There is now video evidence of my brief appearance at Flash On The Beach earlier this year, currently residing on the front page of the FOTB site. I hate seeing myself on film, but fortunately the majority of the video consists of the artwork I showed (from my “Abandoned Art” Generative Art project), which is perhaps the only reason why, three months later, I can now safely watch this without cringing.
Well, when I say “speaking”, I mean I’ve got three minutes! Which should be just enough time to get on stage, get my laptop hooked up to the projector, make sure it’s got sound, introduce myself, apologise for having no time left and get off.
I’ve been selected to present one of the Flash On The BeachElevator Pitches, twenty micro-sessions showcasing “hot new talent”. On first hearing of the idea I thought it would be impossible to fit anything meaningful into so short a time – when I spoke at Flash Brighton earlier in the year it ran to more like three hours. But, as Seb reminded me, this is more of a teaser trailer rather than a full feature, so I’ve now got something in mind (something new and previously unseen) which I hope will do the trick. I don’t think there’ll be time for questions though.
To get an idea of what you might expect, see my recent postings over at zenbullets.com. And if you’re at the conference please come and see me. You will be allowed 3.5 seconds in which to applaud.
There are two things I have had on my to-do list for a few years – 1. do a Generative Art project, and 2. do an Open Source project, so this month I have ticked off two boxes at once with my new 100 Abandoned Artworks site.
A year ago I saw Robert Hodgin speak at FOTB07, which introduced me to Processing, an Open Source Java-based programming language. It is always good to teach yourself a new language every few years, just to keep things fresh, and to give you new perspectives on your work. And while ActionScript is still great, as the language has evolved from the hacky AS1 to the strict, ordered, enterprise-focussed AS3, it has lost a lot of its sense of fun and experimentation; the thing that attracted me to the language in the first place.
So, while I can still use AS3 to make my clients happy, Processing can be my playground. Which is the idea behind 100 Abandoned Artworks (http://www.abandonedart.org). I don’t have the time, or the sympathetic business partners, to be able to emulate Hodgin’s sophisticated works, so instead I am intending to do a high-volume, fast turn-around project (the only thing I can do with a wife, child and 20odd clients to keep happy).
Over the next 100 weeks I will produce an experiment a week and throw it out there, in whatever state I have got it to before one of my dependents puts a stop to my playtime. But I will also post the source code, so if anyone wants to take these works and run with them, or adapt them for another medium, they are welcome to.
I’m hoping it’ll produce some good stuff, and you’ll be able to see a upward curve in the quality of the work over the two years. Make sure you subscribe to the feed, because the more subscribers I have, the harder it is for me to bow out and quietly abandon the project.
This is going to take longer to explain than it did to build (literally 10 minutes, and 8 of those were spent googling for the image). Click above to see it in action.
Richard Lord was guest speaker at our Flash Brighton user group last night, presenting his Flint particle system. I think every creative coder has found themselves toying with particle effects at some point (do check out my generative stuff) but Rich’s system takes all the heavy lifting from the coding and just leaves the fun part. And it can create some really authentic looking smoke, in very few lines of code.
The movie above is my riff on a very old David Lynch photograph from his “Nudes and Smoke” collection (see here). A lot of Lynch’s “still” art work involves incorporating moving parts into paintings and sculpture, so I hope he would approve of this subtle animation.
Rich will be introducing Flint to a wider audience at FOTB08 next month.
I’m sure this isn’t the first PaperVision game, but I might make claim on it being the simplest. But then I only really had a day free to do this, which doesn’t allow the time for any sexy 3D modelling or texturing. Otherwise, you’d be looking at day-glo Tron Light Cycles racing around the grid below, rather than blue blobs. The keys are A/D or Left/Right arrows, and the idea is to collect the green things. The rest you can work out for yourself. Fullscreen version here.
What you’re looking at is PaperVision 3D. Not the silly snake game, but the Flash 3D engine rendering all those polygons. PV3D is probably the greatest Flash Open Source success story to date. At my local nerd club, a recurring topic of conversation is the “Open Source question” – i.e. should I open source my code or not, and what exactly do I gain by giving away my work for nothing? The creators of PaperVision, Carlos Ulloa, John Grden and the rest of the crew, answer this question. Rather than being the authors of a great 3D engine no-one knows about, by setting their code free they have become the leading experts in a 3D engine that EVERYONE uses.
At November’s FOTB conference PV3D was on every developer’s lips, within six months even clients are asking for PaperVision. By giving away their work, the creators of PV3D have made themselves coding mega-stars. This is how Open Sourcing works, the trade is in kudos, not commodities. The Open Source movement is the economic paradigm shift of the 20th Century, it happened in software five years ago, last year it made it’s mark on music, this year it will be publishing. The year after that … who knows. As the Chili Peppers advised, give it away, give it away, give it away now…
Currently Flex Developers are a rare commodity, hard to pin down for freelance work. This may be about to change, in Brighton anyway, after Flash Brighton’s Big Day Out event, where Adobe were generous enough to give out a free copy of Flex Builder 2 to everyone who attended.
The Flash Devs of Brighton have been really spoilt this month, with Flash On The Beach, The Big Day Out, and the rest of the Digital Festival. I’ve been to so many events over the last few weeks that my collection of freebie promotional geek t-shirts is now spilling out of the drawer.
Major respec’ to the Flash Brighton crew for the organisation behind the Big Day Out, it was a really good day. Two highlights – 1. Seb and Dom’s 15 minute masterclasses. 2. Andrew Shorten’s preview of Thermo (which is a long way away, but is already getting everyone excited).
I’ve been getting very into the work of Jared Tarbell after seeing him at FOTB week before last. There were no shortage of generative artists working in Flash at that conference, wowing us with animations, but Jared goes one better than most of his contemporaries by open-sourcing all of his stuff. His throwaway Flash experiments can become a launching platform for another coders exploration.
2. Just about everyone seems to think we should be rediscovering the play in our work.
Even Keith Peters was suggesting we quit our jobs and start making casual games for a living. (Next year the theme will be “Flash – not just a toy”)
3. There is a revolution in Flash audio just around the corner.
4. 99% of what we do as developers is shit, but we need to do shit to make that 1% of masterpiece. (Andy Polaine paraphrasing Hemmingway)
5. Flex is not exciting any more, it just IS.
(Same goes for everything else we were excited about following FOTB06 – Papervision, AIR, etc)
6. Flash is so last week. We should all be learning Processing instead.
7. The Dead Sea is dead because nothing flows out of it. This is why we should be giving away at least 10% of our stuff. (Chris Orwig) Preferably 10% of the shit, not the masterpiece I presume. (Personally, I advocate giving it all away).
Transitions – utterly useless from a usability perspective? Rubbish.
Transitions can often contribute more to an application’s look and feel than fonts, colours and sounds. Most of what we present as multimedia comes down to pages of data, laid out attractively, with some way of navigating in-between them. But why have just a simple page to page sequence when, with thoughtful use of transitions, you can give a sense of space. A few examples:
http://www.leoburnett.com/
This is an old favourite, but still a goodie. It’s a portfolio site that is just a series of pages, but the way they are connected together makes it feel like a 3d environment to be explored. The pen scribble that you leave behind is the most inspired trick, as this a) orients you to show where you’ve been, b) leaves ‘evidence of use‘ behind as you explore (much underused in multimedia).
http://www.sixthsenseuk.com/
This is by our local chums futurlab, and I like it a lot. The desktop metaphor is a well used cliche, but to do it as smoothly as this you find yourself exploring just for the joy of watching the transitions, not just to find what you’re looking for.
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
This isn’t Flash, it’s processing, but there are plenty of great navigation ideas in here. In fact it’s essentially a site of nothing but experimental navigation ideas. Again, it is so visually appealing it wouldn’t matter if this was data about the sale of dental equipment, it would still be great.
There were two sessions at FOTB that got me thinking about transitions, especially as FM are planning a showcase site at the moment, which will be a great opportunity for a bit of experimental navigation. Firstly, Tink’s Flashing Flex talk, showed how simple it is to style Flex and not feel limited by the framework. There’s no reason Flex cannot have the same dynamic animation behind it as Flash does, because they are essentially the same product after all.
Secondly, Carlos Ulloa’s demonstrations of Papervision showed how it can be used for much more than just animating 3d fish and spaceships. Just a simple 3d transition between two planes can make the difference between an application being a series of pages to it being an “environment”. See Carlos’s work for Sony Bravia as a good example.
It would have been so easy to go for yet another generative artist for the pick of FOTB07 Day 3, but good though Jared Tarbell was, today the thing that blew me away was the first session to go so far over my head it made me feel like a junior again (which was a nice feeling).
Flash is absolutely crap at playing with sound. All you can do is shift the pan and the volume of imported sounds really. Unless you get in and start hacking around with the byte code that is, then you can actually start generating sound. This is what Andre Michelle has been doing recently. Once you have tricked Flash into generating sound, if you know what you’re doing, you can start playing with the wave and, next thing you know, you’ve got a synthesiser.
My Pick of FOTB07 Day 2 – Robert Hodgin. His message was simple: forget Flash, try processing (a great message for a Flash conference, cheers). Processing is an open source animation API built on Java, which, as Robert demonstrated, can produce stuff like this:
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