# Bouncing Ball Over Lyrics



## adamday (Oct 17, 2009)

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?


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## ScottT (Oct 17, 2009)

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


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## adamday (Oct 17, 2009)

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.


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## SHARYNF (Oct 17, 2009)

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


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## derekleffew (Oct 17, 2009)

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


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## sk8rsdad (Oct 17, 2009)

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.


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## adamday (Oct 17, 2009)

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.


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## cprted (Oct 17, 2009)

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


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## NickJones (Oct 18, 2009)

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


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## renegadeblack (Oct 18, 2009)

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.)


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## ScottT (Oct 18, 2009)

derekleffew said:


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



Before my time Derek, before my time...


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## museav (Oct 18, 2009)

derekleffew said:


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


First thing I thought of as well. Many here are probably way too young to remember Sing Along with Mitch, much simpler times.


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## SHARYNF (Oct 18, 2009)

The Link here does allow you to either create the highlighted word with the bouncing ball or just the highlighted words in the typical Karaoke video

http://www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_screenshots_v4_e.html

if you scroll down and look at the bottom of the list it has quicktime movies that show the functionality
the plug in is about 179 dollars 


It is a plug in for Final Cut Pro, so far this seems to be the ONLY software video solution for this 

Sharyn


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## jonliles (Oct 19, 2009)

derekleffew said:


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




My Borhter-in-Law still has his "Sing-A-Long with Mitch" Albums from his childhood - there is nearly a full generation gap between him and my wife.


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