Dan Talson, aka Dubassy, started out as VJ, a filmmaker who projects and edits video live at music festivals, clubs and events. His work has taken him all over the world. Like many video jockeys, Talson finds his imagery through stock libraries and in the public domain, but he also produces much of his own content.

"At live music events, the crowd can often number in the thousands, so when I'm creating content, my primary goal is that the visuals look good on the screen," he says. "If the content also sells, then it's a bonus."

What constitutes a good visual? Talson elaborates: "When you're playing in a club, you're adding an extra element to the atmosphere. It's about sharing interesting and unique images with the crowd, things they might not see every day."

He started shooting with the Canon EOS 40D and recently added the Canon EOS 5D MKII for HD video. Talson's preferred style is stop-motion animation. His subject matter relates closely to his passions: music and clubbing, urban landscapes, and retro objects like record players, televisions, headphones and audio cassettes. "I love manipulating the speed of the city and giving life to inanimate objects," he says. The clips can be as simple as an elderly woman DJjing on a pair of turntables or as complex as a panning time-lapse shot of the Thames.

In the beginning, Talson created standard-def content in the 4:3 aspect ratio, but he soon began shooting high-definition, super-wide content, which, he maintains, "is much more pleasing to the eye." For his widescreen stop-motion panoramas, Talson recently began using a motorized panoramic head (the MK PanoMachine) that syncs with a camera's internal intervalometer to create flawlessly smooth panning time-lapse clips.

Some of his most interesting clips involve film leader and television signals. He'll sometimes use these as transitions and filler in his live shows. Talson notes, "The film leader filler was quite tricky to do, and quite time-consuming. I bought the old leader off of eBay, photographed it close up with a macro lens and sequenced it like it was running through a projector."

Editing is performed primarily in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects on an Apple Mac Pro. "I often create a few variations of each clip, as this helps during live performances to switch between two similar clips," he writes in a recent article at Shutterstock.com.

These days Talson prefers to think of himself as a filmmaker who also VJs. He's more than earned that distinction after eight years of providing footage to libraries such as Getty Images and Shutterstock. In that time he's produced more than 2,000 clips. "VJing is only part of what I do. My job is all about experimenting with different kinds of visuals," he says. "My work is slightly left field and stands out from what other people are doing because I'm always trying something that's completely unique."