Preparing for the report.

I've recently been digging out some content for my report. Here are some screenshots from Helvetica - A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit. Watching this documentary inspired me to choose Arial (Windows cloned version of Helvetica) as the typeface throughout the project.









Quote of the day:
"Wear the old coat and buy the new book."
Austin Phelps

Coldcut - Timber

A video by musicians Coldcut and visual artist's Hex. Looking back on it, this video was a big inspiration for my project. I discovered these artists last summer and they pretty much set off my recent obsession with the culture surrounding electronic music.

From Wikipedia:

"Coldcut are an English dance music duo comprising Matt Black and Jonathan More. They are most well known for their technique using hip hop and jazz-style samples in dance music. In 1997 the duo unveiled their own real-time video manipulation software, VJamm. (You can clearly see the influence here. I'm not sure if I was conscious of the similarities between the titles. It must have been subliminal :)

Hex, or Hex Media, were a London-based multimedia group founded in the early 1990s by artist Robert Pepperell, coder Miles Visman and the DJs Coldcut. The group set out to exploit the creative potential of, what was then, the new media technologies of CD-ROM, multimedia, interactive computing, video sampling and portable video projection.

Timber won the award for Best Editing Video Musique in France in 1998 and appeared on Coldcut’s 1997 release Let Us Play!. Its tone is plaintively political, opening with majestic images of the sunset over a forest of immensely beautiful trees then quickly shifting with a clap of thunder to a telegraph button punching out the dots and dashes of a Morse code SOS distress call. Images of powerful circular saws, chopping axes, and huge, buzzing chainsaws soon follow. The picture then distorts and images of the indigenous animals appear to the singing of a mournful native woman. The anti-deforestation message is quite clear even before the industrial machinery makes its appearance towards the end of the track."

Quote of the day:
"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
William Gibson

Flash Work

The clock continues to tick. And occasionally tock. I've been making a bit of progress. I have been doing a lot with flash over the past couple of weeks. My interface, for all intents and purposes, is complete and I have managed to allow the user to apply effects to a video. I now need to focus on programming the logon and gallery pages as well as working on the functionality for uploading and saving a video. I have a fair idea of how I'll do it, just need to look into making flash and java talk to one another. Here's a few snaps of the other pages.

Quote of the day:

"Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others." - Groucho Marx.

My last post was December 1st ... Shocking Stuff!

Am I a contender for most neglected blog of the year? Hopefully things will improve.

Here, check this out:

http://www.mostneglectedsite.com/

Thought some of you fellow internet nerds might appreciate it.

So, here's a bit of a progress report:

> Design presentation and Christmas exams are over. I'm fairly happy with how they both went.

>That 20% java assignment (which took over the last month of my life) has been signed off. I managed to listen to a load of new music while I was coding though, which was nice. Anyway, hopefully the next assignment won't be for another couple of months.

>I've illustrated my design (good ol' pen tool did the trick) and imported it to flash, so it's ready to go.

>I've been researching code and a have a bit of an idea of how I'm going to do it. Fingers crossed.

Today I'm going to do the Flash Video Chapter of my "Friends Of Ed - Flash CS3 for designers" book.

If anybody wants to borrow it just drop me a line.

Hopefully it'll refresh my memory a bit. It's been a while since I've done any flash work.

So that's the craic, as they say. Feel free to leave a comment if you're passing by. I'll let ye know how the video tutorials go. And a belated happy Christmas/New Year to all..

Quote of the day:
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.
---Terence Mckenna