This is the story of Game Form. A music video we produced in the 1990s for Tresor recording artist Joey Beltram. Yes, the same man responsible for Energy Flash and many other epic electronic tunes.
Sometime in the mid-90s as we were working our weekly gig at the Trocadaro for an event called Color Box we were approached by Joey Beltram. From what I recall this was right after he finished his set. Back in those days the DJ booth was on the balcony to the right of the stage and the DJs always had clear view of the stage itself, where our visuals were displayed on a huge screen (beamed across the dance floor). Joey loved our visuals and asked if we’d be interested in making a music video for one of his upcoming tracks. We were so blown away by the offer that we absolutely agreed to do it. Later in the week we received a fax from Tresor Berlin asking for a quote which we provided. Money was transferred and we started to work on the video! We had few discussions with Joey about his vision and what he would like to see in the video. He said he wanted to see parts of Brooklyn in the video such as the Brooklyn Bridge and other locations in the area. Soon afterwards we travelled to Brooklyn to get some footage. After hearing Game Form we started to brainstorm how to incorporate shots of Brooklyn into the video. The first copy we delivered to Tresor was rejected, well not truly rejected, rather it was criticized for having too many shots of… Brooklyn! The label said they liked our computer visuals and the stop motion of various game pieces and asked us to incorporate more of it, essentially nixing the Brooklyn parts altogether. We obliged. What you see today on YouTube was the final version, without Brooklyn in it.
From a creative perspective it is sometimes hard to decide whose vision should be followed. This was our first time doing an actual music video and we felt that we needed to get the artists’ vision captured and displayed in some form. Yet, the people who paid for the work did not necessarily agree with that direction. And we respect their decision. In hindsight, we (Melon Visuals) should’ve probably said “you liked our club visuals, let us create something special for you” and then take full creative control. Nevertheless the experience was true awesome from start to finish and we stand behind our concept 100%
Now, onto the technical geeky stuff. We recorded all the stop motion footage in my bedroom (on the floor!) using a Sony 3 CCD camera which had stop motion capabilities. From what I recall it was the Sony CCD-VX3, a pretty awesome piece of gear back then. It took days to capture all the footage. Next, we needed some fractal animations. These were created by my brother using ChaosPro. We actually worked with the developer in Germany to implement some of the 3D fractal routines, see his thank you note where Jake and Mac Melon are mentioned -that is us! The rendering and set up usually took few days in the preparation for final assembly into an animation. We rendered frames out of ChaosPro and Lightwave 3d from various Amiga’s ranging from A1200 with a 68060 Blizzard Board to an A3000 with a 68040 Warp Engine. Initially none of the machines were networked but eventually we’ve set up Parnet from my bedroom to my brothers bedroom via 25 foot parallel cable that probably cost $300 back then! Setting up a network allowed to have a mini rendering farm. The amount of horsepower and TIME needed to render these complex fractal animations was tremendous. It literally took days and sometimes weeks of rendering.
Besides ChaosPro we also used ImageFX to batch process video frames we digitized. Frame capture was done using VLAB digitizer – that is what video capture devices were called back then, today’s equivalent would be an Elgato HD60 or Blackmagic’s Decklink. VLAB was also a pretty awesome and innovative piece of gear back then. It digitized video frames in 24 bit in real time. Real time actually did not mean one pass would capture the entire video. We had to take multiple passes in order to capture an entire 10 second clip for example. This had to be done many times to bring it all the footage we recorded. Sometimes that took hours to accomplish as we were dealing with source video on a hi8 analog/magnetic tape where the quality wasn’t the best. Once the frames were all assembled we used Macrosystems MovieShop on the Amiga to edit the video. This was done using an early version of MovieShop (pre-Draco I believe) and stability was a major issue for us. Once the video was edited and a desired clip saved we used it in Elan Performer 2.0 to trigger it.
This brings us to the actual video. Parts of it were recorded in real-time using clips triggered via Elan Performer from two Amigas genlocked together via SuperGen and overlayed on top of each other. This included video clips digitized using VLAB and fractal animations. Elan Performer preloads ANIM files (Amiga’s animation file format) into RAM where they can be triggered by pressing a key and played in real-time. Additionally each clip, as it was playing, could have its playback controlled via mouse movements. These mouse movements could be equated to a DJ scratching a record. You can see this in the video when the domino pieces are shown, the game cards and Rubik’s cube. Those clips were recorded in real time while we moved the mouse to the beat of the music. All footage was played back via DCTV to provide the highest quality/bit rate and then recorded to hi8 tape then digitized again and finally edited in MovieShop for final output to Betacam. Today the videos looks pretty bad quality wise because back then we did not have HDTV resolution, there was no pure digital HDMI signal you could feed into a NLE.
It is worth mentioning that at the time we made the video we did not have money for a Video Toaster and it was before Newtek’s Video Toaster Flyer was released. Some of the effects we accomplished by batch processing frames in ImageFX looked similar to what could’ve been achieved with the Toaster, yet one was not utilized.
Where was the video shown? Well, in Europe for the most part. From the YouTube copies I can see it was shown on MTV (in various countries) and VIVA. I am not aware of it being shown on MTV U.S.
What happened next? We were hired to do one more music video. This time for Steve Stoll’s Silver Spiral which we were unable to find anywhere on YouTube. It may have been shown in Europe as well but we have no way of confirming that. We do have a copy of it on hi8 tape along with tons of old 1990s rave footage and visuals we plan on digitizing and one day posting it on this site. Stay tuned!