Flock Jockey VJ Software

What?

We had a great privilege to test the Flock Jockey -software we have been developing, in the most funkiest festival in northern hemisphere, Funky Elephant. Friday April 1st. 2011 was our night with artists Liljan Loisto, The Irrationals and Kid Koala!

Sometimes you have to take risks

We had an idea about creating visuals from the crowd, or in other words, we let the crowd to do the visuals… crowdsourcing! We just built the frames for it and let our software and crowd do the rest. We needed a place to try this out and luckily the producer of the Funky Elephant festival Esa Kandelberg became interested in our idea. So the story in short is that we monitor the movement of the people with camera, detect crowd cheers and artists with microphones, and from all those elements we create the visuals. We started calling it Flock Jockeying. It is audience-made interactive real-time visualization.

Booking, building and testing

We had no idea how it would work, and if it works, what it would generate and look like. And we didn’t have that much time to develop and test the setup. At first we were going to ask if we could come to the festival and just test our setup for ourselves, with someone other handling the actual VJ’ing. But as it happened, Esa booked us for the whole evening to take care of the actual visuals. And in the next sentence he mentioned that the main act will be by Kid Koala. So can we do it? Of course we can! And we took the risk.

Was it worth to take a risk?

Hell yeah! The night was magical and the Flock Jockey software worked better than we expected. The video and audio inputs gave the visuals a whole new perspective and the crowd seemed to enjoy seeing themselves dancing and cheering. We learned of course new things and figured out a bunch of improvements, so when the next time comes, it will be even better.