I hope those who’ve been following my tutorials have come away knowing more than they knew before about the Artiste.
In real life one could think of an event as a meanrngful, memorable, milestone in a persons life. When you got married, , birth of a child, high-school graduation, major surgery, entering the military, getting engaged, your wedding, your honeymoon, an illicit affair, separation, divorce, auto-accident, death, funeral, an arrest, drunk-and-passed out, a physical altercation, your first-love, close-calls, fired-from-job, awards, etc.
I think we remember events more than dates. we can sort of put these in some sort of meaningful order…as to how they relate to each other…easier than we can assign exact dates or even years to them. Example: I had to have surgery after my accident which was a day before Thanksgiving day. They brought me turkey from home.
We often express events in terms of other events. I plan to start a family 2 years after I am married. I plan to enter the military upon high-school graduation. I lost my job during the recession. I plan to take college-prep courses prior to entering college.
This is the approach taken to demark when things are to happen in a performance of scheduled events. Its a different mindset but one I find more meaningful than an “arbitrary timeline of things”.
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Performance Events You Already Know
I first got the idea from Nottoo who blogged on usng song-structure changes to identify when dances should transition from one to another. Example: Song intro, chorus, verse, bridge, solo
For performing, those are good arbitrary event markers when nothing else comes to mind because we have already identified them as events, having assigned names to them. We know when they happen relative to each other.
As you progress from song-changes, obvious other events come to mind…curtain open, curtain close, special lyrics or sound-fx embedded in a song. Song endings/beginnings from a medley of songs.
Artiste uses events at its core. Nothing that is sequenced can really happen without events. All the fun interesting stuff you do will be tied to events.
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The Artiste Event
Events are defined on a notecard. One event per line. Each HUD event has a number from 1 to 20 assigned to it. You can use less than 20.
Each event has a name you give it.
And each event has a time value in seconds.
This can be duration or elapsed time.
The 2 examples below are identical but are 2 different ways to express the same sequence of events. If you can understand the difference then you know how to create events in the Artiste. Event #1 happens 10 seconds after pressing PLAY. Event #2 happens 15 seconds after pressing play. This about as technical as these Tutorials will get.
Example #1:
DURATION
1,”Event #1″,10.0
2,”Event #2″,5.0
Example #2:
ELAPSED
1,”Event #1″,10.0
2,”Event #2″,15.0
So now your HUD notecards (for emoting, adorning, stripping, auto-special-fx, audience-directed-camming, announcing, dance-sequencing, outfit-changes), that express when things are to happen, use the event number, (just 1 or 2) in this example, to tell when things will happen. The beauty is that by changing the event times (10 & 5 OR 10 & 15), all things attached to that event automatically move with it in time either forward or backward.
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The AutoFX Function and Notecard
Most notecards limit what you can do to one thing per line on a notecard (i.e. dances, emotes).
But for the special-FX notecard (we call it AutoFX), you can specify multiple things to happen at nearly the same time for a given event. AutoFX controls things external to the HUD like movers, Palettes, etc. Your only limit is 255 characters for a given notecard line. And using the special WAIT command, when you specify multiple things to happen at the same event, you can create fine adjustments and offsets BETWEEN the multiple things that happen for a given event so they all don’t have to happen at the exact same time.
In fact, a special defining feature of the Artiste is built-in redudancy that helps you get out of tight spots. Did you know that using our powerful AutoFX, you can emulate all of the other functions as well?
Yep! This list includes: Playing a dance sequence, emoting, adorning, outfit-changes, audience-directed-camming, stripping, as well as…!!!ALL of the 80 to 90 action-features of the Palette!!!.
There are also other subtle features assignable to AutoFX, like singalling a change in choreagraphy-grouping, dance-formation changing, curtain control, HUD chaining….and the list goes on.
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Palette-based Mini-Events
One last notable ADVANCED feature on the topic of telling performance-stuff when to happen is…the Palette “action” or mini-event.
You already know you can have up to 20 major events per HUD and each major event can trigger one (or more) Palettes to move as well as do a zillion other things.
Well you can define about 20 moves inside of one Palette (not to be confused with the 20 HUD events). Each of those moves can serve as a mini-event meaning you can attach what we call an “action” to the move. And also realize that a move can be a dummy move or place-holder for an action. Each dummy move would ahve a duration associated with it but no distance to travel or rotation to turn.
So when, say, HUD event #1 tells a given Palette (or more) to perform all (or a range) of its moves, then that Palette can begin to perform mini-events in the form of actions attached to moves, one-after-the other and do actions and not just moves, or actions in concert with moves.
What this offers is finer granularity as well as being economcial with your 20 major events by passing off extra event-work to a Palette.
This Action can be any of the 80-90 cool action-feature thingys that Palette can do. So this means that within one HUD event, you can have several Palette-based-mini events that do things. And, a palette-action can and often does contol what other Palettes do.
20×20 = 400 major and minor events so this ability could address the needs of someone who wanted to put on an uninterrupted hour long presentation…theoretically. And by using HUD chaining, you can introduce manual intervention where you could have manual control over say a few different major acts within a given hour-long show.
Of course you probally wouldnt start ouit this advanced.
Keep it simple.
Grow slowly.
One event talks to one palette and tells it to perform just one move and then graduate and tell it to perforam all of its moves. Then graduate to telling it to do a ‘range of moves‘. And then graduate to Palette-actions.
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I hope I didnt overwhelm you. There are a few more nice features that I didn’t cover. What I covered here are the basics.
We have a manual on events that goes over what I just talked about here and classes will go over events as well. And you can ask for one-on-one help on top of the manual and classes.
Artiste events are powerful, flexible, precise, and are at the core of how Artiste operates best.
A Kat and A Mouse 