To see a preview of the show that Gallant has compiled: https://vimeo.com/130605068
Date: Thursday, June 18th, 2015 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com
About Denise Gallant:
Denise Gallant graduated from UCLA, doing early experiments in
animation, and was inspired by the very early electronic films of John Whitney
Sr., Stephen Beck and the animations of John and Faith Hubley. After graduating
from UCLA, she met up with her long time friend, Rob Schafer, who at a very
early age, was involved in his father’s company, Schafer Electronics, working
with radio electronics.
During the summer of 1977, Denise went to NBC, where she edited news,
and was most likely the first woman video editor in LA.
In 1980, Gallant formed “Synopsis
Video”, where she immediately started doing early music videos for
musicians in the emerging 'New Wave', Punk, and 'New Age' scenes, and later
with groups with wide spectrums of music such as Devo, Tangerine Dream
(from Germany) and Supertramp (with
Renee Daalder from Holland), and music producer Kim Fowley. Her effects were also 'bought' by Grateful Dead for
their live shows. Denise performed live at many clubs in LA, and was known as
the first VJ at the time – in clubs such as the Country Club in Reseda and Club
Lingerie (Visions) on Sunset Blvd.
Simultaneously, Denise worked closely with the New Age musicians such as
Steve Roach and Richard Burmer, along with visual laser artist, Brian Samuels, capturing these with a
black and white video camera, which was then colorized and processed through
the colorizer. Several years of this work (1980-84) were compiled into the 16
song video project, “Watercolors”, the first New Age Video on the Tower Records
label, which also won a Billboard Music Video Award in 1986.
In 1984 Denise went to work for Image West, the first video special
effects company in LA, where they created high end commercials, television
station promos and logo designs, including work with the first video 3D system
in LA.
Denise Gallant left LA in 1986, and married Kevin Monahan, who worked
with E-MU Music Sytems for 20 years, creating the first sound library for a
music keyboard instrument – the Emulator. Denise worked as a Product Manager
and Specialist at such companies as Chyron, CMX, Xaos Tools, Electo-GIG
(Holland), and Distreet Logic-Autodesk (Montreal), including several high-end
editing, compositing effects and 3D projects on the Silicon Graphics platforms.
Kevin and Denise are presently busy with video production and editing,
most for notably the yearly TEC Awards show at the NAMM convention in LA.
Denise continues to use the hundreds of hours of video effects for her more
avant garde productions – video backdrops for dancers, musicians (including the
TEC awards) and video sculptures of Burning Man.
About The Synopsis Video
Synthesizer:
The video synth was originally designed and conceived at UCSC, through
the Electronic Music Department, under Gordon Mumma.
The first video experiments included an early Moog Synthesizer, plugged
into a TV, along with video feedback. Rob Schafer and Denise performed live
shows with musicians creating visuals that interacted with electronic music.
The core concept of the Synopsis Video synth was to be completely
interactive with music, which was unique among early video synthesizers. It was
also one of the first video synth to make use of the new ‘integrated circuit’
technology, which made the synthesizers much more stable, reliable and smaller,
so that they could easily be built into small boxes and carried to live music
shows.
By 1979, they started building these designs on permanent circuit
boards, inside of an Aries Synth cabinet. The first modules included a
colorizer, which was unique, as the controls were Luminance, Saturation
and Hue, (LSH) rather then RGB. This made the synth much easier to
control in a 'live' concert situation. The colorizer also was designed with 720
degrees of color, rather then 360 degrees, which allowed the synthesizer to
create beautiful rainbow hues.
Rob also designed several high frequency oscillators to create both
horizontal and very fine vertical patterns in video, with triangle, square, and
circle waveforms. The last major component of the core box was a Gentle
Electric Pitch Follower, created by Carl Fravel. Through Kevin Monahan's
connections with Carl, Denise built several of the modules to obtain the
module, also built into the video synth.
The Pitch Follower allowed both pitch and amplitude of the music to
interact with Hue, Saturation of Luminance, as well as all of the oscillator
patterns.
Rob went on to design an 8 level video keyer, which became the primary
control module. This 8 level keyer has 12 inputs and 6 knobs per key,
controlling video, oscillator or/and music inputs into LSU, as well as inverted
signals. The final major piece of the synth was a very unique four level fader
which elegantly blended video as a hard key all the way through to a fade, and
all variations in-between. Kevin Monahan (of EMU electronic music systems) was
also influential, helping with a live sequencer design.
The first uses of the synth were at live clubs in San Francisco
(1978-79), as the synth was being built – primarily in clubs like Savoy Tivoli,
The Stone, and The City on Broadway. Denise and Rob would bring the synth and
set it up with video monitors on the stage.
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.