Me and the guys from Bureau BlauwGeel have been working together on their new website: http://www.bureaublauwgeel.nl
The CMS-based website uses video files to create a dynamic, living and breathing background.
Each menu item has a background image that slowly zooms in to keep that dynamic feel.
Although the background and interface always adjust to the size of [...]
For Motion Sickness‘ next VJ Gig, at Hoorspel Amsterdam, I want to mix live Twitter messages into our VJ set. I’ve already built several Twitter tools in Flash, and Modul8 (our favorite VJ tool) supports SWF files.
I started by experimenting with various animations you can apply to the Twitter messages. You can see a demo here: http://www.motionsickness.nl/tweejay/
When the SWF is used as a movie inside Modul8, you don’t want the audience to see the control panel. To solve this I built an external SWF controller. This way the audience won’t see the settings of the Twitter animation. The external controller is opened with the regular flash player, and connects to the flash animation inside Modul8 using a LocalConnection.
I discovered that a SWF inside Modul8 won’t connect to the internet, but this was solved by using the external controller to retrieve twitter messages, and then pass them on to Modul8. The only problem left is that images can’t be transferred this way, so Modul8 can’t use flash to retrieve images from the internet.
This screenshot shows the modul8 environment with the SWF Twitter layer on top of an image. You can see the external controller in it’s own window. (click image to enlarge).
UPDATE 1: the beta test of the tool is downloadable at http://www.eerkmans.nl/bestanden/tweejay_m8_beta.zip
UPDATE 2: Since the SWF movies do not play in a browser they need to be permitted to connect to the internet.
You can do this by opening the SWF files with adobe’s standalone flash player (right click > open with flash player). You will be presented with the following dialog box:
This popup appears when you open the SWF’s in adobe’s standalone SWF player.
Click ‘Settings’ and you will be taken to the security page. In this page, click ‘edit locations’ and then ‘add location’. Browse to the folder where your SWF’s are and add them.
The security settings for standalone flash movies.
If you don’t have the standalone flash player you can go to the settings screen directly.
Or you can download the flash player pack as a zip file here.
I will try to make this process less complicated, perhaps by exporting the controller as an adobe AIR app in the next version.
