From Sunburn to EDC to Beyond wonderland; Noisia to Nucleya to Flux Pavillion- Wolves have definitely carved a niche for themselves and are well on their way to achieve their dream of world domination.
This blog post looks to cover some of their best art, understand their psyche & give you a grand display of some of their prized possessions.
Thanks for doing this, you guys!
Tell us a little something about where it all began for you. At what point did you realize visuals was your calling?
It pretty much started when we met in high school and played a whole lot of video games. We were so obsessed with films, comic books and games growing up that after trying to chase the proverbial ‘calling’ in the real world — Josh has a background in his Dad’s light and sound business and Jash an audio engineer and a journalist — we somehow snapped back to a way to playing video games again. Only we’ve got way bigger screens now and a lot more people are watching.
What do you prefer: Projection or LED? And why?
LED. We respect and admire a lot of projection mapping set ups in the art installation space. But we reached a point of exhaustion with upholding that medium in larger music arenas and festivals. It felt like we were alienating the larger elements of production like the lighting rigs, lasers, stage fx and of course, the performing artists themselves. You can’t having them performing at the same capacity if you have to worry about the lights overshadowing the projections.
So we took the fundamentals of projection mapping and chopped and screwed our input and output maps to fit to the most luminous and stubborn of LED surfaces. Every show’s a new challenge and we never repeat a set up twice.
Tell us the process you follow for pixel mapping.
It starts with us coming up with a stage design, which we conceptualize from scratch or is given to us by the client/ festival. Once we get the tile sizes and resolutions we figure out a way to create the most effective pixel map. One that can fit custom content and existing 1080p content that will look correct moving across the entire stage. Doing a 5-6 hour music festival is not feasible on custom content alone. If you have the accurate outmap map as well you can do most of your mapping from the hotel room itself. Aside from a few onsite tweaks.
Resolume offers mapping and playout of content in the same platform, very few other software offer the same with the ease of access and user-friendly interface. The snapping features, keyboard short cuts and the ability the set virtual displays makes mapping on Arena a breeze.
There’s never a hardcore brief in play rather than an intense few weeks of conversation between us and the artists/clients we’re working with. Our inspirations personally come from larger than life cinematic universes — think Guillermo Del toro explaining Pacific Rim for the first time to a boardroom of studio execs and you know the kind of take we go in swinging with. Often we get so invested in bringing our content to life they become part of larger narratives we rarely get to talk about in a field like live visuals; but it definitely helps us tie it all together. We can give you 3 examples:
1) When Nucleya’s team approached us for his Bass Yatra Tour, we had around 600-700 sq ft of LED available and that many different versions of the LED layout to explore. We do a few days of pure illustration work along these layouts. Sometimes things just don't click and we break it up and start again. There’s a moment where the practicality of having this layout on stage meets this insane war demon sketch you’ve been rooting for in the start, and then we all sleep well at night.
We throw ideas back and forth to settle on a base LED design or projection surface. Once thats finalized, we start to sketch over it- not only does it help control our ideas, but it also assures we’re creating something that will no doubt function at every step.
We have a great team on board that makes doing all of this such a breeze. They work round the clock and deliver spot on content. Shout out to them!
Let's take a walk through your studio. What hardware do you use, what is your most prized possession and what would you like to change/ upgrade?
We're currently using the Octane II from PC Specialist.
Intel® CoreTMi7 Quad Core Processor i7-6700k
32Gb Ram
GeForce GTX 1070
1 TB Samsung SSD + 1 TB Seagate Hybrid.
For display outs they have 2 x mini DP, 1 x HDMI , 1 x USB C/Thunderbolt 3.
For our live feed needs we use the Magewell USB 3 to HDMI capture card.
We’re using multiple Windows servers for content generation with dual GTX 1080 GPU’s and the Intel i7 5960x CPU, 32 GB of RAM and 2TB SSD’s in each machine.
Our most prized possession would have to be the TMNT statues we have based on art by James Jean.[/i]
We’re firm believers in doing everything live. We make our content in layers with alpha so we can explore different versions easily and no two sets end up being alike. It keeps the set interesting for us and helps us play it out with an instrument just like any performing artist would.
It also helps us build upon the content on the road and add more layers to it as our heads come up with something. If we go a bit too far we use Resolume’s crazed set of essential effects to roll out of a situation and come back with another banger. True story.
Is there anything more you would like to talk about?
We're playing around with expanding the Wolves brand because a lot of people seem to connect with it. It's all non profit and DIY at this stage. Our first step was starting a merch line that we want to promote within an immediate community of artists before they make their way out to a larger group of people. We started handing them ourselves at shows backstage, outside venues, on long tours and of course to all the wonderful crew we've had a chance to work with at front of house. It's like marking our path through the trenches of the creative industry with a sort-of-cult symbol rather than it become a household brand.
We've also toying around with the tag 'New Wolf Order' to host a series of video content. At present, we're running with a VLog called transmissions.
It's really rough, surreal first person edits from what it's like to be at a Wolves show. Josh and I often argue that some of the videos lose the point entirely haha so hopefully we'll promote it better soon and start featuring more from a technical standpoint. If there's an audience for that, we're game. [/i]
Thanks guys for taking the time out to talk to us and giving us all these cool details.
Next up for Wolves: The Basspod Stage at EDC, Las Vegas.
Howl at ya’ll there.