Bluebook
Grainy nineties paranormal titles, for Resolume
What it does
An FFGL effect for Resolume Arena and Avenue: SW Bluebook. If you watched television in the nineties you'll know the one I mean: thirty-odd seconds of jittery, grainy footage that looked as if someone had smuggled it out of a filing cabinet. The opening titles of The X-Files (1993) are a run of treatments rather than a story, and every one of them is something a VJ could use on any clip. So the plugin does the treatments and leaves the footage to you. There's no footage, logo, music or lettering from the show in it, and it isn't affiliated with anyone who made it.
Each treatment is a stage of a small film lab. Print step-prints the clip, a still every eighth of a second or on the beat, each sitting a hair off the last as film does in a tired gate. Enlarge zooms into the picture a generation at a time, each one softer than the last and carrying its own grain, enlarged with it, until the picture is mostly guesswork. Stretch pulls a column of it long, pinched at the waist and writhing a bit. Aura puts a glow round whatever's brightest (or darkest, or opaque), with streamers running outwards, and Silhouette turns the subject itself into a black shape inside it. Torch sweeps a beam across a dark room, lit in linear light so the middle looks like a lamp and not a grey disc.
Then the grade (a cold teal duotone, or green, blue, amber or silver, with crushed contrast, grain, flicker and a dark edge) and a caption that reveals itself a letter at a time, as a title or as an evidence legend with a catalogue number that moves on with every print. Everything that belongs to one shot starts switched off: the defaults are what the sequence did to every shot.
Freeze is the other show's hit. Press it and the frame on screen freezes with a white flash, drains to punchy black and white and pushes in a touch, then lets go after Freeze Hold or waits for the next press. Hit it again inside the hold and it freezes a new frame, so a pad on every beat gives a run of stills. It works on its own, with everything else off. The name is Project Blue Book's, the US Air Force study that filed some twelve thousand UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969 and concluded there was nothing to see. Hence the default caption.
- Print: a step-printed stutter on its own clock or Resolume's beat, with a dissolve, a tired gate's weave and a smear
- Enlarge: up to eight generations of enlargement, each softer and grainier than the last
- Stretch: a column of the picture pulled long and writhing
- Aura: a glow round the brightest, darkest or opaque parts of the clip, with streamers, or a silhouette against it
- Torch: a beam crossing a dark room, lit in linear light, sweeping or held where you put it
- Film: a teal, green, blue, amber or silver duotone with contrast, grain, flicker and a vignette
- Caption: up to 48 characters revealed a letter at a time, as a title or an evidence legend
- Freeze: one press freezes the frame with a flash and drains it to black and white
- Universal macOS bundle and a Windows x64 DLL
Where it stands
v0.1.0, and early days. It's measured by an offline harness driving the plugin's own code on an Apple Silicon Mac, at two rasters and on Apple's software renderer: prints land on the frame and the beat the model says, a smear rises as its half-life says, an enlargement magnifies by what it says to a quarter of a pixel, the aura falls off as a blurred edge does, the caption's capitals are the height asked for to the pixel, and a freeze holds the frame bit for bit. It catches thirteen models that are wrong on purpose and seventeen one-character sabotages of its own code, and all 50 controls that can move a still change the picture. With every stage on at once it takes 0.55 ms a frame at 1080p on a Mac. In Resolume Arena 7.28.1 on a Mac, driven over its REST API rather than played, every control arrives as declared, 38 of them change the picture, Step On prints at Arena's tempo, and a Freeze press holds the grey frame for its hold and lets go. On Windows it loads and renders in Arena 7.27.1 on software rendering, with the same 38 controls changing Arena's picture of a still. Nobody has played it in a show. The macOS build is Developer ID-signed and notarised. There's a user guide and a browser demo, but no presets or OpenFX port yet. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.Watch it there instead