Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:00am

Review | The Space Centre Gig

Saturday night saw the Many Coloured Days / Threep event in the Space Theatre at the National Space Centre in Leicester.

A decent-sized audience was treated to a true audiovisual extravaganza that included the premier of Chris Cousin's new 'Many Coloured Days' project supported by 360 visuals (produced by myself and Stu Smith) and a live Threep performance with visuals by Vent Media.

Quite a few people have asked me how the 360 degree dome projections worked, so here is a little overview.

Seven video projectors are used to cover the domed screen. Either the same video image can be shown through all of the projectors, or the a video can be 'pre-processed' and sliced in to seven separate images - each one intended for a specific projector.

While the latter method allows a single video image to be shown over the entire dome, the equipment needed to do it is expensive (and the source video material needs to be very high quality), so for this show (and the last show we did here) we were showing a single image on all seven screens.

Doing this leads to something of a 'kaleidoscopic' effect, which I further enhance by running my video clips through a special Max/MSP patch that rotates and tiles the video clips before they are projected.

To help synchronise the visuals with the music I use my computer's microphone to sample the music and automatically change various video parameters, such as contrast, playback speed etc. Plus I do a bit of live knob-twiddling that allows me to 'tweak' the video images in response to what I am hearing.

A selection of photographs from the event can be seen on my Flickr page.

Well done to Bathysphere for organisising the event and Arena for supporting it.

Author: Sean Clark

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