Skip to content

Print & screen effect

LCD Mosaic

LCD Mosaic is a halftone and retro screen effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Blocky cells, subpixel columns, and faint cell borders.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try LCD Mosaic free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle art rendered as a fine grid of small LCD cells in blue, teal and peach — LCD Mosaic, default settings

What LCD Mosaic does

Dices the picture into square cells, each a flat sample of the image, then splits every cell into red, green and blue subpixel stripes with a thin dark rim between cells. A faint brightness shimmer drifts across the stripes over time. Pixels turned up makes the cells smaller, Subpixel strengthens the striping, Fill hard left widens the dark grid, and Stripes turns the subpixels upright or across.

Using LCD Mosaic

Where it works: Screen-in-a-screen looks, such as a still that should read as a photo of a phone or billboard, and a close-up texture pass for a Reel where Pixels hard left makes the stripes big enough to see.
With the music: The shimmer is too faint to carry a beat. Send B1 kick to Pixels so the panel resolves finer on each kick and coarsens between them, or an LFO on Subpixel to pulse the stripes in and out.
Starting point: Pixels at a quarter, Subpixel at three-quarters, Fill at a quarter, Stripes upright, so the cells are big enough to show their stripes.

Controls

Pixels: Panel resolution. Right makes finer cells, left coarser ones.
Subpixel: RGB stripe separation strength.
Fill: How far each cell fills out to its neighbours. Right thins the dark rim between cells, left widens it.
Stripes: Which way the RGB subpixel stripes run.
Speed: Rate of the effect motion. Centre is the authored speed, hard left a tenth of it.

Pairs well with LCD Mosaic