the hours" he flatly states, emerged a 1.5 hour spectacle centred around a 21-foot-tall x 22-foot-wide, mechanical feat of engineering clad in pulsating, twisted visuals that singularly originates from him and turns E:DM on its head (so to speak ;). Whichever way you want to look at it, Cube V3 is something that hasn't been done before and it is remarkably good.

And as Zimmerman put it to the Miami New Times before the show's premiere at the Ultra Music Festival March 30th "I need everyone to know how much of a fucking insanely stupid technological feat this is… That's important, because we have all this tech and no one's fucking using it."

Before getting into that, one of the many take-aways from having seen this beast come together is that deadmau5 is a truly great role model and from a kind of 'disenfranchised' standpoint that makes it even cooler and a lot more real. Look no further. Massive thanks to the head mau5 for so publicly supporting TouchDesigner and for talking to us here.

Cube Things live stream on Twitch.tv where Zimmerman spent countless hours working on Cube V3.

Derivative: In the recent Forbes article "Who I Am" list of nine defining moments, #9 was Using TouchDesigner and you talk about how as a huge video gamer you were thinking, "If you can get graphics looking this good using real time in a video game why can't you do that on a LED wall?" So now that you've done that on your CUBE - completely reimagined and then redeveloped your show with realtime visual content and in a realtime environment, with visuals that are "modular" has it been liberating?... is it more 'fun' :)? and has it sparked new ideas or avenues for future development? Seems to be very compatible with the way you play and the way you create the music and audio elements for your shows - as in, construct blocks, strip away elements and then reconstruct everything live during the show…

deadmau5: Making the show in TD in a modular space has been super liberating for me. As a touring performer, especially in the Electronic Dance music space, it's very easy and quick for a show production to get stagnant after a while, and more often than not, changes mean more work than you'd think... changing the music around is easy, but having cohesive content to match the changed content, light programming... all that is hours of work.

Most 'EDM' shows to me, just lack cohesiveness. I mean, generally speaking here, the modern day headliner DJ dude gets up on a stage, pops in a cd, and fist pumps while a "VJ" back at FOH furiously mashes away at video clips to kinda make some kind of connection between the music and the visuals. Sure...