Creating club visuals

When it comes to VJing, almost anything goes, from any digital source - including cameras, camcorders, mobiles and vintage clip downloads. It's a similar story with digitally generated content - rendered 3D animations, Flash animations, text, logos, Illustrator files and even random PDFs are all fair game in the creative world of club visuals. The goal is excitement and impact, not video realism or production gloss. So with all this variety, how do you decide how to put a performance together? We're going to break down the content into three main elements to make it simple.

The first is looping. A loop can be any section of video that looks good looped - which isn't much use as an academic definition, but makes sense when you see it in action. The creative point is that loops build up, or sometimes destroy, viewer expectation about what's going to happen next. Loops also establish a rhythm, and professionals will sync either their loops in time with the music, or add video scratch and stutter effects that play around the beat. (Watch any pop promo and you'll see that while there's often a rhythm, it's only rarely that cuts are made exactly on a beat.)

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.