So, here we go – Alias makes good on the bezier typograpy threats. This is a 2.5d typographic experiment, and I hope it’ll work OK with your hardware setup.
Having said that, it will probably look best viewed in IE on a machine which supports OpenGL in hardware… sorry about that. (I am such a hardware accelleration sellout)
Anyway, check it out… for those of you without shiny graphics cards, there’s a video…
As a footnote,for the past ten years, I have been trying, with little success, to impress my father with my various computer graphic efforts. This is the first thng which has actually impressed him. This has to stand for something.
So I’ve been porting some of my flash code over to processing. One of the things which I’m interested in specifically is bezier interpolation. It’s not a lot of work to port stuff over, and I’ll probably work on porting over some more stuff soon.
This is a random walk with bezier curves. This does all the bezier stuff seperately to the processing core – the advantage being that I can get any point on a bezier by providing it with a parameter t, which is very useful for animation purposes. In order to test out this code, I’ve created these stills of bezier random walks.
I’ve left on the control points, and drawn boxes along the curve. The curve itself is randomly generated by a random walk.
So, this is my aforementioned first stab at a simple particle system in processing. Simple bubble particles, rising and re-spawning when they go offscreen. All very simple stuff, but pretty all the same.
Funnily enough, processing seems to run slightly faster in IE…
This is also true in the flash world – I believe it’s to do with the outdated netscape plugin API being a bit lame… hopefully that will change soon though.
I’m actually quite dumbfounded by the sheer power that processing has at its disposal. This simulation was able to take over 5,000 particles before it started to chug. This one here only has 600, as it started to look a bit cluttered, and I don’t want to induce premature browser-death.
So, this year, I’ve decided I that I want to do a lot more processing work. As I’m back to the world of freelancing in 2008, I’ll be making a big effort to post a lot of my processing sketches online as I do them. They will probably not be hugely exciting, but I’ve realised that documentation of work is really important – I have insane amounts of experimental work lying around and it hardly ever sees the light of day. Anyway, I haven’t quite gotten the hang of processing in the browser yet – there’s a few technical constraints I have to get to grips with. However, there’s no problem making youtube videos… so here we go – processing sketch video #1: spiral gallery, “autumn”. This sketch loads the first 25 images returned by the keyword search “autumn” on flickr.com. Then in animates them using a fibbonacci derived space packing algorithm, which was developed by observing the growth of seeds in flower heads. I like how it seems quite chaotic but is actually very rigidly defined and ordered.
Note that this works fine in real time – it’s just that Processing isn’t very happy in a browser at the moment. I’m working on that, and I’ll try to post the actual applet and code soon. Processing is so much fun – it’s a refreshing change to have hardware accelleration! Go OpenGL!
So at the beginning of December I did an arduino and processing workshop at Moving Brands (those are my hands in the picture). This was really excellent, as I got to hang out with Carsten Schmidt (Toxi) whose work I’ve admired for years. Also learned loads about processing, and got to meet lots of cool people, as well as play with light sensors and stuff.
So, this hasn’t really been documented very well, so I’ve pulled some previous posts and thought I’d redo them with a bit of context for the whole thing.
So, Slaughterhaus Five (which is London nightclub a club I’m a managing partner in) did an event called “Ratification”. This sprang from the seeds of discontent with the fact that Gordon Brown is now the unelected ruler of the UK, and we wanted to do something to sort of complain about it. So we decided to do an election of our own.
As you know, Slaughterhaus Five is set in a sort of dystopian, orwellian parallel universe, where a military industrial complex is all powerful and one of the mottoes of the state is “Weapons, Not Food”. We produced three short films for the campaign, which form a sort of basic story arc. For me it was a big and exciting challenge – writing, along with my business partner Chris De Bie (aka Chris Damage) , a rough script and getting people in to shoot for it. The whole thing involved building a green screen in my basement, creating a makeshift lighting rig, lots of late nights and mixing bisto and ribena to make fake blood. I’m hoping that if I do enough of these, I might actually get good enough at making films that someone might pay me for it, someday.
We also partnered with NO2ID to distribute their material and try to drive membership signups. Everyone recieved a NO2ID info pack on the night, containing a badge, a membership form, and a booklet on how to win in an argument over ID cards.
The films are best watched in sequence:
We wanted it to span the range between funny, satirical and actually disturbing. I’m not sure whether it succeeds at that, but it was a fun project all the same, and I was pretty amazed at the performances we got out of all the cast – none of whom were actors. It was all shot on DV and edited in premiere and after effects, for a budget of less than £200 (and that’s counting the green screen).
In the end, the night was a total success. The event was held on the same night as the Russian Election (which was probably slightly more free than ours, but only just). We filled the club to capacity, and I think we really turned a corner getting NO2ID involved.
As part of the performance, everyone was asked to vote, and be photographed with their ballot. You can see the full gallery of voters, and who they voted for, here…
