By C.E. Hanifin / Enquirer staff writer

"This is a test." Those words greeted the crowd entering the Southgate House in Newport this weekend, announcing that the Lite Brite Indie Pop and Film Test was venturing into uncharted territory.

The inaugural event, held Friday through Sunday, brought together more than a dozen independent musicians with filmmakers for performances and screenings, many of them simultaneous.

Alternative pop met film. Rap met animation. Acoustic rock met computer-generated doodles.

Best of all, the audience met up-and-coming artists of both genres.

Some of Lite Brite's artists have long commingled music and images. The members of the Cincinnati band Culture Queer, which performed Saturday, backed incandescent pop melodies with their own locally shot footage, including a cart's-eye view of a frenzied grocery-store jaunt.

Other groups on the bill, including several out-of-town artists, were paired with local filmmakers. During the Waxwings' set Friday, members of the Detroit band spun around several times to watch the kaleidoscope of shapes and colors swirling on the screen behind them in synch with their psychedelic power pop songs.

Not every pairing of sound and visuals, however, made sense. The adult-themed animation playing Friday during Glue's set didn't quite connect to the hip-hop artist's political-meets-personal numbers. That, however, didn't keep the crowd from falling under the sway of the group's rhymes about anxiety attacks and soured relationships set to the whomping beats of DJ DQ (aka local turntable master Dan Hargraves).

The festival, which drew a sparse but enthusiastic crowd Friday, doubled (or more) its attendance Saturday. The audience responded enthusiastically both nights to the artists, most of whom aced the challenge of intersecting their genres. Festival organizer Dan McCabe and his crew earned high marks for pulling off an ambitious plan with few significant snags.

As with almost all first-time events, there's room for Lite Brite to shine a little more. Pre-show announcements would have kept the crowd clued in on the occasional deviations from the printed schedule and provided more information about the performers, especially the "motion graphics" artists who worked behind the scenes.

But these are small quibbles, given Lite Brite's success in forging a new type of event and temporarily transforming the landscape, to boot. Each night, Porchlite Cinema projected 30-foot-tall images onto the wall of the former IMAX theater across Third Street from Southgate House. The snippets of film and their accompanying soundtracks captivated festivalgoers and passersby, and many planted themselves on the venue's lawn to watch.

That's the kind of spectacle worthy of a sequel next summer.

E-mail chanifin@enquirer.com