Moving head lights are such a great fixture for concerts and stage lighting designs.
Having used many different types I have learned they are all controlled slightly differently.
Though most use pan, tilt, brightness, etc; the software used to drive these DMX channels can vary wildly from quirky, to super expensive, and hard to find. Is there a better way?
During the summer of 2016 I created a few pieces of software in the visual programming language, Quartz Composer, to better interface with these lights for the upcoming Summer Meltdown Music Festival.
The following two examples show some of the modes I was able to develop.
Leap Motion Hands
The first example is that of using one’s hands and fingers to control the moving head lights. This is accomplished by using a Leap Motion controller to accurately plot the XYZ position of each finger in real time.
This data is then fed into Quartz Composer via OSC and is then scaled and clipped to the ranges needed for the moving head lights. One more piece was needed to actually drive the lights with this data and that is MadMapper.
As shown in the video it works well and with a little practice it is possible to form very flowing, natural, and intuitive gestures for making the lights go up, down, and all around.
One caveat is that when you want to do anything else, like touch the keyboard, the hands go out of bounds and the lights may look weird for a second. At the show we had a few people doing lighting at once so the team sorted it out.
Clearly a proof of concept but it works and was extremely fun.
Sound Reactive
The next example extends the previous but instead of having the hands control the light position we have a microphone do this.
This works by mapping the intensity of individual frequencies to the tilt value of the moving head lights such that when noise is picked up the lights move upwards like an EQ visualizer.
Playing music and isolating the bass, clapping hands, or even chopping vegetables are effective ways to interact with and control the lights in this mode.
Overall this is a great proof of concept and was fun exploring how different data can be re-mapped and transposed form digital to physical.