Isadora Software

An example

Isadora is video manipulation Software from Mark Coniglio of Troika Ranch. More information and a demo download can be found at http://troikatronix.com. Below is a screen shot of one scene in Cracking.

In this section we wanted three instances of Dawn to be dancing at the same time, but in different qualities. The shadow starts liquid, twelve seconds later, the theatrical top light comes up revealing Dawn herself starting liquid as the shadows starts brittle, and then twelve seconds later the projection comes up as the shadow moves to shaking and Dawn moves to brittle.

Isadora achieves this by first projecting a color-distorted clip of water as background in an alpha mask with a desaturated and contrast-heightened clip of Dawn doing the three qualites as the mask. Using another software "projector", it projects a smaller image of Dawn on her body.

The software does this using "actors" such as movie players, zoomers, alpha masks, colorizers and projectors. It times them using enter scene triggers and trigger delays, and fades them in using envelope generators. the scene itself is started and stopped by another "Control Scene" that activates and deactivates the scene at the right time to stay with the music.

The video stream is controlled by drawing lines with a mouse between outputs and inputs.