*spark screenrunner runs screens. It allows the stage manager to title who is on stage, it allows creative to adjust the mix of the brand video, it allows communications to feed twitter and other messaging through that video. Most of all, it does all it does within a world of well designed motion graphics unique to the brand or event.

For an Accenture annual event, it visualised the activity of 900 consultant’s conversation in realtime, alongside the progress of each of them taking a portrait of each other and the graphic output of a data journalist and illustrator. Rather than brand video, the screen animated around a ‘tabletop set’ of the venue, with conversation turns appearing in speech bubbles above the yurts they were happening in, conversation outcomes writing themselves on post-its, polaroid snaps piling up and illustrations taped down around. It was the centre point of ‘The Brain’, and…

The Brain made #festivalofideas.
– Eithne Harley, Accenture Ireland

For a MADE-BY annual event, it transformed their three minute brand video into the whole day’s output, remixing the elements of that video with a range of media prepared for the event alongside tweets and photos coming live from the floor. MADE-BY’s staff were in control, setting ‘now and next’ titles and creating a composition of media appropriate for that moment of the event.

I thought the application was very user-friendly and generally just very impressive!
– Johanna Walker, MADE-BY London

*spark screenrunner is two things. An application with features built-up over the demands of differing events, and an animation template created specially for each event. The application feeds the animation template with tweets, titles and all sorts of media, and its interface presents a sane way of wrangling that media and controlling the animated output.

You can read more about its development and use through the project’s diary posts.

To use *spark screenrunner, get in touch.

project | 2012 | downloads: spark-screenrunner-appandeventdocs.png · spark-screenrunner_v20_mikefiggis.jpg · spark-screenrunner_v30_madebyhandedover.jpg · spark-screenrunner_v30_madebyoutput.png · spark-screenrunner_v30_photos.png · spark-screenrunner_v30_texts.png · spark-screenrunner_v30_titles.png · spark-screenrunner_v30_videos.png · spark-screenrunner_v32_livecoding.png · spark-screenrunner_v32_photoboothoutput.png

bristech has had some really nice brand identity work done, making it a pleasure to transform the static document into a dynamic animation template. and with that, screenrunner ran the social area screen at their annual conference.

fun day, and a nice way to say thanks to the organisers for some enthusiastic networking they did for me.

diary | 07 nov 2019 | tagged: titler

can you projection map tweets?

of course, i reply to friends at observatory. and a bespoke animation template is made for screenrunner, a license is minted, and soon enough a french team is projecting love letters onto a church in lille. went down well, too: “your creation has been really well appreciated. lots of people, lots of tweet, lots of lovely messages and déclarations. was great to see so much love.”

there’s some tweaks observatory and i would have made if we’d been there in person, but so it goes. overall, observatory made a lovely video piece.

Vous voulez jouer ?
Tweeter avec le #pixelslettredamour . Vos tweets s'affichent sur un mur, en face de moi !
Si je vous trouve, je vous affiche en TL ;)
Go ! pic.twitter.com/RGKgWswI4J

— Mme Pingouin (@madamepingouin) March 29, 2019

photo via video mapping festival

diary | 29 mar 2019 | tagged: titler

boom! excellent live acts and djs, amazing 360° visuals from blinkin lab, florence to and jack featherstone, packed with punters from 9pm to sunrise every day.

there’s a b&w video here: blog.bowers-wilkins.com

diary | 31 may 2014 | tagged: artists+engineers · titler · dome

canal180 shot this nice video of what we, as artists & engineers, were up to with bowers & wilkins. and to my bemusement, a shot of my hairy chest has defaulted to be the poster image on vimeo’s page.

diary | 31 may 2014 | tagged: artists+engineers · titler · dome

bowers and wilkins wanted the best sound, and they wanted the best package around. this is a 21m igloo dome, and as venue it was pretty much perfect.

immersive sound, immersive visuals; just the right balance of intimacy with the artists vs. massed excitement of the crowd.

diary | 29 may 2014 | tagged: artists+engineers · titler · dome | downloads: 21m-Igloo-Info.pdf

suffice to say, they sounded good. real good.

diary | 28 may 2014 | tagged: artists+engineers · titler · dome

the architectural contrast was wonderful. in the scene, an igloo 12m dome. in that dome, a media server running videos and screenrunner.

diary | 23 may 2014 | tagged: titler · dome · historic royal palaces

screenrunner with animation templates for use first by historic royal palaces themselves and then renaissance foundation, photo’d. i do love a 9,600px canvas full of photos animating around.

diary | 23 may 2014 | tagged: titler · dome · historic royal palaces

an offer i couldn’t refuse from friends artists + engineers: high-end soundsystem, 360° screen, barcelona. or at least an offer i had to make work somehow: the phd giving no time for the full content-creation and performance brief, instead some oversight for talent and tech.

part of this has become stage-managing the screen, and so out comes screenrunner; act names spinning in and out around the dome’s screen, live input for guest acts, and a default ‘screensaver’ state. the photo is a happy session developing the realtime effect to animate any non-dome materials around the dome’s screen, in igloo’s london test facility.

diary | 08 may 2014 | tagged: artists+engineers · titler · dome

brilliant. 500 kids with tourettes in the most august tate britain. madness, expertly facilitated by tourettes hero with friends chris+keir amongst other artists. super happy to have my software screenrunner feeding the event back into itself, messages and photos of the kid’s “research” getting onto screens live as the events happened.

diary | 12 apr 2014 | tagged: titler

james sheridan saw SPK-RectPack, and invited me to see the dome setup he develops the tech for: igloo, the company, could do with something like screenrunner running in the dome, and more generally james is a creative-coding guy keen to meet like-minds. well, i was impressed; it wasn’t long before screenrunner was running on the dome’s mac pro^[1], and not long after that james was organising a creative coding night in their mini demo dome.

as part of that he invited the london quartz composer group along, and invited me to show what quartz composer was doing in screenrunner. i was happy to talk about it^[2], i really like the mix of cocoa for the app, OpenGL + QCRenderer for the rendering engine and Quartz Composer.app to visually patch each client’s bespoke design and animation together. it’s not often i can show what lies underneath!

diary | 10 feb 2014 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · video-out · dome · talk

a screenrunner client wanted an animating tiled layout. it’s surprisingly non-trivial to code, at least if you want to go beyond hard-coding a few grid layouts. thankfully, the problem is academically interesting too, and lo! there’s a paper on spatial packing of rectangles, complete with MaxBinRectPack algorithm and c++ implementation. respect to jukka jylänki.

getting this working for me was time worth investing, and i’ve released the results: a quartz composer patch and animation technique. it’s up on github, and is something best seen in action, so check the quick demo video on vimeo.

diary | 18 nov 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · vj

b-seite charge one: provoke vjs into thinking about the future of their practice, via showing the toys and talk about how i made it as a post-vj. this was a tidied up version of the talk i improvised at LPM last year, except that then the mixer was a final prototype, and here I was at a festival with two d-fusers as part of their tech setup. mixer’s i’d sold but had never seen, the boxes opened up by hands other than mine, in a country far away.

diary | 23 mar 2013 | tagged: titler · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj · b-seite · talk

in which i set out my stall, hawking the wares and ideas that have helped make my ‘post-vj’ life. half an hour, somewhat off the cuff, and probably ill-advised in parts. the bulk of the talk covers some of the backroom work and event life of the dvi mixer hardware and screenrunner software projects, but contextualised by how i. vjs should work towards exploiting the liveness possible in their practice, ii. which should lead to a more rewarding, less clichéd life, iii. and one more profitable and sustainable.

diary | 02 jun 2012 | tagged: titler · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj · live performers meeting · talk

…aaaaand, no more test data. we did so much more than can be shown in a still or two here, we even pulled a whole four minute finale piece out of the bag, video edit and all^[1]. most of all, we did it, the audience made it… live!

Amazing event. Loving the Brain! #festivalofideas
– Alice Murphy @almurph75
Thanks. We’re having a brilliant day too!
– Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Over 2000 ideas have flown through ‘the brain’ @ @Accenture_Irl #festivalofideas.
– Andrew Hetherington @a_hetherington
Wow & we’ve still got the afternoon!
– Accenture Ireland @Accenture_Irl

Still buzzing a little after #festivalofideas yesterday. I think the crash will hit hard!
– Carolyn Jones (Cj) @TheWidget
@TheWidget you guys were great. The Brain made #festivalofideas. Hopefully we’ll see you again some where, some time…
– Eithne Harley @EithneHarley

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

at the heart of the brain was the increasingly inappropriately named *spark titler, collating all the media and channelling it to the screen. it runs the screen, and gives just what you need to be responsive to the moment without breaking the visual illusion. so… *spark screenrunner?

whatever its grown-up name is, it monitored a fileshare for photos incoming from the caption-shot camera, illustrations and data-vis from ciaran and caroline’s laptops, listened to twitter accounts and hashtags, and, wonderfully, got updates in real-time from convotate, stef’s conversation annotation web-app. a technical shout-out here to pusher, the HTML5 websocket powered realtime messaging service, and to luke redpath’s objective-c library. and via the venue’s many-input HD vision mixer and a quartz composer patch or so more, we had treated feeds from above ciaran’s illustration pad, photoshop screen and whatnot.

it might be that you have to do this kind of job to grok the need, but i really think there’s something in *spark screenrunner, whether its just titling and transitioning between two presenters’ powerpoints or this kind of high-end craziness.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · video-out · engaging audiences

clockwise from top left

• ciaran lucas illustrating key ideas and playing with post-its and sharpies across the venue
• stef lewandowski live coding
• caroline beavon plugging the data into spreadsheets galore on the data-journalism tip
• carolyn jones wrangling everything and everybody together
• yours truly, at this moment dealing with the good problem of having so much data coming in, the visualisation needed re-scaling

the physicality doesn’t match up to kinetxt’s, but there are definite and deliberate echoes here. its not a big ‘visual rock band’ performing realtime story-telling from audience contributions, but perhaps released from the demands of that, we finally delivered on some of those original ideals of transforming a sea of contributed snippets into something meaningful and coherent.

photo credits matthew thompson

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

This is the Brain.

We are using experimental thought-casting technology to display in real-time the ideas and thoughts are emerging at this moment, inside the Hexayurts and elsewhere. Come join our artists and coders in drawing it all together: talk to us, doodle with us as we find the emergent themes, trends and stories.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · liveness · engaging audiences