Dive deep into these explosions of sound, light, and shape from Munich-based Perplex On, as the musical act pairs compact instruments with visuals made in Lottie and Imaginando’s VS – Visual Synthesizer. Dazzle at these eye-popping, brain-tickling audiovisual explorations.
Warning: contains flashing lights and rapidly changing patterns.
As perfectly structured as these are, they also exude spontaneity; Perplex On made these for Jamuary. (And they make a lot of us, and a lot of media artists for that matter, look bad in the process! It’s on!)
What’s Lottie? Basically, think of a lightweight, portable animation format stored in JSON. (Here’s a good primer.) That’s generally used for the Web — a far cry from the slow-loading, proprietary Flash and its locked-in creation chain. But it works well here, too. Perplex On tells CDM that these files are then imported to VS – Visual Synthesizer as video for easy triggering. Various tools can make Lottie files, but Perplex On used online animator Jitter — no, not the one in Cycling ’74 Max — different Jitter! (Actually, at the risk of adding to the confusion, Lottie support in Jitter would be terrific!)
Create Lottie animations with Jitter
Imaginando: VS – Visual Synthesizer
From there, it’s MIDI trigger to video clip — simple, but effective! (There’s some other video triggering, etc., with VS, too, not only Lottie-generated, I think!)
VS is well worth a look, too, for your own jams. It’s got a rich selection of customizable patches, plus the ability to load your own content and shaders (in various formats), plus it happily runs on both macOS and iOS.
Tools aside — there are many ways to do this technically — I just love the design that went into music and visuals alike. Complete respect. Let’s make every month Jamuary! Enjoy!
MusiKraken is a jem, too — a MIDI and OSC controller toolkit for both Android and iOS.