Animated Alphabet

Alphabet.. done!

www.amythornley.co.uk

My website is now online at www.amythornley.co.uk

Has a selection of my work on from the last two years.

Let me know what you think.

Code as Design, Stewdio, Rafael Rozendall etc.

I recently emailed Stewart Smith of Stewdio(http://stewdio.org/) who I was inspired by for his piece Pong, which uses popup windows as the actual game pieces. I was inspired to use it for a weekly assignment for university called 'Show us something' which you can view here: http://www.amythornley.co.uk/showussomething/index.html

He very kindly got back to me and recommended some websites I should look at. All of these were design companies or more specifically individuals who are creating design or art largely involved with programming or coding. One of the websites he linked me to was the website of Rafael Rozendall who is an artist who creates websites as pieces of artwork. His work is inspirational and definately worth a look at.

A few of my favourites:

Colourflip is a simple little flash piece where you pull away the colours. Lovely.

Big Long Now is a piece where you simply open a door one one side, and close it to the other. In short a never ending door. What makes this so great is the way you can pull a number of doors and they'll stay then the speed at which you pull your mouse with the next one, boom you can slam them all. The little details are what makes this piece so great.

Finally Cold Void is another fantastic piece, maybe my favourite. It's a bit like a spider web you can break apart, it moves really fluidly and is very intuitive.

visit his website for more here: http://newrafael.com/

Very inspired by his stuff, has made me think more about what I may want to do for future self initiated briefs and made me look at learning some new web languages such as processing(http://processing.org/)

Website

I recently bought www.amythornley.co.uk and am working on the design, should hopefully be online fully within the next couple of days, here's a sneak peak:

 

Alphabet development

More development of my alphabet today. Managed to get the video camera recording after a bit of pestering the technicians at uni. I fed the picture of the letter into the TV via my mac, and then recorded it with the old camera, I played around with the focus and shutter a bit which gave me some cool glowy effects.

Looks quite nice when like above, but sometimes it was a bit too overpowering so I may just use it a little, if at all.

After filming the letter with the old VHS camera, I then set up a DV camera (too many cameras!) and fed the VHS camera into the TV via scart.

As I fimed it with the DV camera I used the tracking, pause, skip frame, rewind and forwarding to try and create some cool effects. It involved a lot of mashing of various buttons to work out what worked best. Skipping between pausing, rewinding and forwarding is particularly effective.

Here is a little bit of a film to show what kind of stuff I got, this is my favourite bit I captured.



Hopefully do some more letters tomorrow.

VHS Fun

We have been set a project for our Digital Practice/Media Through Time lesson to create an animated alphabet. Something along the lines of this:

This is an amazing piece of work created by dropping the letters into a tub of cornflour and water.

I'm interested in the idea of playing with VHS tapes and seeing what type of effects I can get by altering the tracking, fast forwarding etc. Managed to find this old VHS camera in the studio that tapes normal size tapes.

 

 Bought it home and it still works, just need to keep it plugged in! I wanted to use it to feed into the TV though so bought a normal red, white and yellow to scart cable and then an old VHS from a charity shop (teenage mutant ninja turtles yeah!)

And it works! Later today I'm gonna try the old selotape over the edge trick and try to record over the tape with a sample letter. First of all I need to get a DVD or something to get the alphabet onto the TV... or to be even more geeky, I could try and feed my mac into the tv, then feed the tv feed into the camera... confusing? Very!