John Waiveris
john@invisiblegold.com - (860) 285-0172

The Rolling Stones

My friends ran into the computer center with news of some project for Rolling Stone magazine. This was a big deal since I was a poor college student studying computer science and electronic art. Apparently the guy creating animation for the giant screen behind the band needed some psychedelic effects like ones he'd seen in a ski video. He searched me down as the creator and contracted me to create some more.
There was a catch though, the final video had to be delivered within two weeks and I had to find some new computer hardware to do the work. I got access to a lab of SGI Onyx's and quickly set down to get a copy of fractint (a fractal rendering program for the pc recently ported to UNIX) compiled for UNIX. This turned out to be no small accomplishment due to the newness of the code.
The next step was to create a library of fractal animations to dump to the VHS deck. then once he'd selected 11 fractals with selected color schemes I rendered them to be circular and rendered them to a BetaSP tape. They were later transfered to laserdisk and programmed to loop continuously to be used during the entire Voodoo Lounge tour.
The final product was delivered on time and within a month I was in the front of giant stadium watching Mick Jagger larger than life in front of my even larger fractals. I saw about 15 minutes of my work on stage. and I heard from the producers that there was even more play in Europe (where it didn't have to compete fractal to fractal with Lollapalooza and the Grateful Dead)

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I spent the summer between my second and third years of college programming in a lab of extremely powerful computers. One day a man called me up and said that he works for the Rolling Stones and wants to pay me to create some animations