Artist Feature: Gabriel Freed

Gabriel Freed is a Film-maker, multi-medium artist, and owner of the production company “Fuzzy Pictures”. Gabriel was always intrigued by the blend of film making and video art as a young film maker, one of his biggest influences “Sans Soleil” was the first time he encountered the term “Video Synthesizer" and became inspired by its fever-dreamy melding of story, music and visuals. After moving into professional work, he began to view synthesis as a needed counterpoint to the precise, sleek, usually product focused projects he was used to. Having already had experience with audio eurorack systems, he started covid developing a rig based around LZX's Cadet and Castle eurorack modules. Presently the system has expanded to include Syntonie, Revere Landfill, NLC and Visible Signals modules, and a r_e_c_u_r video sampler, and has remained entirely DIY.

While working on an audio-visual patch, he likes to work with both simultaneously, letting them influence each other naturally without strong expectations for a vision or direction. Once the patch reaches an intriguing direction, that's when he begins to search for elements and parameters to give the piece some semblance of structure. And oftentimes when he becomes particularly inspired, he will record himself performing it and add a layer of animation or illustration. When it comes to more intentional pieces like for collabs or intended themes, that's when the process takes a more fine-tuned approach. In this case, he would record each element individually to later combine with after effects work or hand drawn elements like animation. “Often I will then rescan the final result off of a small CRT monitor. I especially like the aesthetic that the limited numbers of lines on these smaller monitors provide when filmed with modern HD cameras”.

Currently, Gabriel is working on another audio-visual piece with a traditionally animated component called “Terminal Interchange”, as well as doing some experimenting with techniques to create rear-project video synthesized backgrounds behind miniature set builds to do a form of analog video matte painting. Analog video tech has begun to peak its way into many aspects of Gabriel's work “A number of Directors and DPs I work with are either capturing to analog formats or are re-scanning from CRT monitors and incorporating analog glitch effects into their processes”.

Gabriel looks forward to expanding his system with the hopes of making it more suitable for live audio visualizations and potential collaborations with musicians and DJ’s. “I also, after a lengthy break, am hoping to soon re-start ‘fuzzy’s video synthesizer notebook’ where I document various patches I come across that feel worth documenting”. And finally, hopes to move forward with his plans of designing a few modules of his own.