The Art Of Motion Mixing: BTS With V Energy Drink

Music and visual components have always been used together as a form of art, most famously in the music video. As technology expands so does the way we use it for expression. The people over at Frucor (V Energy Drinks) recently challenged Joel Little, lead singer of Goodnight Nurse, to create a single track that could be played (mixed) live using only a body’s movements in this unique musical and visual journey of a marketing campaign. 

The advertising campaign is the brainchild of  Colenso BBDO the New Zealand advertising agency that oversees V Energy drink. They wanted to be sure that it was obvious in the commercial that the music was being played live in front of the crowd in downtown Auckland, New Zealand. The collaboration includes musicians, motion graphic artists, dancers, videographers, experts with both visual and audio technology and even a marching band.

The three components (music, dance and video) were broken up into two teams, the music portion and visual portion. Joel Little produced the music which was then imported and broken down into Ableton Live in a custom tech controller made  by Fugitive then flowed to a motion graphics program overseen by Custom Logic and Assembly  (the latter also filmed the music video, commercial and live feed),  which used the Kinect camera to follow the musician’s or dancer’s movement seamlessly bringing it all together.

The project took several months of planning and experimentation. They had to overcome certain obstacles, including the lag caused by using the Kinect camera by adding a second Kinect with a second computer running different musical and video programs. The result of their hard work, creativity and perseverance is the amazing commercial and music video shown.

 

I happen to have a great love for electronic music and to see this commercial that is not only being recorded documentary style, but that is mixed live using the human body is incredible to me. I’m hoping that this musical method of motion mixing will become a trend for future DJs and producers to use at their live performances (Deadmau5, are you reading this?).  I highly recommend viewing the full music video below and reading the full articles written by one of the collaborators, Jeff Nusz . Now it makes me curious what V Energy Drink tastes like. If that isn’t brilliant marketing, I don’t know what is.

Full Articles:

V Motion Project – Part I: The Instrument

V Motion Project- Part II: The Visuals 

V Energy Drink- V Motion Project  (Offical site with a free download of the single, ‘Can’t Help Myself’ )

 

Full Music Video:

 

 

Behind the Scenes Videos: