Back in 2010, I was working at Mater Academy High School alongside John Baldwin, my mentor and long time friend. At the time, we wanted to leverage spare projectors in theater. The goal was to build something that could help us place images or videos on the stage, animating their movement, and recording the layout so it could be reused during performances.

The result was “Organic”, a desktop application built using Adobe Flex. For those that never heard of it, Adobe Flex was the result of leveraging Adobe Flash technology to make a RIA (rich internet application). I already had experience working with Adobe Flash and ActionScript, making interactive web sites and little games.

The software used a grid to place images since our original plan was to try and align the images to wooden cubes on stage. Using a grid was a lot easier to implement, but the need for arbitrary placement and transformation was immediately apparent.

Organic 2

I rewrote Organic from scratch to support arbitrary resizing and placement of images and video on the screen. I don’t have screenshots of the second version of Organic, but I did keep a video of an instance in which we used the software in a show. This was a workshop for The Nutcracker Ballet presented by The South Florida Ballet Theater in 2011.