I’m now starting to get ridiculously frustrated with my partial disability and can’t wait to get back into the swing of things. I can’t believe a bit of glass has virtually put my life on hold for the last 2 weeks! Anyway I’ve been trying to put my fit hand to good use by copying and pasting all of my blog entries over from here to my own site - RAfolio.
The site is simply an online portfolio and a project I’ve been wanting to work on for a while. The MA and the Site + Motion module in particular has provided me with the perfect opportunity to crack on with the site, and I’m pleased to unveil the new blog for the time being:
Don’t get too excited, it’s only a Wordpress blog with my own theme, but it’s allowed me to experiment with a much more versatile blogging system. I will be using RAfolio primarily from now on, so if you follow me, please switch over to the new blog, since I’ll probably not be updating this one from now on. The main portfolio site will also be along soon…
Well I had a run in with a pint glass last week and came off a fair bit worse. My wrist more specifically - I’ve cut thru a tendon that makes my fingers work. It’ unfortunately my good arm as well, so I can just about type, but otherwise its unlikely there’s going to be much work from me for at least the next month…
This is the 7th image, and one of the “Glimpses of the Spectacular”. The idea here is that the user has managed to discover this glimpse by finding a small gap in the window. Once discovered, the user strains to take in the spectacular view, peering through the thin crack in the filthy glass.
Look with your mouse…
Ok so this is the third image animation which again has taken me a ridiculously long time! I started by duplicating the original image and turning it into a night-time shot in Photoshop. Then I created a button from the top fluorescent light which triggers a fade transition between day and night.
This was all pretty simple stuff and I introduced a flicker into the up state of the button to signify its function. The cloud animation behind the glass, on the contrary, caused me a great deal of stress. I had to introduce “depth” into the AcrionScript of a simple movie clip to generate the dispersing cloud effect, and then use the cursor tracking function to apply the movie clip to position of the cursor.
The result is that the user can draw a cloud trail across the glass. The next problem was limiting the cursor trail animation to the area of the window, so that it appeared as if the clouds were forming behind the glass. I initially used the StartDrag function and limited the active area to top, right, bottom and left boundaries, but this had the disadvantage of restricting the area to a rectangle, whereas the window consisted of a series of rhombus-shaped panes.
After some further research it seemed the way forward was to create a button with a hit area which filled all the glass panes, and to assign the cloud trails movie clip as a RollOver state. This button had to have an instance name, and I then had to duplicate its hit area to be used as a mask for the animation.
Finally I had to create an empty movie clip which was subject to the mask, and give it an instance name. Again the process was rather long-winded and certainly more complicated than I’d expected, but the result is quite effective.
I feel I need to work on the actual cloud trail animation, specifically for the night-time image. Please test the animation and send me any feedback you have: rich@rafolio.co.uk
Brilliant.
I noticed that in the previous version of this animation, the snow was sliding beyond the boundary of the image when viewed at full size. To correct this I added a mask over the whole animation, with the same dimensions as the stage.
Click here to see the full size masked version
Ive had GridIron Flow running in the background now for a few weeks, picking up on all the little links that make up my workflow. I checked a couple of these workflows from Flash files created for the Site + Motion module. As you can see the results are pretty complex, its amazing how quickly you can build up a workflow consisting of so many files.
This is the 4th image of the main 5 in the animation. The idea was to experiment with the drag state in Flash and I wanted to allow the snow on the roof-lights to be slid up and down with the cursor like blinds. I thought this would be fairly easy, but it seems I was wrong, and it took me all bloody day to discover that unless ActionScript and Algebra are your first and second languages, its almost impossible.
The difficulty seems to be in restricting a draggable object to a path. It’s fairly straightforward to limit the object to a bounding rectangle, and therefore easy to limit to a horizontal or vertical line (by setting the rectangle width or height to zero), but incredibly difficult to limit to a diagonal line. I expected that I could add a motion guide as a drag path in a similar way to a tween, but this method also proved unsuccessful.
I ended up settling for a slightly different method, where the snow on the roof-lights are animated buttons which are triggered on the down state.
Click here to see it at full size
There is also a reset button somewhere in the animation, to return the snow to its original position.
I’ve been planning out what I think will be a more concise and finalized version of my animation. Each image has its own unique animation, but all will be linked with a standardized navigational system. See the Flickr set for more detail and read the image descriptions to see what I’m planning for each image.
Some more attractive and useful video glitching work from ISVSH. This clip is particular relevant as it is somewhat similar in appearance to what I envisage my installation projection to look like towards its latter stages. A collection of images change so quickly that we only get the very slightest impression of what they are, the odd face or figure is apparent but the overall effect is very abstract.
