For the past couple of Thursday nights I have been playing live visuals at a night called ‘Plug & Play’ at a bar called Kent St (located confusingly on Smith St in Collingwood). The night is run by two fine gentlemen named Jean Poole and Future Eater and is a nice relaxed place where each week people come to plug in their audio/video/laptop/playstation/casio devices and play. The venue also has a good broadband connection which allows for international djs/vjs to perform remotely and for me to test my latest vidgets. Version 3 is just about ready for posting here and combines the layering/mixing of clips of the first version with the photo searching and xml reading of the Flickr Viewer.
Here is a screenshot of the new drag and drop interface. The grid of images is loaded dynamically based on an xml file which means I can set the vidget up to play different content without rebuilding the entire project in LiveStage Pro. Almost everything is modular now. The ten thumbnails on the right are the results of a Flickr search for the tag ‘blue’. Each of these thumbnails is draggable to the three clip holders at the top of the screen (red, green, and blue). These refer to the three different layers of video which are output to a screen or projector. Up to three video clips or still images may be mixed/layered together.
After playing with this prototype version at Kent St last week I’m definitely going add some more space for thumbnails as I ran out of content after a while. I am also going to explore some more of the graphics modes for combining the images.
Oh yeah, I’m playing there again this week so if you’re in Melbourne come down. Its free and starts at about 8pm @ Kent St, 201 Smith St Collingwood.
