noCreativity.com » experiment

For those about to rock, we salute you

Ronny — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:47:58 +0000

Cool title, huh? While I was writing this post I was listening to some AC/DC which reminded me of this very quote which was actually an album title. I thought it was pretty applicable for this post.

For the longest time I haven’t talked about this. I felt that it wasn’t my place to say it, but as I went on with my life I figured this is something I just have to get out of my system.

When I was 14, some grown-up told me that creativity was something reserved for the talented. Not just for everybody. Not only was this the biggest piece of bullshit a human being ever told me. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
At that point I was a dreamer: I wanted to discover the world and show everybody something they’d never seen before. Like any one of us probably did back then. However when that specific person said those words. I felt like somebody took away my dream. And I actually gave up.

Only years later, I realized how untrue all of that was. I started realizing that creativity is not a noun. Creativity is a verb (don’t you dare to correct my English horror show or I’ll come down there and spank your hairy little ass!)

Creativity is something that evolves (and teaches you) as you do it. It isn’t so much of a coincidence that creativity contains create. The only way to be creative is to downright just create stuff. Most people tend to think that creativity starts in your head. I beg to differ.

Creativity starts with making mistakes.
Making those mistakes allows you to discover new stuff, which you hadn’t though of before. That is how the coolest ideas come to life: By just trying. Simply creating. Experimenting and discovering. Not just thinking. Leave your educated personality out of the equation and let your subconscious mind be your guide. (It works even better if you actually throw away your sanity. Who needs that anyway?)

There’s this great quote I first read on DeviantART and up to date I just can’t stop thinking of it:

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.

And with that, I salute you.

Unreality

Ronny — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:03:11 +0000

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

UPDATE: I changed the way the arm is put over the logo when turning it around. It looks a bit better, but still far from perfect.

Image Transition Effect

Ronny — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:44:34 +0000

[ 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

Ronny — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:02:54 +0000

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

I’m on fire!

Ronny — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:05:18 +0000

(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.

World360: Unbugged and kicking!

Ronny — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:11:29 +0000

A few days back, I posted the latest update on my World360 project (aka ‘stereographic projection‘… That’s what it is actually called). What this thing actually does is it turns a 360° panorama image into a stereographic projection. The idea is to render this real time (just for the fun of doing it) (I am thinking about doing more with this though…)

A few days back I ran into a (at that time) weird problem where transparency was rendered black after a few frames. I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, and I just didn’t have a clue where to start looking. Google wasn’t really helping me out either. So I posted my problem on FlashFocus but nobody came up with the answer to my problem. Peter Elst asked Ralph Hauwert if he already had run into this problem. Mario Klingemann suggested that there might be a problem with the premultiplied alpha. At that time I didn’t know what premultiplied alpha was and seen as the problem resembled the example Mario gave, it seemed quite obvious he was right.

So I took peace with this, and decided to fall back to a non-transparent image format like JPEG. 2 days later Erwin Verdonk came up with the answer to the whole problem… I just had a hard time understanding it…

The root of the problem was me: I had totally forgotten that the draw() method of the BitmapData class didn’t clear the pixels before drawing… Yea, that’s emberassing, right?

But okay… That took care of some problems. I rewrote some of the code, and adjusted some settings.
The speed and the result are quite okay right now. However using 450MB and up of RAM usage might be a bit of a killer.
I’m wondering if I could take care of this using PNGencoder or perhaps JPGencoder.

But for now I’m happy… The final result (for now) can be seen here.

Thanks everybody for helping me out. You guys rock!

PS: The picture used in this experiment was taken by Thomas Heylen. Thanks Thomas!