Ian Macklin Interview

I recently interviewed Ian Macklin of Goodies Corp when he came into Stockport College to lecture the second year students for one day and give a talk, I managed to grab half an hour with to talk about him and his work with concert visuals, as I was creating a concert visual piece for my self directed project. The Q&A is below:

Ian Macklin Interview

"Q. How did you get involved with concert visuals?

A. Free lancing, got passed on to the job by a friend from UVA.

Q. Enjoy it? If so what did you like?

A. Yeah, I love music!

Q. How do you find the rhythm and mould it visually?

A. Everyone interprets beats and rhythms differently, best advice is to lock in on a beat.

Q. What kinds of briefs are you set for a particular song?

A. With the Kylie Minogue brief it was very open and I was given references to arches, and was expected to use them.

Q. How do you approach or handle the design process?

A. Experiments to see what works. (An example was triangles with edges or triangles without edges)

Q. What sizes do you have to work at to get the visuals on these massive screens? What’s the process?

A. Clients will specify and provide templates to be used in after effects and other software. Tech guys sort out how the images get on the screen.

The Kylie project was HD 1080

Q. Rendering out final comps, anything to be done special in the term of settings?

A. Animation codec full resolution. Then export in QuickTime for a smaller file size.

Q. Any addition advice you could give to me?

A. Try own experiments keep experimenting and try different mediums."