Video

Dreamwalker Kickstarter

Screen Shot 2017-05-09 at 21.12.56.pngToday the TrickJazz Mobile App Kickstarter campaign, um, started. There are three games in the chillout series that are part of this Kickstarter campaign, but Dreamwalker is the game that my tune is going to feature in, on the menu screen. All of the games are aimed at being relaxing for the players and feature chilled out hiphop triphop and jazz music with a beat. One game involves popping on-screen bubbles, another is a colour-changing game where you have to change the colour of a ball at the right moment to match the moving ‘glass portals’. Dreamwalker is all about doing parkour (aka ‘freerunning’ – running and jumping your way through an obstacle course) in a dreamy environment.

TrickJazz have already got a simple game out called Chicken!, but that one is really not about relaxation – it’s more likely to wind you up, in fact… But perhaps that’s where the idea for making relaxation games came from!

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If you’re not familiar with this whole Kickstarter-ing business, the idea is that a lot of people get together and pool resources to make something happen, with the people that contribute normally getting some kind of reward in return – aka Crowdfunding. It’s important to note that, with Kickstarter campaigns, unlike some other Crowdfunding initiatives, it’s all or nothing: the fundraisers have to hit their target amount by the deadline, or the project gets nothing and it’s all been in vain.

In this Kickstarter, the goal is the launch of the three initial games in the TrickJazz games series, and they are looking to raise £10k to get these launched. That sounds like quite a lot, but the aim is that this will be made up of lots of very small pledges from a large number of supporters.  The deadline for reaching the £10k target is on 8 June – the same day as the UK General Election.

If you would like to know more about the game series and the Kickstarter, there’s a page with ALL the details on, including a better description of the games and rewards, and you can also have a look at this video which explains what it’s all about.

 

Code Like A Girl

The last week has been a bit bonkers, as I’ve been trying to fit work around helping a good friend with a family crisis. I haven’t got as much done as I would have liked, but some things are just more important, and I’ve still been able to make a little progress.

Over last weekend, I wrote an article for an online publication called Code Like A Girl, which you may possibly have heard of if you’re interested in encouraging more girls to do STEM subjects, or you’re a bit of a computer geek. During the week, there has been communication with the editorial team, minor changes made, and they have published it this evening.  The article is a bit of a mashup of a couple of the articles in this blog, and describes how I made the video for Sunrise but I thought I’d share it here anyway as I’m feeling somewhat chuffed to have been included on their writing team and had an article published about my work.  I anticipate writing at least another article about a different video I’ve made with a similar technique, maybe going into a little more depth about the code this time.

Silver Bird

I made various video backgrounds from animations that I worked on in Processing in preparation for a gig I played at the start of January. In the event, the venue’s projector wasn’t available, so they weren’t used. But the preparation work isn’t wasted, I have some videos in hand for future live performances. Plus, I took some of the footage generated for Silver Bird and edited it into this video.

In fact, the timing could not have been more perfect. No sooner had I finished the video than I got an email from BBC Introducing (Lincolnshire) to say they had used Silver Bird in their show the previous Saturday. This was an exciting end to what has been a brilliant month for me, where I’ve made a lot of new contacts and felt like I’d scratched the surface of whatever this music thing is.

Vorsprung Durch Technik

After some more headbutting and reaching a point where I didn’t think I would be able to solve the original problem of routing live sound through a self-programmed music visualiser, I went back to basics. Ditching the sound module provided on the Creative Programming course, I looked into Processing’s own sound library using the online documentation.

And bingo, using the available sample code in the online tutorial, I suddenly had something that was responding to input from the soundcard. Just like that. The graphics were terrible – just a fuzzy line at the bottom of the screen, but the body was still twitching, so to speak.

So, moving on from there, I’ve incorporated the relevant commands into the visualiser code, and developed the graphics further to create something workable. The short video here is just a teaser: I want to keep the full graphics for live shows.  Here, output from Ableton Live Lite is being picked up by the visualiser from the signal going through the soundcard, and processed on the fly.

New Video: Sunset Landscape

I nearly forgot to share my new video, which is available on YouTube. This is the video that I made by taking lots of stills photos a few weeks ago, and made a blog post about.

If you get travel sick easily or suffer from epilepsy, I should warn you that it’s quite wobbly because of how it is made, with rapidly changing images. It was an interesting technique to use, though, a bit like stop motion, and I wouldn’t mind making something in a similar style but using a tripod or similar stand to reduce the wobble factor another time.

Springy Photos

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Digital StillCamera
Digital StillCamera
Digital StillCamera
Digital StillCamera

I took a very long walk (for me at least) in the sunshine yesterday to take a LOT of photos. The idea is that I will be able to string sequences of some of them together to create some time-lapse style video footage. We shall see how that works…

In the meantime, here are a selection of the stills.