Painting with Physics (AS3, Box2D)

Looks like my Painting with Physics tutorial from god knows how long ago now is up on the Computer Arts site for all to download as a nice PDF.

Actually, I was looking for my 8-page “minimag” on buiding iOS apps with Flash CS5 from issue 181 back in…. November maybe? Can’t find it anywhere. I’ll stick it up here if I come across it.

12 touchscreens, 7 projectors, AIR, openFrameworks & me

Last month, I was whisked off down to London’s Earl’s Court 2 to look after what the agency I was working with had dubbed the “Wonderwall”, an interactive event stand we’d been working on for the preceding few weeks. Earl’s Court 2 is huge and very hard to photograph when carpeted in a sea of red as far as the eye could see.

Here’s the “Wonderwall”, almost set up and ready, while the blokes in hi-vis jackets have a shufty (it’s London, see?) at either side.

On the front, a 5m x 2m projection of an ever-changing openFrameworks piece. Six touchscreens running Adobe AIR fired delegates’ votes on four questions to a Mac running oF. We chucked them through a UDP socket and into an SQLLite database, whilst the votes streaked across the screen in light-writing paths reminiscent of the convention’s logo, to be added on the right. Here’s Stu hammering it:

To either side sat 3 touchscreens, where delegates could see and hear their Senior Leaders answer key questions. Again I used AIR, with each laptop feeding both an HD touchscreen and a 10K HD projector showing video of your chosen leader answering your chosen question. Again during set up…

…and on the day:

Oh, the red. Two days of that red. AIR’s fantastic though. It worked like a dream and hardly needed any babysitting throughout the 2 days, even with each setup constantly playing 1080p video. Here’s inside the “Wonderwall”, with all 7 monster projectors and the big front screen to the right. Needless to say, it got a bit warm in there (click for closeup).

And just one more check before the hordes descend:

palmerama Ltd

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m now making the big jump to being my own boss and the master of my own destiny. I really couldn’t be happier. Five years at magneticNorth and two-and-a-half at LOVE have been simply marvellous, but as of Monday November the 8th, I shall be freelance and proud – off into the big wide world as a one man band.

So hopefully someone out there will need some cool games making, some AS3 coding, some Flash designing (oh and coding on that link – just go with it), a spot of writing, an interactive installation or maybe just something nice for Xmas. I’ve made plenty of lovely interactive stuff for people like Diesel, Sony PS3, the BBC, Kellogg’s, Warburtons, Dr Martens, Vauxhall, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Umbro, if that helps.

Please say hello on email, twitter or LinkedIn and you’re on my site now, in case you were wondering what this was.

Cheers. As you can see above, I’m visibly excited.

Thrillinocuous

Just thought I’d repost Thrillinocuous, my mashup of LCD Soundsystem’s “Get Innocuous” and Michael Jackson RIP’s “Thriller”, in honour of the untimely death of LCD Soundsystem. May they rest in peace.

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There’s a Good Girl on Vimeo

There’s a Good Girl

Not painted a stroke in 16 years since my GCSE Art teacher tossed me an off-hand C and “accidentally” threw away 2 years of hard work after the final exhibition. Bastard. Hope the fixative did for him. So it took an iPhone to get me to have another go and this is it.

Turns out Brushes is pretty damn good fun and highly, dangeously addictive. But what’s really slick is that it records everything you do into a .brushes file on the iPhone, which the Brushes Viewer OS X app can then use to recreate all your fingering at a much higher res.

theres_a_good_girl_detail

It can even make quicktimes of the process, but bear with me – need to sign up for Vimeo I think. There are lots of far more able people than me at it over at Flickr too.

PS. The girl did it.

Shape Tweens Hit Hollywood

It may not be too clear here (and I couldn’t find the titles anywhere on YouTube), but this has to be the most mainstream example of a Flash 3-style shape tween I’ve ever seen. It matches right down to the nasty colour choices and dodgy outlines. At least it’s eased.

God alone knows how this ever came to be, but looking at the rest of the film’s frankly terrible titling…

…when the tween came up after 5 minutes nothing would’ve surprised me. Looks like they just used the default settings in some dodgy old 90s video titling package for the names, so maybe shape tweens were a step up for the main title.