In life, one must have a balance between the pre-rendered and the generative. So, because I’ve been spending so much time in After Effects lately, the goal for this weekend was to create something pretty in code. After a rather inspiring conversation with a fellow artcoder I remembered that I had been wanting to play with three.js for a while. And, here’s my first experiment. It’s not that complicated, just an array of very elongated spheres floating around with a single point light source and some bloom in post. But I think the effect is pretty nice.
Click on the thumbnail to open it in this window. It will work best on Chrome, it should work fine on Firefox, and if you’re running IE I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but the DOM ain’t one.
Many things to @jerome_etienne for the three.js boilerplate, Paul Lewis for the fantastic Getting Started Tutorial, and of course MrDoob for writing the thing in the first place.
A study in audio-reactive form and light. The song is an excerpt from “Aurora” by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. More on them may be found at http://www.raster-noton.net/anrs/
I got to thinking, people do all this stuff with particle effects being all bright and shiny, what would happen if you made particles … of DARKNESS? (also a friend showed me a nice trick with aux systems being used to create sparks on surface contact, so I wanted to play with that)
I uploaded and linked an earlier version of this, and then immediately saw a bunch of improvements that needed to be made, so I did. I improved the camera motion a lot, made significant changes to the lighting/ color correction, and made some minor changes to the particle system. Oh, and replaced the dummy floor texture I accidentally left in last time with a real one. It’s nice, though, that on this case my turnaround time between “this is awesome!” and “oh I can do this much better” is in this case measured in minutes. The original is still on vimeo if you want see the evolution.
I don’t know what it is, but it’s trapped in that tiny room with you, and It Wants Out.
This is a still from the video I shot at the Occupy Port of Oakland March, 12.12.2011. Color manipulation done in After Effects. Really I just made this so I could use it as a wallpaper, but you’re welcome to it if you’d like it. Click through for 1920×1080 version.
This is the video for Unwoman’s cover of Hurt, off of her album Uncovered. It was shot and edited (minimally) by me. This was originally meant to be the key shot in a more complex video, but when we watched this we both knew instantly that it carried itself so well that doing much more to it would risk overworking it. A gorgeous sunset, a beautiful woman, and a fantastic song; what more does one need?
This is a video I made for the Renegade Lights #1 compilation. Renegade Lights is a music/video art collective, and I am one of the VJs who gets to play with this incredibly talented collection of musicians. The downloadable version of RL#1 includes videos by myself and CSTNG_SHDWS, and this is mine.
The music is by me. The video is based around “Techniques of Hand Sending”, a WWII era U.S. Army instructional film on morse code, which is now in the public domain. All other material was either created by me for the film or modified recordings of my live sets. Fun fact: This was edited on my older macbook, which was incapable of rendering more than 1 minute of effected footage at a time, so the entire thing was rendered in chunks and pieced together into a final. Which is the main reason there’s not more going on.
If you would like to hear more of my so-called music, I can be found on bandcamp under my musical project Autopoesis
Hey, look up, up there at the top of the page. You see those lines and circles and stuff? That’s an svg being dynamically generated on load by javascript, using the raphael library. It is different every time you reload the page. I think it’s pretty cool.
I recently applied for a frontend position at a largeish company, and as a part of that process was given a code test. I didn’t get the job, but I cleared with them that I could put the results on my site. It involved primarily parsing the results of an RSS feed using javascript.
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I just threw together a quick experiment using the Javascript InfoVis Toolkit to show weather forecasts. It uses jquery to pull the next 5 days predicted temperatures in jsonp format from worldweatheronline.com (which I am using only because they seem to have a relatively consistent API. Turns out it’s kind of hard to get json weather data for some reason) and then dumps the results into a form that jit can understand.
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When I was doing the most recent rework of this site, my original plan was to handcode a simple content management system. I eventually abandoned this for two main reasons. The major part was that I was building the structure just to be a portfolio, and I decided rather late in the process that I wanted a blogging component, as well as some of the other functionality that comes for free with wordpress. The second half is that I had, unfortunately, coded myself into a corner.
