visuals for me began with stef lewandowski as 'robots in disguise'. he'd pulled off a club-night with live techno in the bowels of the students union, and turned his graphic design of the flyer into a flash loop on a pub sized tv on stage. i thought "this is where its at, and i've got all the resources of a student tv station literally down the corridor". running the station did have its advantages, as we temporarily dismantled things to take to clubs around the city.
it did pay off though, this showreel video that i edited together won the student tv oscars - 'nastas' - that year for music video. it started in 1998, and the nasta win was 2000.
rid largely ended when we got bored of the limitations and hassle of the kit of the time: we'd developed an aesthetic using lots of graphic elements combined with stuttering video, and it couldn't go any further with stef's flash triggerer tool, vhs decks and an mx30. for me, i moved away and the laptop revolution happened, which changed everything.
looking back, what i really liked about this era was the combination of dynamic flash elements and live camera. for instance we had crosshairs we could position over a live feed of the audience, and caption people with quotes pulled from a text file we'd write on the way to the gig. even more simply, our flash clips weren't pre-rendere but would loop internally at different frames, always giving a new combination.
