Bouncing Ball Over Lyrics

[adamday]

Hi, we are doing Thoroughly Modern Millie and my director wants to do the bouncing ball effect on the subtitles when the actors are singing. I have set this all up in Powerpoint 08 using the custom animation, however, the speed options are not fast enough to match the speed of the song. I can't really make a video of this because the speed of the song will be different every night, so I just need something so I can trigger the ball with the press of a key. Anyone have any suggestions?

[ScottT]

Budget? Equipment? Any other information you can add will be extremely usefull.

[adamday]

Well I have access to the projectors and everything I will need to do this, I think now it is just down to the software I need to use to make it work. The only thing is that it needs to be mac compatible.

[SHARYNF]

I have NEVER used this but if you scroll down on the page for this plug in there is a series of screen shots of the Karaoke bouncing ball. This is a plug in for Final Cut Pro, so it is mac CGE volume 4. I would GUESS that this is not going to be totally automatic but....

Final Cut Pro / Express Plugins by Eiperle CGM


Sharyn

[derekleffew]

Who else could not read this thread without thinking of Mitch Miller?

[sk8rsdad]

If you can't find something that let's you vary the playback rate of your software, you may be able to keep the performers on track by feeding a click track to your musical director.

Assuming you are doing a single line of text per slide, another option would be to live with the variability but manually trigger each slide change so you don't accumulate a big time skew. It turns the operation of the sing-along slide show into somebody's full time job but labour is cheap in a school setting.

[adamday]

Ya, I am planning on manually triggering each bounce of the ball, but the way I've got it set up in Powerpoint works, but it takes .5 seconds for each bounce and that's just too slow for what I need.

[cprted]

What if instead of a bouncing ball, you just projected one verse at a time ala sur-titles in Opera?

[NickJones]

I have looked into this, and found it's pretty hard to do, most people can get the idea of where the song is, look into ScreenMonkey, it's nice and simple and very effective, it doesn't have the bouncing ball, but it's great for lyrics.
If you are good at programming you could make it yourself. If you do, post it!
Nick

[renegadeblack]

I did this show and we just had about a sentence at a time, or when they're saying Mammy just the one word on the slide. The audience got it. Btw, dont leave a folder in front of the projector when you're hoping for complete darkness... the folder will start to smolder. (Just a side-note from when I did the show.)