Survival of the fittest

About 6-7 weeks ago we were given a very challenging assignment at school. We were told to update an old Darwin-online site. New design, now informational structure, new features… A new life for the website!
Revamping that website was one of the most surprising things I’ve ever had to do. I never thought a subject like Charles Darwin and his research would be that hard to lay out. Together with Fabian, we managed to give the Darwin site a new face. At least for this assignment. According to our tutors, the University of Cambridge might select one of the designs made by the students and ask to put it into production.

Along with that we had to create a conceptual touchscreen application that might be used inside the museum, allowing visitors to look up more info about Darwin and his immense research. In order to make sure we can pass our ideas along, we were ordered to create a demo video that features the use and experience of the application. I finished that demo video last night and I really wanted to share this with you!

Doodling evolved

The few people that follow me on Twitter have probably seen me tweet about an upcoming site called ‘Draw A Doodle’. I could try to explain everything about what I’m planning to do, but why bother if I could just save you 8 minutes and just show you what I want to really to create?

One of my latest school assignment was to create a site where users can create news-content. (Me being way too excited to have actually paid attention, I read users should be able to create new content… Turns out my lecturers really wanted NEWS content… ) In this assignment, I saw the perfect opportunity to create the basics of the Draw A Doodle project. So I did…

I really put in a lot of effort into detail and animations. Nearing the end of the deadline I had to cut some corners… I had to leave out the layer-rearranging system in the Doodle Creator, I didn’t get to take care of all tab-indices, I had to skip the scrollbar for the users-list and the comments-lists, etc.

Oh god… I was going to cut right through the chase and show you the project! How did I end up telling the story of my life again? Well anyway: Pictures!

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A Deviner’s Life

Let me just get to the point right away. No fancy little story, no boring little bla-bla.

At school I was given the assignment of creating a room in Flash that tells a story. One, and the most important, limitation was the fact that we were NOT allowed to use any Actionscript 3D libraries out there. No Papervision3D. No Away 3D. They wanted us to feel pain. We were forced to use the 2.5D capabilities of Flash Flayer 10. They’re not that bad… But I really really really (yes 3 times) prefer Papervision… And not only performance-wise.

I really put all my effort in this project and I am pretty positive about the result.

If you’re not interested in the story, feel free to stop reading and feel free to check out the site. You won’t miss anything important (I think…). (Oh btw: the site is in Dutch, but the content isn’t really that important )
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Unreality

[ Link ] I finally got myself to the point of really experimenting in After Effects. This is my first shot at ’something’.

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.

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