[‘coo]-[‘coo] is experimental software for live visual performance written in AS3.
It allows me to combine old fashion frame-by-frame animations with videos and code generated visuals.
Paired with musician King Dice, I prepared a bunch of footage especially for this night.
All filmed/rendered/animated/coded from scratch.
I wrote it from scratch so the whole thing suits my style of mixing/performing. While most of the other software for Vjing
consist of two screens (one for controls another one for output), ['coo]['coo] works with just one, so all the controls are
part of the visuals. I set up 800x600 resolution on my laptop and clone my screen to projection screen.
The whole proces of mixing is a bit similar to what I've done here with Tracequencer. Difference is: the controls are tiny little
icons hidden in a bar on the left side and mouse cursor is hidden and replaced with grey dot, barely visible on a projection screen.
There are three different types of footage I can use.
1/ Animations (or Movie Clips in flash if you want) are timeline based animations
2/ Videos (or FLVs in flash) are normal videos, that can be encoded with alpha channel
3/ Code generated visuals (or classes in flash) are scripted sketches that can consist of pure code, or include other graphic assets
Once I click footage icon, it's added to stage, and opacity is set to 5%. Along with footage, set of controls for it is placed
randomly on stage. For all footage I can set opacity and blending mode.
For animations I can change the playing speed and Forward/Backward/Bounce mode of playing.
Code generated visuals can either live their own lifes, or can react to various mouse events (movement, click,..).
According to what I want to do with it I can assign controls to whatever I want. For example mouse sensitivity, velocity
of particles, etc
There is also a mouse wheel functionality that blacks out the whole screen, and a couple of keybord shortcuts to change
appearance of the mouse cursor.
From technical point of view, as AS3 is not hardware accelerated, when more than two videos are played with different
blendings + complicated vector graphic is rendered at the same time, the FPS is becoming very jerky.
In terms of the whole contept, it's not very universal "platform" for vjing as it needs a lot of preparation in advance
to achieve synergy with music
Because of it's limitations I will use/develop ['coo]-['coo] only for particular shows/performances. It's likely that after some
time of tweaking and developing it, I will release make it public as open-sourced freeware.