moving

so ive moved all the posts from this blog to www.ryankent.ca. Please update your rss/bookmarks/whatever as I will no longer be posting news here. Thanks all.

portfolio site up

http://www.ryankent.ca

check it out.

*not ie6 friendly

muxtape

yes i finally got one.

http://ryankent.muxtape.com/

Organism

Here’s a little project I’ve been working on in Processing. You’ll have to download the zip file and open the html file in it to play since it’s a little bit big for web and has a tendency to crash firefox/explorer.

Basically this is a game which has no real ending. You start out as a single cell organism and eat other organisms in order to grow. It’s a fairly simple concept. Right now the game clearly isn’t as good as I would like it to be, but I think that would be more of a summer project for me to work on. I want to eventually include multi-celled organisms, growing of flagellum’s and cilia, enemies, fluid-like moving organisms, and etc, but I think it’s in a good enough stage to start expanding. Some inspiration for this work comes from the games Spore and Katamari.

Event Log

Guggenheim Museum

New York

October 21-27, 2007

After becoming permanently attached to fine art I’ve always wanted to visit the Guggenheim. The week we were in New York the artist Richard Prince was the one featured, and I didn’t really know anything about him. Some of the other students in the group left because they didn’t feel like paying $12 to see the exhibit on an artist they hadn’t really heard of anyway, but I kinda already decided I was going in the Guggenheim before we even got there. Anyways, the place itself was a little bit bigger than I imagined. When you first walk into it you enter right onto the main lower-level floor. You can just look up and around, the ceiling is all windowed and it looks pretty amazing. Me and the small group of students who decided to stay slowly made our way up.

A lot of the work was interesting but what I found stood out the most was Richard Prince’s work itself. He had incredible joke paintings which were not only humorous but had great typography and colour. It seemed as though the farther up the Guggenheim you got the more distorted the backgrounds of the paintings became, coming to a point where you were barely able to read them. At the very top room of the Guggenheim Richard had his series of Nurse paintings hanging up. They again were distorted and messy, very interesting colour schemes, and each followed a different theme to go with the nurses. This room had a strange feeling to it because it was square instead of round like the rest of the Guggenheim and it seemed like everyone in the paintings was creepishly staring at you.

Overall it was a great experience and fulfilled my expectations. It was very tiring though because of the buildings scale, but I still feel bad for those other students who didn’t come in and see it with us.

Museum of Modern Art

New York

October 21-27, 2007

The seconds stop on the Image Arts New York trip in October was the Museum of Modern Art. There was a free entrance at a specific time so that motivated most of the students to go there. The place was giant. It wasn’t as open as the Guggenheim but it certainly had more content. It’s hard to pick a part to begin to describe with the MoMA, it was all fantastic. It was easily the best stop of the whole trip. I’ve been wanting to see so many of the works in real life for so long it was really a dream come true in a way. I had no idea all these artists were there. In fact, once I thought I was done I went and met with a few other people (Queen’s University had a New York trip the same time as us) and they asked me some questions about what I thought of some of the work, and I was just like “That’s here? Where!?” So basically I saw the MoMA twice.

I guess because it was free entrance it was hard to see some of the work. But most of the tourists just wanted to see Starry Night and whatnot which left a lot of the space open. When I went to see Pollock it was fairly empty and I could get right up to the work, literally staring at it an inch away. This was probably my most favourite moment. Underneath the paint you could see all the crap he dropped in it. I watched a video on Pollock a long while ago and heard about this, and also that his cigarettes would often fall into the paintings and he wouldn’t bother taking them out, or would also leave footprints and other things in the work. It was an amazing experience basically looking up close for these small things inside this huge work of art. I always hear that photographs can never capture the real texture of a work of art and that is so very very true.

EYEBEAM

New York

October 21-27, 2007

Eyebeam was a spot last year that all the students enjoyed. This year they built it up a little too much and when we got there it wasn’t really what I expected. It was basically a big open building in the factory district that had a bunch of new media and graffiti in it. The outside of the building had paint covering it too. Inside they were kind of in an in between phase of the gallery and didn’t have a whole lot of stuff to see, and what was there wasn’t that great. But what I didn’t realize before going is that they were associated with the Graffiti Research Labs, which is a street art group in New York, and they had some of the stuff they did and made there. So that was kind of cool, just because I didn’t realize it would be there. Bat aside from that it wasn’t the best. I would like to go back again when they have more things to look at.

Encounter with Thomas Beale

New York

October 21-27, 2007

This was one of the more interesting experiences from the New York trip. While wandering around after a slightly disappointing Eyebeam we found a little workshop of some kind open to the street. Inside there were some really interesting sculptures made out of wood. The one that really caught my attention was the woman who looked as though she was running away and had her head turned just slightly, with an expression of possible fear on her face, like something was right about to get her. The first thing you notice about the work was the feeling it invokes, the medium took second.

It turns out the artist working on these sculptures was in fact there and we were able to talk to him. Thomas Beale told us about his process for the large abstract shapes he was making, which although all started the same ended up looking very different, and what it was like practising his art in New York. It really enlightened me. He wasn’t all smart about it either he was just really cool about it. So basically it taught me that it is very possible to be a happy, cool dude making art and doing what you love without completely starving to death.

How to Cook Docomodake? Art Exposition

New York

October 21-27, 2007

The next day was frighteningly weird. We were wandering around little Italy and got lost when we came across this place. To be completely honest I don’t even really know what it is. I read the description there and apparently this “Docomodake” character is a symbol of inspiration in Japanese culture. There’s apparently a whole family of them with a story too. So there was this little gallery that had a whole bunch of weird Japanese art in it featuring this mushroom-like character. It was out of this world. Some things were so bright and colourful and others were just like straight out of a magic mushroom trip.

It was interesting to see this totally different culture, it was like entering a new world, inside this little building space randomly in New York. We walked around inside for a little while but it was a little creepy so we left kind of quickly. It wasn’t a big space though. It looks like it would have been a shrine for anyone who liked the character but it just wasn’t something I’m totally interesting in. I just saw it from the perspective of culture and whatnot and that’s what was really interesting for me.

STÆTIM Fourth Year New Media Festival

Toronto

March 28

Staetim was another a super hyped-up event. It is a “mixture of human and machine that is needed, necessary, now.” There were 35 different exhibits at the show. I had very high expectations for the fourth year new media students and to be honest I wasn’t all that impressed. Most of the stuff there didn’t look like they put a great deal of their own real effort into it. I’m sure they took “effort,” but it didn’t look like they put their hearts into the work. Instead they treated it more like an assignment that had to be done than a work of art for a gallery. That was basically my general consensus of Staetim. One of the projects I did like though was the cat and mouse one, where one robot attempted to chase the other and there could be human interaction. It was fun to watch and interact with them. It’s not something I’ve never seen before but it worked well and was fun so it was enjoyable.

I think that this years new media students could definitely give the 4th years a run for their money, though. Staetim was a little bit of a letdown for me but also a source of motivation to make sure my work is much better. It is also a reminder to myself that I should make something I enjoy making, because everyone will be able to tell when you don’t put your heart into your work. I’m really excited for 3rd and 4th year and am really looking forward to what my other peers can do as well.

War, Inc. with John Cusack

Toronto

April 2

John Cusack was invited to Ryerson a little while ago for a screening of his new film coming out titled “War, Inc.” The movie is a political/satirical/comedy based in a country similar to Iraq. I wasn’t sure what to expect because I had no idea anything about the film and it took me a short while to understand just what kind of movie it was before I started to enjoy it. The movie itself was pretty good but what I enjoyed most was listening to John Cusack and Mark Leyner (co-writer) talk about the film, the United States, and basically everything. Being a resident of Canada we don’t get to see everything the United States is exposed too and we don’t get to live under its jurisdiction. I agree with John in a sense that something has to be done about the war and for the country but I also think that even though you can see in the work of all these artists that they want change, nobody really does anything besides that. Everyone just hides behind art or computers and the issues are talked about but there is never any real action. I don’t really know enough about the actual issues in Iraq so I’m not going to voice my own opinion about it and post it on the internet because it probably wouldn’t truly be my voice, so I’ll just leave it at that.

I Met the Walrus

Toronto

April 8

I’ve been wanting to go out and see this for a while and I missed it the first time they came and showed it, but luckily just in time for my birthday they came back and showed it again. So right off the bat I was happy about that. “I Met the Walrus” is basically an animated interview with John Lennon. When 14, Jerry Levitan snuck into John’s hotel room and recorded his conversations with him. He basically held onto on the tape for a while until recently deciding to do something with it. He contacting Josh Raskin and Alex Kurina from Ryerson to animate the work. The movie was nominated for a Best Animated Short Film 2008 Academy Award. I really enjoyed the film. It was done entirely in After Effects so it’s interesting to see and learn by watching how they did it. The best part about the experience was that after the film they talked to everyone about their experiences with the film industry, how they made it, and what it’s like to have an Academy Award nomination. It’s very real and possible for someone just graduating to make something like this, and I find their successes to be a source of inspiration.

Process Diary

Ira Nayman

My Kitchen

The kitchen assignment wasn’t very difficult. Basically, I brought my laptop upstairs to the kitchen table and typed. I started first with what was directly in front of me and just expanded. After the table I went around the room describing everything I saw. It got pretty boring so I tried to add a couple clever remarks, such as the missing tangerine, but I’m not sure if that went over too well. I thought there would be more difficulty since I had just moved recently into this house but I had no troubles. In fact, I unknowingly wrote well over the minimum number of words when I still had close to half the room to describe. I could easily go back into the assignment and type another 3000 words but there would be no point.

There was no creative process in this assignment. This was basically a typing exercise for me to get used to my new laptops keyboard. I have been a very visual person and took fine art in high school for all four years, and from that you really get to know what the grain on the table or the texture of the floor really look like, especially when you have to draw or paint it with agonizing detail. The whole “writing what you see” thing, unless mistaken, was an assignment to force other people who perhaps iconify objects able to realize that what they see isn’t an icon but a mixture of light. The writing process from this assignment therefore has a direct reference to an almost painfully slow rendering of a photo-realistic painting. Like I said earlier, the only real thing I learned from this assignment was how to type better on my laptop. This assignment would therefore be considered an exercise to learn my “tools” rather than my concepts.

Audio Interviews

Brad would be the first interview I did. Originally I wanted to record my uncle Ron who is a musician and was in a band many years ago, but I couldn’t figure out how to record the conversation over the internet. Ron lives close to 3 hours away and it would have been ideal to have his stories but it just wasn’t possible. An idea stemming from Ron, though, was recording someone over the internet. We just needed interviews, right? It was never said anywhere that you have to interview someone standing next to you. The only way for me to do this was to set up a meeting over Xbox Live. I used the voice-chat feature on Xbox Live and had a private chat with Brad and our interview began. Being that the interview was over technology and a platform designed for gaming I thought it would be an appropriate topic of interest, so we went into detail about gaming. Another interesting topic was the fact that we hadn’t seen each other for a while but were still able to connect to each other through Xbox, so this brought into questions things such as distance and school. Overall it was an enjoyable experience.

Tom was the second interview. He’s been in law enforcement for many years and I figured that he would have to have some good stories to tell. I also had to schedule a time to interview him because his work schedule fluctuates so much. During the interview Tom went on about this one case he had for a while, and though interesting, I felt that it would be good to include more than just one case. Being so serious I thought that it would also be best to mix it up and to hear about the less serious side of being a police officer. I would have liked to have more time for this interview and ask more questions but it wasn’t possible. This interview, out of the three, was probably my least favourite. Not because of Tom, he’s fine, just that the topic was for the most part too serious, it’s not something I’m totally interested in, and it was mostly just Tom talking and me listening. There wasn’t much interaction.

The interview with Craig was probably the one I had the most fun with. Craig’s been a good friend of mine since kindergarten and always has something interesting to say. I grabbed my laptop and just headed over to his house one day and that’s how it started. I turned on the recorder without him knowing at first and we just talked about stuff. I find things that happened in the past and during childhood interesting as it usually has a big impact on the way we see someone today, and we focused more on that for this interview. Dreams from childhood also came up. The interview was originally far too long and would also be impossible for me to transcribe, so I had to cut it down a lot. It was close to 20 minutes and I pretty much cut it in half.

Transcribing was a pain in the ass. I didn’t really think about it until I was doing Craig’s interview and figured that running a few minutes over wouldn’t kill me. So that means all the interviews ran more than 3 minutes. If I could type as fast as the interview went and not miss anything I wouldn’t have cared much about transcribing, but I couldn’t. I could type for about 15 seconds before I had to stop the audio file, go back a bit, hit play again and start typing. I eventually got to be so good at stopping and starting the audio though. I had it set to a hotkey so I would just alt+tab to the application, then hit space to pause it, alt+tab back and finish what I was typing, alt+tab again and hit space to play it again, alt+tab back and type more, and so on. Even with my process it took a good 4 hours or so to transcribe everything.

Audio Remix

This was more of a fun assignment for me. I used the open source program Audacity to mix everything. I liked the idea of dreams and nightmares and so I just played around with that for a while. I also always have problems going to sleep, I feel like it’s a waste of time. I stay up until 7 o’clock in the morning sometimes if I’m working on something, and at that point I force myself to sleep because I know I won’t have the same amount of energy the next night as I do this one. My art teacher once told me “There’s plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.” I found that very motivational. Sometimes, though, after not going to sleep for so long, things start to become… fuzzy? They start to have holes in them, they start to repeat, they make less and less sense until at one point everything mixes together and becomes completely incoherent. I based the design of this sound piece off of this concept. I found an amazing sample of Craig saying that he “couldn’t get to sleep,” so I made that my starting point. By repeating the words over and over again I was able to describe the repetitive process which begins to take form at night. Over and over again he goes until he becomes distorted. The sound now only makes sense because you heard the sample before it. Then, by mixing in other thoughts and ideas, it opens up the mind to think about everything else. Without sleep it’s easy for it to wander off. After bringing in a couple different samples and distorting them the sound piece itself makes absolutely no sense. You begin to wonder about what happened to the sound and how you got here. What am I listening to? This work is essentially a progression in the life of an insomniac. At the end of the work I cut off the quote from Craig and just left it at “sleep,” breaking the rhythm and breaking the distortion. It is at this point in time when the user finally breaks away from insomnia and is able to get to sleep.

Looking back on the work the only thing I would want to change is the tempo. Time tends to slow down during insomnia and I forgot to reflect that in the work. I would have liked to add ambient noise as well but the restrictions of no external sound invalidated that idea.

Everyday Algorithm

The everyday algorithm assignment was also a fun one. In the example the diagram was too messy. I hated to have to look back and forth between the diagram and the text. To be honest I only really looked at it for 10 seconds before I was fed up and went on to do something else. It was for that reason I wanted to make it more graphical and easy to read and follow along. I used Open Office Draw to draw out the diagram. I’ve never used the software before but it was great; very easy to use. I thought the best idea for a diagram would be one that poked fun at new media students and artists. Although not all the information is true about them it is at least humorous and some-what implied. First of all, all artists wear black shirts. Always. That’s why there isn’t a “no” option. From there I just went on about some technology and other things relating to both artists in general and new media. There is nothing I regret about this work and nothing I would want to change. I think it’s pretty solid and stable, my friend Tyler posted a link to it from his blog so he thought it was pretty good too, and he’s not even a new media student, so it’s good that some sort of outside audience understands it. I was trying to go for that, which is why I included such great stereotypes toward artists and geeks. Everyone always asks me what new media is and what new media artists do, so now I can just link them to the everyday algorithm and I won’t have to tell them.

Short Story

The short story was somewhat enjoyable. I had a good time coming up with the story, thinking about it, and all that, but the actual writing process was somewhat agonizing. I think I just don’t like writing a lot of words down. With mostly everything I do I focus on one thing, finish it, then move onto the next. So for a short story like this I did the majority of it all in one sitting. It was great to involve myself in such work, I felt like a real writer of kinds, but at the same time it was a lot of work and I don’t think I’d want to do it again anytime soon.

I tried to make the story have a cartoon-like feeling to it. I described his grandmother as an elasticy figure and drew scary shadows that crawled up the wall to try and persuade the reader that it was some type of surreal experience. That was the goal of the story more or less. Nightmares and these kinds of dreams have a more direct reference to childhood, as well as cartoons, imagination, and innocence. Besides the theme of the work I wanted to have some kind of underlying message for the reader to interpret. Most good stories tell us something that could fascinate us but underneath the descriptions there is usually a meaning or message we can all relate to. The meaning behind my story is basically that even though you may not believe in something, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And the same thing for the opposite.

What I learned from this work is that the internet is always down when you need it, so don’t every rely on it. I couldn’t upload my story to my website right away and I almost missed the deadline. Basically, try to get you’re work done well in advance so you have room to fix errors, miscalculations, and unexpected problems.

Short Story Explosion

I did not enjoy this assignment. It was very tedious, more so than just normal writing. I had to keep going back and forth between different pages and making sure certain things line up. I think it would have been a better idea to write it all out in advance, then try to put it onto different pages. I think I had some issues with things making sense, and having pages that actually had some kind of meaning to them rather than just filler. I wanted to have two very distinct endings, and options led to either one or the other. Near the end there was a point where I gave the reader their “last chance” to sort of save themselves from being eaten, and I think it might have been too obvious or something. The story after exploding it didn’t have the same feeling, rhythm and flow to it that was originally there when I created it. Basically, the explosion actually destroyed my story, then made me try to paste it back together in a with crappy white glue made out of html links.

There wasn’t much creativity involved in my process. It was kind of all cookie-cuttered. All the creative work was from before in the short story itself. The only thing was giving the user another option of not being eaten, but that was fairly easy to decide on. If the end of the story already involves being eaten the first thing that comes into your head as an alternative is “what if he didn’t get eaten?” So that’s how it went. One other thing I didn’t like with what I did was that I cut out the description of his grandmother if you chose one of the options. That was my favourite part of the short story and I was sad to let it go. So if i could’ve changed something then I would keep that part in somehow. But I don’t think I’d ever want to go back and do an assignment like this again. It reminded me too much of that terrible DVD we had to watch in class.

Interactivity Without Computers

This assignment was kind of cool. I got into thinking about animation and how all of that works, which is just the flashing of images really quickly to create an illusion of movement, and I thought about making a flipbook. The only thing was what was I gonna make in the flipbook. I thought about drawings and weird things like that, but then thought that would be too boring and unoriginal. I was wasting time on youtube when it hit me: what if I used youtube as the flipbook? So I decided upon one of the most popular and most modified video on the internet, which also happened to be really short so that was good, and I saved it to my harddrive. I wanted to have it so that if I printed the video then people would be able to draw on top of it and make their own modification of it, just like other users on youtube have done digitally. So I opened the files in Flash, exported all the frames as images, then printed them out. I actually had to add the play button and title on the first frame to make it look like it was from youtube. Afterwards I cut up all the frames and bound them together, and that was pretty much it. It did take a very long time though, far longer than I was expecting. The whole 9 seconds of footage was something like 180 frames. I cut off some of the last frames because the final 4 seconds of the video is more or less the same thing.

So I decided to hand in two videos, one being the already altered one, and the other being a blank one free for people to colour over and add their own effects. In class Andrea drew over one for a bit but I would’ve like to have more people draw something. I asked half a dozen but nobody wanted to. I think I should have drawn on the one book myself, then left the other one blank, rather than having one drawn on from the internet and the other one blank. I think it would be easier to see to the user what it is for them to do. Aside from that I think it was fairly well done. Everyone seemed to like it still. It was a long process though and I wouldn’t like to do it again. I wasn’t sure if the glue was going to work. I kept the books together with really big clips, then I glued the “spine” of the book, let it dry, then added some black tape for good measure in case the glue broke. They somehow managed to hold up and not break, even after getting them back. I think Andrea has them now and I haven’t heard if they are still alive or not. It doesn’t really matter but it is kind of interesting. I just used normal white glue, the same kind of stuff the kindergarteners like to eat. It was the only thing I had around at the time, and I most definitely was not going to sew the book closed. That would take ages.

Collaborative Story

The collaborative story was also another painful assignment. The style of it resembled closely to that of the short story explosion and that is probably why I didn’t enjoy it much. But at least we had fun creating the story, just assembling it was bad. Dan and I sat down in the lab in the second floor of image arts and ideas just came flying out. We had this idea of a terrible cop movie as we were planning it out, so I guess that was kind of our inspiration. The story had to be as ridiculous as possible. In the end I think it could have been more ridiculous, but whatever it was still alright. As we were planning this story we wrote down a timeline to make it easier to construct later. We wrote down the series of events for each character and what they were going to be doing at each node. We decided to have each their own perspective, so it would be a simultaneous story of two people both in first person. The best way to do this without mixing personalities and characteristics by accident was if we each took on one character and just wrote everything out according to this timeline, then threw them all together later and looked at what we created. It was kind of like one of those art pieces that evolve over time and you don’t really know what the outcome is going to be until it’s all there and you have a chance to take a step back and look at it together as a whole. So that was kind of interesting. I was the one that had to put it online though, and of course there had to be issues with syncing. Even though we followed the same timeline sometimes an event would happen at the end of the text rather than the beginning, so it was just slightly different. But over time and by the end the order was even more messy. So I had to go in there and cut and paste around between certain pages in order for it to all make sense and the reader doesn’t read the same event twice or anything like that.

If I had to change anything else about the work it would be that Brian actually did something. There could have been 3 perspectives and a longer series of events, perhaps a more ridiculous story, anything. Just new ideas. Brian’s been having a rough time with some things that I don’t really know much about so he wasn’t able to contribute to the assignment very much. I think that would have solved most of the problems with the story, but overall I’m still fairly happy with it. It’s written seriously about an obscene topic and that’s kind of what I like about it. If if was written differently or if the events were serious as well I don’t think I would have had any fun with the assignment at all. But because of that I was able to enjoy at least the creation of it.

Robert Appleton & Brian Lesser

Cell Phone Avatar

The cell phone avatar was my “gangstAr” assignment. I used the final product for both Brian Lesser’s Flash project 1 and Robert Appleton’s project. We were supposed to have a bunch of pictures and some checkboxes so when certain checkboxes are pressed down it had to change to the appropriate picture. I made all the pictures of me pretending to be some gangster or something, with different bling that could be applied. It was kind of funny and I enjoyed it. The programming part wasn’t very difficult. It was fairly straightforward and it was the first assignment for Brian so nothing spectacular was expected. The images were for Robert, and those were just hilarious. I set up my camera on a tripod and timer in my room and just pushed down the shutter, went and sat down, and had my picture taken about 50 times with different accessories and combinations of accessories. In Photoshop I batch edited them to add a stardom effect to add to the flashyness of the imagery. Finally I put all the images together in the flash movie and made it work with the code. It didn’t seem like a whole lot of work and wasn’t too difficult so I added a couple extra things in the way it looks really quickly, like a spinning star in the title as the “a” and whatnot.

I think it’s well done. There’s nothing I’d want to change about the assignment besides the focus of a couple pictures. It’s hard to focus on yourself if you can’t reach the camera when you’re taking the picture. I set it to manual focus and focused on the right distance but sometimes I was a little too close or a little far away from the focal point, so it made a slight difference, and you wouldn’t really notice it if some of the other images weren’t as sharp. The effects look good and the code works though so I’m happy with it.

Animated Cell Phone Avatar

I had fun with this assignment. The project is supposed to be an animation that loops while a phone rings, then once it is picked up it may stop on a certain frame or something. It was up the the students interpretation on how it actually worked. We were supposed to try and include the images from the previous assignment into this one but I don’t think they would have worked well enough. There wouldn’t really be any meaning behind it. So I just took one image that I liked from the cell phone avatar assignment of me. For some reason I guess I have a fascination with robots and post-apocalyptic earth, so some of my drawings are kind of geared toward that, and so with my avatar I took it to the next level. I decided that because I have this fascination and some people know I draw these really retarded looking robots, what if I drew myself transforming into one? So that’s where the idea of the project came from and I just went with it.

For the process I put the image into Flash and traced over it, then I went to the last frame and drew the picture of a robot in the same pose. From there I went to the middle frame and drew what it would look like exactly in between forms, then split it again so it was a quarter, and again so it was an eighth, and then played it. There were some problems with it so I had to go back and forth a lot to try and make sure it looked perfect and that nothing was moving too quickly or too slowly. It had to be good, basically. So I made it good. It took about 2 hours of drawing until I was totally finished. That’s really not that much work for animation. I’ve done some stuff that took 4 months with 3 other people to make a short video. I was happy with the result and left it how it was. I don’t think there would be anything I could even change about this assignment to make it better. I can’t think of anything. I got a perfect mark on it but that doesn’t mean anything. Usually there is still a little something that you could do better but there was nothing with this. I had a great time making the animation too.

Guess the Number

This assignment was fairly difficult. I used to be good with actionscript a few years ago but I forgot it all, and then adobe came out with actionscript 3.0, so that didn’t really help. I had to ask a few people for help with the coding. None of it really sank in. It was after this assignment I decided I was going to go through all the effort of really learning actionscript so that I’d be the person other people would go to for help with their assignments, rather than the other way around. So that’s what I did. This is probably the most important assignment to me. The assignment itself was absolutely terrible. It was like a kick in the face to get me moving. I needed this to start up my passion for coding again. And I needed it for me to come to the realization that I needed to start working again, in order to have a passion for something that I do rather than just getting it done. It affected more than just coding though, some of my other assignments as well I tried to really have a desire to finish and to do it well, the way I want it to be. So it was a turning point for me.

Falling Objects

This project took a really long time. I spent most of it for this project just going over actionscript, the notes from Brian’s class and external sources, so that I could learn how to write and understand actionscript better. I decided that for this assignment I was going to do the whole thing without asking anybody for help, and that after this one I would be far better off in the future to do more work in Flash without even have to look at outside sources. It was a big undertaking, especially for a lot of students, so we had an extension for another couple weeks in order to finish the assignment. That was good for me because then I had a couple more weeks to learn what I needed to do.

I started off simple and built the movieclips I needed and drew out all the graphics that had to be replaced. I just made them follow a space theme with asteroids and spaceships. Those were my favourite type of arcade games as a kid (and still are) and so I have a bit of a connection with them. After implementing them and testing them I got to the hard part that was coding the rest of the game. It took forever to try and get everything working. I had this one problem where whenever the sideways asteroids were called in the game wouldn’t end unless you died. Basically you could never win. I went through all my code for days and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I was about to give up when I realized that one of the positives had to be negative in order to destroy the asteroid once it left the screen. After that I was basically done, I sent it to a couple people for testing. They were able to beat the game so I made it harder just for fun.

Final Project

The Final assignment for Brian I found to be actually easier than the one before it. It might be because of the stress I had from the last assignment. I finished the assignment in 2 weeks because I thought it was due then but it wasn’t. He gave the class more time to finish their work. So with that time I’ve been the one going around helping people, just like how I said I would. So that was kind of exciting. I spent a little more time doing the visuals on this assignment. I hand drew all the characters and things and then imported them into Illustrator. I vectorized the shapes and coloured them in Illustrator then imported them to Flash. From there I put them right into the timeline and replaced the previous graphics quite easily. After replacing the graphics I read through the whole programs code to try and understand how it’s being built, and it wasn’t really that complex. I went through the list on Blackboard of the things I needed to do and I just went through it and checked them off. I had a couple problems along the way though which were kind of silly. For one I didn’t remember that all the assets for the movie are preloaded into an assets section, so I forgot to upload the door and the new characters onto that frame so they would be loaded in the rest of the movie. The second silly mistake was that to make level 3 I basically just copied all the code from level 2 and pasted it to level 3. I was positive it was working but every time I ran the game it would always skip level 3. I finally realized that the exits for both levels were on top of each other, meaning that as soon as I finished level 2 I would load level 3 and finish it as well, in about 1/30th of a second. After I worked that out there were no real problems with it. I actually enjoyed this project much more than all the other Flash projects. It was more fun to do because I actually knew what I was doing and understood what I was doing.

Pierre Trembley

“A Love Story” Animation

This animation I did was one of the assignments that took the most amount of work. It was tremendous. Usually when I work on animations that take a really long time, which is pretty much always, I get bored and frustrated and just want to hurry p and finish the damn thing already. With this animation I had more of a passion for it, so it was kind of cool in a way, even though it was a lot of work. I started first by storyboarding everything and figuring out how I was going to do the assignment. I’ve never used After Effects strictly for simple 2d animation before but I thought it would be interesting to try. I drew out by hand all the frames and characters and did the same process as before with Illustrator, then instead of opening them in Flash I opened them in After Effects. I made small clips with running animations and things like that and just built up my library at first. After you build it and get all the pieces you want it’s generally fairly easy to assemble it all.

Now moving onto the actual animation part, it wasn’t entirely difficult, just tedious. Even though I thought I finished my library I found myself going back to the drawing board and drawing up something else to add. That’s one of the reasons I think it took so long. The whole movie is very easy to do besides one scene where the camera moves in 3d space. I wanted that to be the first 3d scene because it had to be huge. The factory had to be breathtaking. I wanted the viewer to experience what it felt to be the main character in this scene. It took a fair bit of construction with all the parts to make the perspective look right, and I tried to exaggerate the size of the building by having the walls fade off to white. I think it worked.

Everyone told me they enjoyed the movie afterwards so that was a relief. The worst thing is when you spend so long on something you don’t see all the mistakes you made anymore, but everyone else with a fresh pair of eyes can. Pierre told me it was beautiful but could possibly be sped up a bit, or broken off of the music, in order to make it a stronger piece. I agree with him. Rather than having some beauty and then a bit of waiting around before something else that’s good happens I think it would be a good idea to speed the whole thing up. I don’t have time to go back into it and I already put it on youtube so I don’t think I ever will, although it is a learning experience and next time I will remember to think of something like that. I think I just needed an extra day or so to rest to review it so I would see the problem before I proclaimed I was finished, because I noticed it pretty much the next day. I still had a good time doing the work for this and I still think it’s a very fun animation though.

David Green

Processing Final Project

This assignment was one of the ones I had the most fun with. Processing just hooked me. I started working with it again and I forgot how addictive it is. I think I stayed up about 3 nights in a row until 6am just tweaking some features. After I was done I ended up making another one which kind of compliments the first. Greg and I worked on the first one mostly and I just got carried away on the other one. It’s not that he didn’t do any work, it’s that I just wanted to do more. That doesn’t happen often enough. The work downloads music from a stream on the internet, either classical or piano, and generates vector-based visuals which correspond to the rhythm. The whole point is for the project to be completely generative so that no 2 times you play it will be exactly the same. They may be similar, but never the same. The first one we did was the messy, abstract, deconstructed, annoying piece entitled “Unclassica.” It was an experiment. We didn’t totally know where we were going with it until it was done. The code is a little bit messier in this version as well. The clean, structured sketch with soft piano music relates to the other but has an energy of its own. Both works I think compliment each other and that’s another reason I think they are so cool.

There isn’t very much about the assignment I would want to change. Overall I think it’s a strong piece. The only thing I can think of would be to make the piano sketch more structured and have more objects in it. The electricity is cool and everything but I think that if it was more 3d and more solid figures t would look better. The objects could possibly grow or shrink based on the waveform. It would be a fun idea and more different visually from the other piece and that might make it stronger, but I think it’s fine the way it is. I’m thinking about doing my final project for Appleton in Processing now. The language makes more sense to me than actionscript and I may be able to do more of what I want without having to go learn a whole bunch of stuff first. I want to be able to just do it and play with it for a while and get all the bugs worked out, so basically I have this assignment to blame for that.

unclassica

Processing.org sketch/experiment (0135b).
Fetches classical music from web streams and adds filters and visualizations to it in real-time.

colour experiments

I havent posted in a while so here’s some stuff I’m working on:

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Basically what I do is get some really bad pictures, then I fuck around with the colours until they look remotely interesting. In the final image I combined all the pictures into one, fucked around with it some more, and now its a work of art. This proves photography is for chumps.

A Love Story

Short Story Explosion

A choose your own adventure mash-up of “Don’t be Afraid to use a Nightlight”

click here to begin