Holiday De-lights: The McCoy Christmas Light Display

A while back, my good friend Brendon McCoy took up the hobby of creating musically-synchronized Christmas light displays for his parents’ house. Over the course of many years, he accumulated a truly impressive amount of lights and equipment for the display. I had always been jealous of his ability to put on such a wonderful spectacle, so imagine my excitement when, during what would become its final season at that location, he asked if I’d be interested in sequencing my own song as part of his show!

Though I was new to Adobe After Effects (the software he was using to create the light animations) at that time, I jumped in head first to learn it as quickly as I could and have my portion done by the start of the holiday season. Several weeks later, I had a finished piece ready for display!

As expected, I had heard parts of the same song on repeat far more times than any casual listener, and was beginning to get seriously tired of it. However, there is something so incredibly special about seeing work you’ve been doing on a computer screen come to life at full scale, especially for others to come and enjoy with their friends and family, I practically had to be dragged away from the fourth loop through the show by my own group.

In addition to the song above, Brendon also chose to feature my “startup sequence” in the show, as well.

These videos were taken from inside a car parked on the street in front of the house. The music is being broadcast over FM radio to the car’s speakers. Though the lights themselves are being controlled by a piece of software called Light-O-Rama, because each LED was individually addressable as a pixel, the show was able to be created in After Effects, exported as a sequence of images, and then imported into Light-O-Rama via some custom HTML code.