If I’m to make good on my resolution to blog something every single day, then I currently owe a whopping eleven blog posts.
I ought to get on with it, hadn’t I?
In the spirit of getting on with it, the new Justice video features electro-rockstars Gasparde and Xavier doing exactly that, while preparing for the release of their track ‘Audio, Video, Disco’ from the eponymous album.
The video documents the pair living and breathing their work in the studio at all stages of the track’s life cycle, from conception to critical acclaim. You’ll like it, because it’s confident, it’s awesome, and it’s very very French:
One more post by midnight… time to get on with it!
As leaders in computer animation, in terms of box-office takings, technical prowess and industry awards, it’s easy to forget that Pixar’s roots are in traditional animation: the frame by frame progression of a set of still images at speeds that trick the eye into perceiving a single moving image.
But in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it’s hard to explain the essentials of what Pixar really do without spoiling some of the magic: as any Behind the Scenes DVD extra will show you, it’s a probably a bunch of sweaty animators slaving over their Wacom tablets for months on end.
a traditional zoetrope
So when Disney sought to showcase their acquisition (they bought Pixar back in 2006) in a couple of their resorts, they tasked Pixar with a demonstrating how animation works in a way that keeps the magic in.
What they came up with – a modern re-imagining of the zoetrope – is something to truly surprise and delight.
Take a look at this:
Lovely, isn’t it?
What caught my attention is the point animator Warren Trezevant makes:
It’s the clearest explanation of animation, because you get to see every frame of animation before your current frame [...] and every frame of animation after it. Here you have the opportunity to see the tricks the animators use to make things move.
Dr. Manhattan
Thinking more deeply on this, one could consider the zoetrope’s design as illustrative of one other concept: four dimensional perception.
Unlike traditional screen-based animation, the zoetrope lends observers the ability to see ‘through time’. One can rewind or fast-forward through frames with a slight adjustment in perspective, much like Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan.
This recalls an essay I wrote applying McLuhanism to comic books, which talks around the medium’s unique ability to force a sort of cognitive leap between the panels of a page (despite speeds far lower than 30 fps).
In comics, the reader’s mind fills in the blanks, making it probably the most effective animator of all. And now that Disney owns Marvel too, perhaps we’ll see more examples of Disney playing around in the fourth dimension.
Members of the Flickr group Make Something Cool Every Day are making cool things every day, in a social experiment that looks like a lot of fun.
The group’s rules are simple:
ONE upload per day. Each piece must not have taken longer than a day to make.
So with these in mind, here is a slideshow of their submissions, best viewed fullscreen (but it can take a while to load):
So far the group has attracted 2,972 members, who’ve contributed 33,950 unique creations. That’s 11.4 submissions in total, so it’s evident people aren’t being religious about uploading every day, but what the hell.
What I find really interesting about the group is that there is very little conversation – a lowly 97 comments in total – in the main group discussion forum. All of the chatter is around individual works of art (especially the best stuff) . This tells me that viewers and contributors are far more interested in the content than in the delivery framework. Rightly so, I think.
The lesson to learn here is that despite Flickr enjoying a highly creative user base, it is very hard to engage those users with a campaign idea (and I’m not just talking advertising). Flickr just wasn’t designed for community engagement, as I’ve learned on past advertising campaigns that have used it as a platform.
But that’s OK, because people upload great art to the site every day, and the quality of comments that they do attract far outweigh Facebook’s throwaway commentary and (largely) poor photography, any day of the week.
This post is about one of the really cool things that happens when maths I don’t understand and technologies I don’t understand get together to make something awesome. Let us begin:
A typical fractal, made using the Mandelbrot set.
A fractal is a conceptual object that reveals further details about its shape ad infinitum, upon ever-closer inspection of it’s fabric. Think of the trunk of a tree sprouting branches, which in turn split off into smaller branches, which themselves yield twigs etc and you won’t go far wrong. In fact, fractals typically look like this thing to the right.
These infinitely complex shapes are ‘created’ by instructing graphics software to render the result of a simple mathematics formula. Until now, the result has been a 2D image – there’s no depth, shadow, perspective, or light sourcing. It is a truly abstract mathematical shape.
But since your home computer became powerful enough to do proper image rendering stuff, home hobbyists have begun to innovate on these formulae. For the first time, three dimensional fractals are able to be created with relative ease.
I can’t go into the maths, because you know, I’m not a total geek, but I do want to show you how beautiful some of these shapes are. Let’s run through some examples:
This is what you get by multiplying phi and theta by two.
More like a classic fractal with 0.5*pi to theta and 1*pi to phi.
This time multiplying angle phi by two, but not theta.
But we’re still looking at these things from outside. The really cool bit is when you start to zoom in. So let’s look at some of the high quality renders from the archives of Daniel White at his highly eclectic Skytopia, where I first learned of this phenomenon.
Make sure you click around on some of these thumbnails, yeah?!
If you’re anything like me, you’d be pretty excited at the idea of being able to create both beauty and complexity from something as simple as a few lines of code, and to then be able to explore your creation from every angle.
Then again, if you’re anything like me, you’d feel a bit frustrated that you’ll probably never be able to make something that awesome yourself. So let’s marvel at the wonder of Daniel’s creation as he takes us deep ‘Into the Heart of the Mandelbulb’.
