Motion graphics / Web designer by day, VJ by night? Flash artist, looking for some way to put those coding skills into something that you can actually use in a live set? Or just trying to find a way to escape all those endlessly-looping videos to do something more connected with the music? The possibilities of adding interactive Flash to your set are really limitless. (It’s a cliche, but in this case, it’s absolutely true.) GrandVJ, the new-generation visual app for Windows and Mac from VJ software vets arKaos, has added full-blown ActionScript support that really works, meaning you can make some serious interactive animations. Clarification: GrandVJ supports Flash up to ActionScript 3.0, but ActionScript 2.0 timeline animation is recommended. Well worth reading is VJ Ecin’s discussion of the advantages of Flash VJing.
Ben Guerette aka VJ Ecin (Triggermotion.com) kicks of a series of tutorials on the topic with an excellent getting started video. It’ll work with GrandVJ as well as NuVJ and the higher-end media server MediaMaster, though GrandVJ would definitely be my first choice. Ben writes on the arKaos blog:
In this tutorial I’ll explain how to tap into the EQ data to create some simple audio-reactive animations. We’ll be using some basic ActionScript 2.0 for the inexperienced Flash programmer. I won’t go into much detail on the how the code works but it should be enough of an introduction to allow some experimentation in creating new content for your VJ arsenal.
It’s delicious stuff, but it can’t help but amplify my longing for a tool that can do this with Processing sketches. That’s not to compare Processing to Flash: they’re actually quite different tools, despite some overlapping capabilities and syntax. But because of that difference, there are things I’m doing in Processing I’d love to be able to drop into a set. Developers, I’m curious if you have any smart ideas (realizing that getting render pipelines to coexist is a non-trivial problem).