Show night should be the calm part.
Simpli Show is cue-based show control for macOS. Simple enough to run on one key, modular enough to build something complicated out of sound, video, images, text and shapes.
In practice
Video that answers the actor, and scenery that moves
The part I am proudest of is video that runs in dialogue with the actors. A recorded voice answers a live one on the beat, because the cue fires when I press the key and not a moment before. Next to that: looping video as moving scenery. I generate the clips with AI and let them run, so a train window has landscape sliding past it for a whole scene. Light shows made of geometric shapes, on evenings where there was no rig worth the name. Text and video across the back wall. Sound from the same cue list. I built it to do exactly this, and all of it comes out of the same five kinds of part.
Five kinds of material
The list is short on purpose. What you can do with it comes from combining simple parts, not from a longer feature list.
- Video and imagesPlay a clip full-screen, or place it exactly where you want it and leave room for something else beside it.
- SoundCued along with everything else, so the music starts on the same keypress as the picture.
- TextTitles, surtitles, a name under a face. Written in the app, with no round trip through another program.
- ShapesSquares, circles, triangles and stars, in your colours and your opacity, combined into whatever the scene needs.
I built it for my own shows
I write software for a living. When I needed something to run the picture and the sound for my own productions, I built it: simple to operate, modular enough to put complicated stage animations and sound together. Other people saw it running and wanted it too, so now anyone can have it. I still use it myself, which is why I am the first to notice when something about it is wrong.
See what it can do
The product page walks through how a show gets built and how it gets run. The download is there whenever you are ready.