SofaLofa Live Multimedia

On the 18th March 2006 Chris Cousin's SofaLofa performed live at the National Space Centre in Leicester. The audio was in surround-sound and was accompanied by 360 degree video projections from Cuttlefish's Sean Clark. The show was well-attended, with people travelling up from as far afield as London for this unique event.

Sean says, "Producing visuals for the show was quite a challenge. The hemispherical screen at the National Space Centre uses six video projectors to construct a single 360 degree image. In order to produce a seemless image the video source normally has to be pre-processed quite extensively and then 'sliced' prior to being sent to each projector. Since we wanted to display live video we couldn't pre-process the source in this way and so we had to experiment to find video clips that would 'tile' well when the same image was shown through each projector."

The resulting video images consisted of moving textures and patterns combined with sound-responsive grids of more abstract shapes. The video mix was then generated live using Max/MSP/Jitter throughout the 30 minute show.