Particle power!

Ever since Ralph Hauwert first announced his part of the LetItBloom site, I kinda wondered how he did it.

V1

A few weeks ago, in Amsterdam, Ralph explained a bit about it during his session. And then finally yesterday (actually the day before…), I bit the bullet and spent the evening making it happen. Only 4 hours later I had a first version that got pretty close to it.

Check this very first edition on the following URLs. The text is generated using AS3, so you can just make it show any text you want. Just change the URL params

• Particle fun V1 (with blur)
• Particle fun V1 (without blur)

The particles move to a perlin-map (red & green) with text in front of it. The color of each pixel is used to determine whether the particles has to move up,down,left or right and how far. Not how fast… That left all particles moving almost equally fast… Which is kind of a minor downside to me… Seeing how it almost was 6AM, I felt it were a good idea to catch some sleep… Read the rest of this entry »

Experimenting at new levels

I have been experimenting around a lot in the past year. I have run into all kinds of limits when experimenting and where most of those experiments stopped, this one actually started off… The limit I’m referring to is not the most regular one: The rotation of the earth in space.

I wanted to capture startrails. Startrails are basically the same as trailing lights from a passing car at night. The only difference is that the trailing light is coming from about 7 million lightyears (or any random that makes it sound more dramatic) away and it takes about 15 minutes to actually spot movement.

I went out twice in one night just to shoot some pictures. Once, just to be sure I actually would be able to capture startrails and once for the money-shot. The result?

Read the rest of this entry »

Unreality

A few weeks ago school started again. One of the new classes I got is ‘Audio Visual Media Production’. That’s a fancy name for ‘After Effects and stuff’. Only 4 weeks into the academic year I felt like taking a leap… Following the crazy idea of “If you can think it, you can make it“, I took my camcorder, recorded some footage, got back to my computer and started fighting my clumsiness in After Effects. Only a few hours later I finished a first version of my experiment. I spent today continuing and finishing this experiment.

The result is pretty much what I expected (although I am pretty embarrassed about the horrible arm-in-front-of-logo-disaster. Feel free to enlighten me on how to do this without making it look this bad ). Enough words, check it out!

This is my first shot at making something look good in After Effects. If there’s anything on your mind, let me know. I could use advice and feedback Read the rest of this entry »

Image Transition Effect

[ Link ] I saw this cool image transition effect on a site and I wanted to create this myself. Hit the spacebar to slow the animation down

WebcamRelief

[ Link ] I decided to play around with webcam feeds and 2.5D in Flash Player 10. Requires a webcam