Chaotic Animation

Here’s an example of what I call "non-linear" or Chaotic Animation. What I mean by that is most cartoons run in a straight line, from beginning to end. In this case, the animation is "bounded" or limited by the number of things it can do, and it will do them continuously in random order. So even as the creator, I don’t know exactly what it will do next: Lunge, Intimidate, Twitch, or Blink.

Digital+Painting

The backdrop is a digital painting, maybe not as "chaotic" as Jackson Pollock, but the best approximation I can achieve, spattering color with a computer. Although it appears to have a gamut of colors, it really has a limited palette.

If you are working digitally, I recommend that you isolate the colors you want to work with, from the 2 million or so shades that your computer can render. In other words, your software offers lots of colors, "straight from the tube", and you should mix and blend them to make your own palette, just like artists using traditional media. It sounds less spontaneous that way, but it’s worth the extra effort.

Hacks

To do something similar using Flash motion graphics, you’ll have to use Action Script. Assuming you already know a bit about Flash, I’ll make a few intermediate level pointers. Feel free to log-in and comment if you need more.

The transformations this character goes through are ordinary "tweens" and single frame animations. The trick to making your animation non-linear is to create frame labels, and then goto and play those labels, in random order.

Now that you have a mental image of the play head jumping back and forth on the timeline, you may be wondering why the backdrop doesn’t jump back and forth as well. That’s because the backdrop is another movie clip, with its own timeline, on another layer.

Pretty impressive technology, don’t you think? And a good reason to creatively delve into Flash Action Script.

To Do ~ Learn to create your own characters with Photoshop shape layers

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The eWarrior MiniPlayer is powered by ForthMedia design technology.

Peter Gabriel Wisdom portrait Now Playing on iPod

My ghost likes to travel so deep into your space.

Simply drag from The Artist at Work to the Now Playing window, bottom left, in iTunes.

Two computer OS’s running two Web browsers each

Here you see the new blog design for this site in progress. Rather than take sides in the so-called “browser wars”, it’s best to surrender to the fact that one can never win that argument, but only stir up resentment. So, the front-end is being tested under Mac and Windows, running Firefox, Safari and IE. The UI is implemented using only CSS and DIV tags, no TABLES, however, I am not convinced that is the only solution.

The back-end is now powered by WordPress, providing category tags, user comments and RSS feeds. WordPress is a “classic” Web 2.0 app, based on PHP and MySQL, but don’t let that stop you if you’re interested in creating a blog, because it is actually very easy to install and use. (You don’t have to design your own theme, like I did.)

Tech geeks recognize that half of these are server-side issues, and what really counts is how it looks on your own computer, client side. The blog is being re-launched with the “quick & dirty” version of its own blog theme. That means the “look & feel” will be refined over time. If you have a recent Flash Player and Javascript enabled everything should to pretty much work without a hitch. Bug reports welcome.

Dozens of ArtCars converged on Silicon Valley for the day, at the San Jose Museum of Art. The vehicles, transformed by their owners into mobile, public art, moved on to Berkeley the next day to complete their 10th anniversary festival.

The cars ranged from re-worked wrecks to polished, custom-made designs. In fact, one of the exhibitors was gluing more do-dads to her car when I arrived. Watch the slide show captions, because I included some photos from a few years back. The red, high-heeled shoe and guitar-shaped motorcycle were not at this year’s event.

The fm mini-player was specially coded for this exhibit. You can swap between slide show and panorama. You should know how to work the buttons by now. Please leave a bug report comment if you "break" anything.