Breadcrumbs back to creativity

Over the past couple of weeks I came to realize I almost lost something very important in my life. I only realized it in the very end – probably too late. The will to be creative; the will to create stuff just for the heck of it. Only after days weeks of trying to get myself back together, I came to realize that I hadn’t lost the will to create at all. In fact I never wanted it more… However I let go a few of ‘my tools‘ that gave me the ideas and motivation to create stuff.

What follows is a (bit like a) ‘note to self‘ of what I should never ever forget again.

Let your inner child be your guide

If you have kids you’ll most definitely already know this: Kids are insanely mindblowing when they try to explain something they saw. They have the craziest visions of the world. Not because they are smarter than we are but because we are smarter than them. While they are talking about a huge television in a room, we talk about a cinema.

You know what they’re trying to say but they just see the whole world differently. That is a great thing to do/have. Make sure you keep this alive in yourself. Let yourself be amazed by flying birds and soap bubbles. It’s okay to be blown away by cool and simple stuff. It’s okay to actually enjoy life at its fullest.

Make sure you bring back that inner child in yourself. It’s fun! (and cute! Girls love it, believe you me!) It’ll make you think up the craziest stuff in the world. No reason. Just fun. And who doesn’t like fun?
Your inner child knows what you want. You don’t. The only thing you know is you want to pay your bills before it’s too late. The inner child in you wants chocolate. I suggest you give it to him. Read the rest of this entry »

Heaven and hell

It’s been quite some time since I did a photography experiment/project/thingy… So here goes my first in <insert timespan here>.

I went out for a shoot at the well known bridge-spot in Kortrijk and by accident I made 2 great color-discoveries. A mighty blue shot and a horrifying red one… I love ‘m both.
I wanted to do some post-editing but after some feedback it turns out I shouldn’t tamper with the originals after all. I also recorded 2 timelapse shots, featuring the same awesome colors. Yesterday was an amazing day.

Read the rest of this entry »

More particle awesomeness

A few weeks ago, I toyed around with particles. I used perlin noise maps to send the particles in the right directions. However the particles were randomly positioned and just a boring flat color… Kris Temmerman addressed that in his latest experiment. As he’s a decent man, he’s always sharing his code, so I just took his render engine, threw in some AIR magic and got myself a PNG sequence generator (for those who don’t speak Ronny: I made an AIR app that generates these image particles explosions and in the meantime saves every step as a PNG file. That way you can create a video based on these frames )

As it turns out I happen to have no life at all, so I went for insanity when I decided trying to get enough images for a 60 seconds sequence (Generating those images took a whole afternoon… I ended up having ±15GB of HQ PNG files).

Anyway, long story short: I’ve got this video I wanted to show you.

You know: Afterwards I realized this could probably be done using After Effects right away… (I wouldn’t know to be honest). But in the end, it’s proven again: Sometimes not knowing how crazy something is, is actually a good thing.

PS: I would share the AIR app, but right now it’s buggy as hell and somehow memory seems to be an issue. Will need to address those first. I promise I will release it sometime soon

What does Marsellus Wallace look like?

You have probably already seen this version of the famous ‘What does Marsellus Wallace look like?‘-part of the cult movie Pulp Fiction… But did you know about this one?

That’s the number one reason to have a Google Wave account, right there.

How to distribute your Flash CS5 iPhone apps via Cydia

Ever since Apple announced that they won’t allow any Flash CS5 compiled iPhone apps into the App Store, creative Flash developers lost their one chance to deploy their existing knowledge to the iPhone.

However: since Adobe released Flash CS5 with the iPhone packager anyway, we can actually deploy iPhone apps created in Flash CS5. The only thing we can’t do is to submit these apps to the Apple App Store (in fact we can, but they will reject them anyway, so why bother?)

However: We can distribute our apps using Cydia! Okay, it’s not the same, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

Setting up a Cydia repository is actually pretty easy. There’s a great tutorial right here!

There’s a little problem though: Flash CS5 creates an .ipa file. In step 3 of that tutorial you’ll need to put your application in the Applications folder. That application is actually an .app file, not an .ipa file. (I’ve tried it using the .ipa file; it doesn’t work )
Getting the .app file is pretty easy:

1. Rename your .ipa file to .zip
2. Unzip the archive
3. Your .app file is in the extracted Payload folder

That’s it! You can now create your own Cydia repository and distribute your rejected iPhone apps to the (jailbroken) masses using Cydia.

Have fun!