I’m on fire!

(Luckily not in the litteral way… Allthough I ran into a few close calls…)
So what do you get when you mix up the following?

• Tennisballs
• A ladle
• Dry cord
• Lots of oil
• Fire
• A digital camera

You get to play fireball!

We had some great fun, and the result was pretty much what I expected from a first shot (yes, this is supposed to be the first of many fire-related experiments) at Fireballs and trails. If you like what you see, check out the complete set in my Flickr stream.

Dooodl(e) fun!!

When Dorien and I were in Denmark, back in June, we stayed at a bed & breakfast. Before leaving we signed the guestbook. That made me think back of the days when I had a guestbook on my site. I remember building tons and tons of those things. The more I kept thinking about this, the more I started to realize I really liked it back then. And to be honest: I still love the idea of a random visitor leaving you a message… However, a good old fashioned ‘guestbook’ is kinda ‘out’…

I have been thinking about this for some time. A few weeks ago I was browsing Kris‘ site and found the answer to this guestbook-problem in the sidebar: A Doodle-wall. He allows his visitors to draw a little doodle and save it to the sidebar. Better yet: He built a history-browser too which allows you to browse all doodles through time. Read the rest of this entry »

Bezier animation fun revisited

A few months ago I experimented with Bezier Animation and allthough I uploaded my SWF files and shared them, I never really shared the source. This is what I wanted to do a few days ago when I thought “Oh, what the hell… Let’s clean that code up before uploading it…”.

So I started moving some code around and after a few minutes, I found myself rewriting the whole thing… That’s not a bad thing since now we’ve got one handy class that can do about just everything a Bezier Animator should be able to do.
Demo time!

There’s still a little bug somewhere which allows the target to ‘run away’ from the bezier, and I haven’t gotten quite to the root of the problem, but I really felt I had to share this. Also there are some imperfections when you disable the orientToPath and scaleByPath properties. I will look into fixing those asap.

I really love the idea of animation movieclips using bezier curves. It looks so natural and yet zo intriguing… I will do some experiments and upload them later on, showing the coolness behind this simple animation engine.

Sources
Download the above demo source (Flash Builder 4 project): Click
Download the BezierAnimatioin class: Click

Devine after one year

About a year and a half ago, I decided MCT wasn’t my thing, so I dropped out. I figured Devine – the new track my university was about to add to their offering – would be more my cup of tea. About 6 months later I wrote what I was told a few weeks before school started again. Most of you suspected a lot of promo-talk, but no real value. A few of you thought the juice might not be worth the squeeze. And some of you (and me) somehow knew that this would be exactly what I needed.

I could start telling about all the stuff I learned and about the projects I had to make, but why use words, if there’s Vimeo? Here’s a quick showreel about Devine 2008-2009 one of our lecturers (Nicolaas Bijvoet) made.

Read the rest of this entry »