New blog

From now on I will be using a wordpress blog based on my website! Check it out by going here:
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/blog/

Javascript GDA converting

I am trying to figure out some very basic javascript, the hope is that eventually we may be able to construct Louise's(http://www.louiselawlor.blogspot.com) 3Cubed project which examined peoples intake of food and placed the results in ingredients tables(http://www.louiselawlor.co.uk/3cubed.htm) into some form of interactive website. However Javascript is very new and quite difficult to me, also unsure of whether we'd need something like PHP to store the results while they send to a result... and how much customization we can get with Javascript. (Trying to present them in the same way as her original projects)

See the quick example I've had a go at thus far, which converts the number of packets of crisps you've eaten to tell you the ammount of fat and the % that is of your GDA
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/testconvert.html

Obvisously this is very simple but hey I'm a beginner. If you have any advice how we'd go about building this just give me a buzz

Old school internet

I am currently trying to collect lost things of the internets, right click warnings, dodgy gifs, midi files and pages made on the express page interest me. Do you remember angelfire, geocities, lycos, or maxpages? Did you adorn webpages with guestbooks, counters, animated gifs and brightly coloured and massively padded tables?

http://web.archive.org/web/20000229121827/expage.com/

If you have old internet junk you wish to share with me please email it to me@amythornley.co.uk

P.S. Do you remember frames? http://victorian.fortunecity.com/brambles/4/frames/

DIY Screen Printing

Reblogged from Louise Lawlor's blog:

This is mine and Amy's first attempt at screen printing. We made the screen using a cheap photo frame and a mesh fabric stapled over it and then covered each side with the emulsion and exposed the image onto it using the sun (which took several attempts to get the timing right)
For a first attempt I think it was a great success, needs more work to get the timing just right, also the material we used was a little too thin so it let ink through even with the emulsion on it.

Stay tuned for the 2nd attempt!

Clone Troops dancing to J-Pop? Check!

This is possibly the best thing I've ever seen.

Repeat-x, Repeat-y backgrounds

Submitted a few backgrounds for repeat-x, repeat-y


See more here:
http://www.repeatxrepeaty.com/

ID3 Final Show: Sync

Went to the Interactive Design final year show last week, it was really amazing! They had an interactive turntable piece were you moved small circle shaped markers to change how a music piece sounded, as well as everyones work on an interactive website and another piece called 'Circuit Breakers'. It was a really great night and definately something to attempt to match next year!

And here's a small video of the making of filmed by Jamie Gregson:

Jump!

Went to Sheffield to see one of my college friends final show, there was some really good work there. However I do not have any photo's of the work, I have this rather silly photo taken near the train station of myself and some of my friends doing a classic "mid jump" photo.

Unknown Pleasures

Taking some time to enjoy Joy Division today listening to Unknown Pleasures, one of my favourite music covers ever. What a design!

Books

New books finally arrived today, I initially ordered Rafael Rozendaals 'Big Long Now' in book format, simply a book of doors. But because the order took so long I also got the latest edition of the atomic acitvity books as well. A really odd book which the cover lends nothing to the inside! To read more about it click here: http://www.atomicactivity.com/activity/the-girl-with-the-blanket Pretty nifty! ooo sound!

Barts Blackboard

Really love this by the work club who invite a different artist to decorate their blackboard in their studio every six months.

Every single line ever written on the Springfield Elementary School blackboard! 2 days, 20 white markers, 288 lines and 7,697 characters.

Check out the wall at http://www.work-club.com/blackboard

Star Wars in Lego in 2.5 minutes

An animation of for the original star wars trilogy made of lego, in 2.5 minutes. Fast and funny!

Processing website

http://www.amythornley.co.uk/ps/index.html
Here is a website with all of the stuff on from my processing project. Enjoi!

Break your socks!

Went to a fun little night on Thursday organized by Johnathan Robertson and a few other 3rd years to raise money for the Interactive Design final show. They had live screen printing, illustration and a few audio visual presentations including a great light piece by Mike Tierney which you can see properly here: http://www.vimeo.com/11384068

Here are a few photos from the event








I also bought this screen-printed poster, Jurrasica park ftw!

Video tracking

Have been tracking today with videos and webcam feed, pretty cool stuff I have to say. I've got quite a few results, you can have a go yourself by downloading one I've made here: Webcam motion tracking

Note: You can use this if you have a webcam or video camera, you may have to open something like photobooth or imovie before hand for it to recognise your device is on as it picks up the last used device.


This one detects the colour red and follows that. Hence the rose.


This one follows the motion, the first one is the video itself as the object(s) following the motion. The webcam can be turned on and off but the motion still tracked.


This one follows the motion and fades away.

Another experiment I wanted to do was to try and track the white ball in a game of snooker. This is actually harder than expected because there are other areas of white or motion on the table. Here is a quick example of how it worked anyway:

(image may take a while to load)

Pong

Today I have been playing with: http://www.trsp.net/teaching/gamemod/ which encourages you to create your own game mod for pong by playing around with a few figures in the code. Really interesting stuff! Heres a few results I've come up with:







Ext. applets and More:
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/pong1/index.html
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/pong2/index.html
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/pong3/index.html
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/pong4/index.html

Strobelight

Made a simple strobe light effect using vectors and rotation with a few for loops in processing:

Click the mouse to alter the colour




Ext. applet:
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/strobelight.html

Type and Code

Today I've been experimenting in processing with text, simple stuff but with some nice results even just as eye candy. I was inspired by this workshop called 'Type and Code' (http://www.yeoahn.com/typecode/index.html) and decided to play around with some of the techniques it covered on the website.

Video of some of the animations can be viewed below, the quality has suffered a bit but for the record the white dots are @'s and probably my favourite. Now if only I could remember how I did it:


Hope to experiment more soonly!

Snake Experiments

I am trying to build one of my ideas from earlier in the year during the 'show us something' project.

Show us something minisite

Ofcourse I am not trying to do this in processing. I'll be honest I may have torn half my hair out today. Stress! I've produced a few results though but am a long way off making it anywere near close to the imagined result.

Here is a version of it simply following the mouse:




As you can tell it's not perfect and I couldn't figure out how to distance the image apart equally (Still can't!) I've since made a version were you control the movement of the dot with the keys.

Use the a key to move left
s to move right
w to move up
and z to move down
Note: MAKE SURE YOU CLICK INSIDE OF THE APPLET






or view it externally here.
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/snake4.html

And here is one that was an accident. Use the same controls but have a sonic like movement instead! This is wrong but it was an accident achieved while trying to get a trail to go behind the dot, of other dots.

View it here:
Sonic snake!

Still stuck on how to do this so have had to resort to asking on the processing forum! Really hoping I am able to achieve this, even if not an actual snake game just having a trail would be nice.

My Favourite Blogs

Decided to post this list of a couple of my favourite websites/blog stops. Most of these I visit everyday for an injection of inspiration, knowledge or laughs.

Geekologie
A blog for geeks and all things geeky. Mostly for laughs, great, great website! Recommend it to all who find anything to do with star wars, super heroes or random things on the internet funny.

It's Nice That
Another fairly well known blog that posts a host of lovely design things found across the internet.

Today and Tomorrow
Most of you probably know this one, one of the best blogs out there for art and design inspiration.

Mental Floss
A website for knowledge junkies, has lots of top 10 'interesting fact' type things that are really interesting.

Technobob
A blog about gadgets and gizmos galore. If you love technology this is the blog for you.

Johnson Banks: Thought for the Week
Blog of the design company Johnson Banks. Lots of inspiration from a top UK design company.

A couple of other random favourites:
Grafik Blog
Site Inspire
Data visualization
Rafael Rozendaal's Blog

Bits and Bobs

Few more experiments I've done with processing:

Ball experiments using objects in separate tabs, main different with these is the coding:
Horizontal and vertical balls
Diagonal balls

And a really simple experiment from the other day just using random animation of squares. Hurts your eyes a bit but is cool.




And that might be it for today, brains melted a bit. Have a lot more to learn and it's difficult as it feels like I'm getting nowhere with the visuals atm as it's all about the syntax.

Moving cats

Made these simple moving cats using the object code from the previous post but spruced up a little. Next stage is to have objects in separate processing files.




Ext. applet and source codes:
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/cat.html

myBrain.explode();

If you're wondering why I havn't posted much on processing in a while it's because I am currently learning probably the most challenging and uncreative part of the language. I am learning syntax essentially and how to make the code easier, and to be able to move further on with the code.

The two bits I am racking my brain to try and thoroughly understand atm are objects and functions. A function in processing is something like a square or a circle, something that processing knows how to draw. Creating your own functions means you could create a collection of shapes or a new shape, then make it into a function so that it can be called like a normal function.

For example, if I made a collection of shapes to represent a cat, and made it into a function I could then tell processing to drawCat; appose to having to write rect(100, 100, 200, 100); etc.

Objects I'm still just beggining to fathom. The idea is you can put the variables (attributes of something, for example the attribute of a cat may be it's size and colour) the setup (start the cat) and the draw (draw the cat, it's colour and size) into one code instead of putting it into the processing code in seperate areas. In other words it's all about keeping code clean, tidy and easier to understand and edit.

Example:
//Declare the cat exists
Cat myCat;

//Start object
void setup() {
 size(400, 400);
myCat = new Cat();
}

//Draw background
void draw() {
background(255);
//Draw cat
myCat.display();
}

//Cat variables
class Cat {
color c;
float xpos;
float ypos;
float xspeed;

// Giving the variables values
Cat() {
c = color(0);

// dividing the width and height by 2 makes the position the center of the canvas
xpos = width/2;
ypos = height/2;
}

//Then add a function to it to draw the cat
void display() {
ellipseMode(CENTER);
fill(c);
ellipse(xpos, ypos, 100, 100);
ellipse(xpos, ypos+120, 170, 250);
triangle(xpos-20,ypos-30,xpos-35,ypos-60, xpos-45, ypos-20);
triangle(xpos+20,ypos-30,xpos+35,ypos-60, xpos+45, ypos-20);
}
}

This will give you this:



Which fair enough we could get ordinarily anyway by using just the simple draw function. However you can now load that object as many times as you want, and you can create a new processing file specifically for the cat so that it doesn't clutter up your main proccessing document. Just a way to keep more organized and make it easier. If you also change the cat code to include arguments (similar to variables or attributes) you will then be able to load the object in again and also change aspects of it. This is what I am learning atm. It all seems very complicated for the sake of it but trying to power through in the hope it will make my life easier when it comes to making more complex things later.

Title Sequence

Title sequence for the 80's film 'War Games'. I recreated a computer's DOS effect along with similar computer graphics for the radar system used in the film to create the titles. They were then re-filmed to make them look more authentic.

I then used lots of footage from in and around the cold war as the film was made around the end of the cold war and about missile's being launched between Russia and the US.

Finally added the sound of 'Two Tribes' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood which is again about war.

Gravity!

Playing around with gravity and speed in these simple ball interactions.

Click the balls to stop and start them bouncing. Gravity and speed varies according to how long you leave them to bounce and how they bounce in accordance to each other. If you leave them they will eventually cease to bounce.

And the first one I did was a simple click and the ball starts, click again and it stops type thing.

External Links:
Single ball
Coloured balls

Buttons

Starting to work out basic buttons, these are very mundane examples but just getting the gist of things. These should work on the blog. Will go back to links if they don't though.

External links:
Fading buttons
Moving button

Showreel 2010

Showreel of my work from years 1 and 2:

I got 99 posts but a...

This is my 100th post!

GIFFF!

my gif is finally on I AM NOT AN ARTIST. yayy. Also check out the rest, mah00siive update. lots of cool ones.

http://iamnotanartist.org/gif.php?id=243

Calculated Movements

Early video art by Larry Cuba in 1985. Extremely cool!

Angelo Plessas

Just found another great flash artist this morning a little similar to Rafael Rozendaal.

A lot of his work is very abstract like Rafael but great interaction and really interesting. He also posts a lot of the source to his work which is really good of him, so if you like a piece you can probably find the code for how he did it.

A few screenshots of my favourite pieces:

His website: http://www.angeloplessas.com/index.html
His blog: http://www.angelosays.com/

Decode 1

Went to London yesterday along with Louise to see the Decode exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum (http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/decode/) It was a really great day and exhibition was awesome, it showcased works from interactive designers across the globe. There was an awful lot of inspiration to gather from it and it really put my mind at ease that what I'm doing has some worth in it. There was a lot of work involving processing too so really helpful for my self initiated brief.

I'll post some photos in a few days when we develop the films (we forgot cameras so had to buy some disposables, hopefully they'll turn out!)

For now here are a few photos of the programme we got, which is lovelly:




And an @ sign I bought from the V and A shop. Thinking I may turn @ into my design identity for when I leave uni.



More soon!

Star City

Went to the Nottingham Contemporary for the first time with some friends yesterday to see an exhibition called star city, which was about the future under communism. It took some influences from the Cold War so it was kind of helpful for my title sequence too. There was some great work there including a ginormous astronaut that you could walk inside of.



Can't see these too well on this photo, but I really liked the prints of the jewels in the background. They had photographs to represent communism with lines over the top to create jewels. Simple but nice. Also that big structure there was made from cardboard tubes and you could sit on it, bit creaky mind!

Probably have more photos soon as well from one of my friends cameras [=

Click here to see more about the event

mouseX > width/2

Experimenting with Boolean expressions today. They control things which are either true or false, for example if '15 is greater than 20' is false, so if x was 15, and y was 20 'x > y' would be false. Not sure this makes any sense at all. But I've experimented with some simple animations that move and change in accordance to the direction of your mouse. So when the mouse in the left side of the screen = true for example it moves the animation accordingly and changes it's size.

Applets and source codes:
Experiment 1 - Squares
Experiment 2 - Coloured circles

Learning Processing: Day 02

Here are other results, aside from Drog that I've achieved thus far. Very basic things but I am learning after all. It's begging to get trickier now so results may begin to slow!

Few screenshot examples:

Links to applets:
Excercise 2 - Loading Fonts
Excercise 3 - Line thickness controlled by mouse speed
Excercise 4 - Mouse clicking
Excercise 5 -Growth
Excercise 6 - Animating using Variables

Drog

Just done the first chapter exercise from my book. Design a creature/monster using lines, points, ellipses, rectangles, fills and strokes. Here is the final result. I name him Drog, the cross between a Dog and a Frog. A surprising amount of code in this but really got me understanding the basics such as co-ordinates and RGB. Great fun!



For applet and source:
http://www.amythornley.co.uk/applet/excercise1.html

Book!

My processing book arrived today. It's called 'Learning Processing: A beginner's guide to Programming Images, Animation and Interaction. It's thicker than I imagined, good thing or bad thing?