For the first part of this Light Show interview series, I had the amazing opportunity to chat with Alex Simpson, a light show artist based in Boston, Massachusetts, who is part of the group Sons Lunaris with his bandmate Justin.

Alex has been performing for the past 5 years. He originally discovered light shows through a picture posted by the band The Yardbirds, and has been practicing ever since.

Since starting they’ve done countless gigs, been on tour, and even have a residency where they put on a light show every week. I spoke to Alex about his process and career so far, he was a delight to talk to and I can’t wait to see how his work progresses!

Read The Full Interview Below!

**Sophie**: So, how did you get into Light Shows?

**Alex**: So basically The Yardbirds photo, was like really the thing that kicked it off. I've been playing with my band for a while now and a few of the people that listened to us had told me like hey you should check this out since you play that like late 60s early 70s style [….] you should check out this thing called liquid light. And I was like, “I don't know what the hell that means.” And the art is such like a weird thing to describe in the first place, knowing it, and then people that have seen it in passing are trying to describe it to me. So I had the most vague description of what it was. Like they were using dishes and liquids in it, and they were projecting it. I was like, "what does that mean? And it really wasn't until that photo came up that it basically clicked.
I've been working in the concert industry for about eight years now. So I've seen all the stuff that's done in “modern times”. That old school projection style is no longer the go-to thing. So I was looking at that photo and with my background being like “I've never seen what this is how are they doing that?” and that was when I really started to deep dive into what is liquid light and is and they were doing that and getting into the tunnel from there.
**Sophie**: What did you use to learn about it?
**Alex**: So in some ways the pandemic was actually like a good thing for just me having a ton of time off. You know, in a couple of days I'm coming up on like doing this for five years.
**Sophie**: Happy anniversary!
**Alex**: Thank you! It's the light-aversary! Let's go!
That was smack in the middle of the pandemic at the time. So I call that the anniversary because that's the first time I have a photo of random dishes on an overhead trying it out for the first time. It took a few months of studying really before I could even grasp some of the concepts. But a lot of it was Google and YouTube and just trying to find things. I came across Steve's [Pavlovsky’s] stuff fairly early. And I came across videos of other things, but they weren't like How-To. They were just basically, here's a 45 minute background to watch while music happens elsewhere or some thing like that. And those videos I would look at them and have no idea what's going on, but I would watch the whole thing and try to imagine it. The first [one I did'], it was probably from one of Steve's videos, honestly, because he's one of the only ones that really has detailed YouTube instructional videos; And that's probably how I put it together, that the overhead projectors were used.

Then I just put like a question out to Facebook or something, asking if anyone I knew had an overhead projector they didn't need. There's some people that were teachers that just had some lying around. So the first overhead projector I had, now that I'm in it more is not really sufficient at all for what we do, but it was the first one I could get my hands on. So I had that, and I had like a Pyrex dish that wasn't even like any real glass. I just went into the cupboard in the kitchen to see what I could find.. The first actual one was this weird old overhead that didn't really have any adjustments on it. It was the Pyrex dish and water and probably something like cooking oil just thrown on top. So I could just watch it and try to understand the concepts. At first was projecting on the wall, just the giant pyrex logo because it's on the dish as well as and yeah, I'm just like tipping the dish around. It's simple things like that, that nowadays I have to like come back to and remember, especially if I'm having a show that I'm thinking myself is not the best show I've ever put on. I have to always come back to remembering that everyone watching it hasn't seen this at all. And then remembering how interested in the concept I was when it was literally just like random things I had in the house and cooking oil and water and just sloshing it around in the dish. At the time, that was like the coolest thing I'd ever seen. So even on a bad day, I have to remind myself that nobody else has seen this in my area in 50 years or 60 years at this point. So even my worst show is still good.

Sophie: So you’re part of two bands, do you do the light shows for both?

Alex: So with Sons of Lunaris, which is the band/light show, we have the Optikinetic projectors for those, and then we'll teach people how to do it on an overhead. So then depending on the situation, it's like, hey, if there's a friend available that wants to do it, we can get them set up with an overhead and our glass and everything and run it like that. Or if not, we just basically run with the Opties and just call that a day. There are some people that knock Opties, but I love them because it's, I mean, now, if I'm doing like a bigger show or something, I'll have like my frame in the middle, that's the active part of the show where I'm doing everything. Things are changing and they're dynamic to how the show is going. But if you really want that wideness and you wanna hit like the walls or the proscenium of a theater or stuff like that, having the Opties just pointed at those and just making it bigger than the stage itself is huge. Because a lot of times I just don't have the fire power really to bring 20 projectors and just point them everywhere and run that off of the same dynamic show. That would just be insanely expensive. I think I had some epiphany when I first got the Opti running and I had it on the wall. I was just sitting there staring at it. And was suddenly I'm just like, “I get lava lamps now.” They're just the cooler version of a lava lamp that you have to like sell your kidney to get one.

Sophie: So we’ve talked about the Optikinetics, and you said you’ll use them to fill gaps. How else do you adjust your setup for a venue if it’s super big or small?

Alex: So I think the largest room I've probably done this in is 3000 seats or something like that. When it gets to be probably thousand-seat theatres and up, stuff like that starts becoming more of the digital side of projection. The overhead projectors themselves kind of lose the ability to fight against, especially nowadays with the way that lights get used a lot, the beams and the color washes and stuff like that. Overheads really have a hard time fighting those in venues that size, especially when you're in front of house your position is going to be like 75 feet away from the stage. You can only do so much. The further away it gets the darker the images and then it's just fighting everything else that's right next to the wall. So for I'd say thousand C up is definitely strictly the digital setup and then anything under that. There's like, if you were to have like a venn diagram and you had the thousand and up, it would be like strictly digital. And then you had like the 500 and less, then you could run it fully analog if you want. And then there's this sweet little middle ground that I like, sometimes where you can still make overhead work and use the digital stuff. Because there are benefits to both really. There's a lot you can do in the digital side of things that you just physically can't do on overhead projectors and slide projectors and all that. For me, the biggest thing is just that pixel map that shows up when you're projecting in digital. 'Cause I see all the time the close up photos that there’s photographers running around and they're taking pictures of the show and then they have that close shot of the guitar player and you just see a pixel grid across their face. It's like ooh that doesn't look as good as it looks when you're further back.

**Sophie**: So how does your digital setup work?

**Alex**: So the main thing is I have this road case that I built out. I have to give a shout out to Shane from the Dregs Light Show. He did like a road case kind of box thing, and I just carried that idea into fitting what I needed to do with my stuff. Shout out to Shane. He's great. He started doing the light show stuff a little bit after we started doing it. And then once we found him, we were like, "Let us teach you all that we know, and go." He's just been doing great ever since. And we're like the only two in the area that actually do what we're doing. So big support. But anyway, he was the one that I initially saw doing like a road case kind of setup. And I was like, that's a great idea. I need that for myself and basically I just built out what I needed I have a couple drawers on the bottom where I store all the cables and cameras and stuff like that. I have the video mixer Velcroed and mounted to the top where I can use it. There's a spot for my laptop and that connects with the MIDI controller. There's a camera rig that's set up inside the box where I mount cameras and various other objects and stuff to the inside of the box. And then I’ll sometimes set up camera off to the side and do some live stuff as well.

**Sophie**: Is that resolume?

**Alex:** Yep that's Resolume. Resolume is pretty much the standard that I see in all video applications on a concert scale for even the simplest of things. Fully recommend Resolume wholeheartedly from a liquid light standpoint, but also from a concert video and audio perspective. There's so much Resilume can do that I'm not even touching. You can get into video mapping or syncing up BPMs off of tracks that the artist is playing to and have that sync up perfectly with the lighting rig and the videos that are happening. So it's all really cued up and streamlined. I just do the bare minimum where I'm like “video and go.” And the MIDI controller, there's a little bit you can see of my preview monitor in there, which is mounted in the box. That top left square, you can see I have a camera on the right side of the box, which is pointed at the stage. And that's how if you see on the projection in the center, there's the guy playing guitar. So I'm doing an IMAG with that. Just anytime there's a solo or something I'll put the vocalist that's singing at the moment or the guitar player or keyboard player, I'll put them up there. There are a few different ways that I do that, I also get a lot of my video feedback with that, where you just have the tunnel where it just extends into infinity. So I love that because it just even a little bit of the musician up on the wall just gives that like big concert feel. This room is like a probably like 300 cap room or something like that, but everyone that shows up gets like the full, large scale concert experience.

And below that on that monitor is just like a bunch of little lines going on. And that's a moire, a pattern that I have in the box on a turntable with a camera pointed at it. So that'll rotate. I'll put a few different things in there. I can do the one pattern on the turntable and it spins, it's the Color Dancer turntable from Steve. So it's all the different color options and it has the light chases in the turntable as well. I have one clamp where I can attach a second pattern on top of it. So that just holds one pattern and spins the other underneath it to create patterns. And sometimes there's another clamp, I'll put a flashlight in there. There's another thing I'll do, I'll mount a flashlight in a clamp, and I'll put a rainbow sparkly reflective sheet on the turntable, and then I'll put a glass candy dish on top of that, and then shine the flashlight at that. Then the camera will pick that up and then I run with that however I run with it, and that creates a really beautiful effect, I use it a lot, it’s just really pretty.

Sophie: So how many projectors are you using for that one setup?

Alex: So in the center is the digital. That's running everything outputting from Resilume. So my set up goes: (assuming I'm doing everything) I'll have the turntable setup inside with the camera, and that's doing a live element of some sort. There's either a Moire pattern or there's a the glass candy dish effect stuff like that sometimes i'll just stick my hand in and just key out my hand with a moire pattern and it just turns that into one moire shape and one color. But I'll have that camera in there. Then the second camera going off to the side. And there's a few different techniques I'll do over there. The basic one would just be I have another turntable and I'm doing live liquids on top of. I have a small monitor and I'll have an output from my video feed looping to that and then the camera that is looking at it is also sending the feed to it underneath and I'll just do a video feedback cycle and I can take anything out of Resolume, and put it on there and then depending on how I have it I could take things from Resolume and turn it into feedback loops. One thing I've done often is I take the flashlight again- and it's an LED flashlight that circles through white and RGB. So I'll have it on the blue setting and then I'll have these neon fluorescent strings and put those on top of the monitor; And then I'll shine the flashlight at it and I'll just pull the string across the monitor and the light of it will then create feedback loops. Then I have the camera off to the side that's filming the people.

I have like one extra in this, in the way I've been running things right now. Where one thing I'll do is there's this app called, It's just called Fluid. It's an iOS app. I've used my phone so far for this, but I worry because it's a very small screen. I'll take the output from this and it’ll go to that fourth output on the video mixer. And it just allows you to just touch the screen and it just works as if it's fluid going. There's all these settings that you can get into on the side of different parameters and all that, save presets, whatever you want. But I'll take an output from this into the video mixer. And then sometimes I'll just have this off to the side on a stand and during the show I'll just project that. And that's a lot of fun. That's like a digital version of like the finger plate which I was doing just using vegetable glycerin in a petri dish and then dyed it with black ink. And then on an overhead projector, [I would move my hands across it] it, and that would just create streaks of white. Then they would slowly collapse in on themselves and go away again. And then you throw that through like a color wheel or warp wheel, whatever you do You’re just kind of throwing black ink everywhere, the whole time you're doing like spiral shapes or whatever. But that's kind of like a less messy, digital form of that, where you're just touching the screen and it's following the tracking of your fingers, and then you're still projecting that.

So yeah, I would do two cameras on live elements. I would do the app and I would have the camera and then that would come out. I use the V1 HD by Roland. That's the video mixer. And then I take that with a capture card into Resolume. And then from there, I run all the liquids that I have prerecorded or I have a bunch of stuff that Steve was, I think he still is selling a bunch of clips that he uses. I got a bunch of clips from Joshua White as well. He sent us, for Christmas he sent me, a USB with a bunch of recorded stuff from 1969 and again, from 2012. And I got to use those in the shows as well. I've made them into clips on Resolume. So I have stuff I recorded. We either will record the plate, or we'll have like a light table and do it on top of a light table, record that, or we'll set up a screen and then we'll project stuff onto the screen and then record that. So if there's a combination of plates that we like the look of together, we'll record it like that. Or if we want individual separate things, we'll record the plate itself, turn those into clips, then you project in Resolume and go.

But to answer the question, four projectors. There’s the digital rig there, and then the left and right walls in that picture are the Opties,

Sophie: That’s a lot more throw than I’ve seen from the Opties.

Alex: Yeah, These ones are up above where the setup is in the choir loft, this venue is an old church. My only problem with this venue or the chandeliers because you just project straight on to a chandelier and then you just have a projection shadow on the wall, but no one seems to care except me.

Sophie: No one's going to get mad at you about that.

Alex: We've actually gotten a message to the page of somebody that was at the show, and it was just, like, a zoomed-in photo of the chandelier because that's what they decided to watch all night. Just the light moving on the chandelier and I'm like... I think it's a win anytime we're doing a show and somebody's just standing there filming the wall when an artist is like right there. It's like, “hey, there's a whole concert here but this wall [is good]”

Sophie: So where's that [digital] projector mounted to?

Alex: That one used to be up in the choir loft and we just put it on a bunch of tables to clear the wall. But this is the venue that has becomea residency place for us. So they've actually gone in and built a shelf in the building to keep the projector on. And we've been doing that particular room every Tuesday for a while, since September. We'll get minimum, like 75 people showing up on a Tuesday. And all things considered, this is a middle of nowhere kind of place too. Not like middle of nowhere, but it's not Boston. It's not the big city or anything. People have told me that they will drive one hour each way on a Tuesday, just to come see the show. I mean, just having the residency is great because, while it's slowed down a bit, but it used to be like I would be walking in every week and I would plan out, all right, what's a new technique I'm going to do? What's a new thing I get to try out because I get to do this every single week? Just having somewhere to do that really pushes you to learn because you have every single week you're going in. You're like, "All right, I can't do exactly what I did last time. What am I going to do now?" Yeah, I like it. A little bit because I'm starting to run out of ideas. I think really the next thing that I can do that would be new would just be filming more liquids you know, basically having a studio day and just making clips again and stuff like that. Because beyond that it's either do that or buy more stuff. And buying stuff gets expensive.

But yeah, it's just great to have a residency and just being able to work in the same room and just knowing that to me, there's very little pressure involved with it because again, everyone that's coming to see it has never seen anything like it. The scale has gotten so big that it's just, me on a bad day is still great actually. I actually have footage of me on a bad day.

**Sophie:** I had a question written about this too, perfect. I hope it's not you crying or anything. I hope you're okay.

**Alex:**:   No, no, just... I forgot the key to unlock the stuff with my cameras and my gear. so I showed up and I was like, “well, I can't go home because the show's gonna start.” So it was just, oh, what do we do?
**Sophie**: See that still looks good! What did you do to make all that work?
**Alex**: Let’s see, what cameras did I not have? I didn't have the IMAG camera that day. So nobody was going up on the wall. I didn't have my MIDI controller, so in Resolume I had to click and drag everything with the mousepad, which was very slow and annoying for me, but it's one of those things that the audience doesn't get to see that part. I just get to be annoyed with myself all night, And I think I had like one turntable, I had access to and one camera just out of sheer luck. Because Justin the my guitar player and the other guy that does this, there was a date I couldn't the show so he went and did a show himself and he brought whatever basic stuff he needed and one of them was a camera and a turntable. So one camera was not locked in. I basically just had my laptop. I mean, actually, it was super lucky that he did that because otherwise I would have locked the long HDMI that goes from the output of the box to the projector. It was still out because he did that gig. Otherwise, I would have had... I would have been able to make it work, but it would have been a three foot HDMI cable and me leaning over the balcony on top of the projector. You know, I would still make something work, but man, would it be bad.
**Sophie:**   So that was your most disastrous gig ever.
**Alex**: Yep. Yeah. I'd say that, that so far is the most disastrous gig ever. And now I keep spare keys everywhere.
**Sophie**:   You learned you learned the hard way.
**Alex**:  You know, just got to learn somehow.

**Sophie** : So if that's your most disastrous gig ever, what’s the best gig you've ever done? Or your favourite?

**Alex**: I don't know. I'm inclined to say the cheesiest thing and say the next one. But I only feel inclined to say that because every single gig I've done has just been growing on top of what I did on the last one. I kind of ended up sending you the photos basically in chronological order, just because that's how I was going through my phone. But in all of that, there's, visually to me, a clear progression of, "All right, things are getting figured out, they're getting better.” So I don't know. I think whatever the next one is, is the best one. It's just going to be a culmination of everything I've done.
There are some things that I enjoyed doing more. Like that small tour, which was with the band Neighbor. And just going on tour is always fun. I've done that a couple times, but that was the first time that I went on tour as a projection artist. Sometimes when you get into very large rooms like that, you're basically just plugging into a video wall, which can happen. But I still like front projection over everything. Again, there are pros and cons to literally everything. But I'm still a front projection fan. I like being able to turn off the front light too, and just get lost in the sauce.

Yeah, the tour was pretty cool. We also did one gig, which was, we recorded a bunch of material for the Boston Children's Museum. They had a whole exhibit, which was, I think, the short of it is basically psychedelic dinosaurs in space. They used our projections on like a version of the moon. So they just had that going for the whole exhibit. And then they also had all the fun other things for the kiddos to do.

Sophie: “Psychedelic Dinosaurs in Space” is your next band name.

Alex: Hell yeah. I'm going to pitch it right now that we're changing it.

Sophie: Write that down.

Alex: Put it down! Write it down! So that was really cool. There was one gig that I did for, the only reason you can't talk about it is because it's like a big client, and if they use it or not, depending on how they're feeling, but as of right now they they haven't done anything. But I've done some stuff with like * band name redacted * , just basically recorded files for them of the liquids based on the color scheme of the tour that they're doing, as well as a few where they can then color match stuff or underlay a certain color and then have a squish plate and put the color of the whatever they're doing in instead of the white. You just key out the white and then it just shows what's underneath it and then you can color match for whatever color scheme you need to do. But that was great.

Alex Simpson - Sons Lunaris

For the first part of this Light Show interview series, I had the amazing opportunity to chat with Alex Simpson, a light show artist based in Boston, Massachusetts, who is part of the group Sons Lunaris with his bandmate Justin.

Alex has been performing for the past 5 years. He originally discovered light shows through a picture posted by the band The Yardbirds, and has been practicing ever since.

Since starting they’ve done countless gigs, been on tour, and even have a residency where they put on a light show every week. I spoke to Alex about his process and career so far, he was a delight to talk to and I can’t wait to see how his work progresses!

Read The Full Interview Below!

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