notes from underground

So I’m sitting here, playing with actionscripted animation in Flash, and I finally got the first part of my code sorted out. I’m using a few open-source snippets as a base, but modifying the code for my own purposes and recreating the effects on my own, so it’s really interesting. I’ve posted the .swf of my demo file, I’m calling it Textual Popcorn for reasons that should be clear:

Textual Popcorn! (Flash Link)

I just posted the fruits of the four-hour long battle of wits between me and my machine:

Mount Fuji Flash Project Background

For electronic writing II i’m working on dynamically generated art in flash, and this will be the background. At the moment it only does anything if you click on it, but eventually those flickers will be timed to fireworks that explode in the sky

For people (none of whom, ironically, read this blog) who have asked what Electronic Writing means, I present a link to the website where my instructor, Brian Kim Stefans, explains What Is Electronic Writing?

The overarching blog that page is from, brown_ewriting, is the course blog for my class. Feel free to look around… it’s got some cool projects and links, including one I submitted to Brian about the amazing Word Disassociation music video. You may know the band who did the music as the same group that created the song The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. Then again, you might not.

Since my first project for that class is just beginning to take shape, I thought I’d post my initial project proposal here. (Warning: Adobe PDF File)

More updates later this week, but for now I have a play of a page to write and a Japanese quiz to study for.

One last final paper later, and I’m done. It feels… wonderful.

Starting on Friday I ended up on a vaguely nocturnal schedule, ending up at Louie’s around 6 or 7 both Saturday and Sunday. There’s something very satisfying about eating a really good bacon cheeseburger with a coke at 6am… Louie’s is great, I love the low prices and the people that work there are really friendly most of the time. It reminds me a little of Sonny’s, a breakfast restaurant in North Carolina with a similar community atmosphere (Robby, the guy who runs Sonny’s, knows our family even though we’re only there once in a blue moon); however, Louie’s has that college-town atmosphere that is so unique. We went in at 6am on a saturday, with finals looming… not only did I run into four or five people I knew, but the place was PACKED!

I did not take full advantage of my sleep schedule, I’m afraid. Where I probably should have spent the long hours with few distractions churning out my paper, I split them up between research and writing and less academic things like RF Online. Saturday was weird too, because Techhouse was going to have a dance party, which means I always end up being less productive than I’d like while I mess with music and try to figure out a playlist. The party itself was really, really fun, despite a major technical issue: the speakers stopped working around midnight, about halfway through the stuff I’d wanted to play. Grr, but now I have an even stronger case to support my big-speaker budget proposal next spring.

I left town tuesday, after marathoning my Philosophy paper Sunday night/Monday morning. On Monday I crashed around 11:15, after handing in my paper, then woke up when Dee came by around 6:45. I’d planned to go to a movie with Dan Byers and Dan Erickson, but I slept through it… when Dee came by I finally dragged myself out of bed and went to Jo’s, then made a Ratty run to snag a to-go box stuffed to the brim with mozarella cheese. One visit to the minimart later, and the nacho party was ready!

Albert and Katie came by for said nacho party during a break in their crazy 6-hour Genetics study session, then went back to the sci-li. I hung out around techhouse and once more failed to sleep, as I ended up staying up all night packing and talking to people. Oh well. My flight was around 4pm, so I got to say goodbye to Katie after her exam, and give her the presents I’d gotten her. Much fun! She got me an Edward Gorey wall calendar, it’s amazing.

I’m down here in North Carolina now, staying at our house in the mountains until the 30th. It feels wonderful to relax for once… I’ll plan for next semester to have a lighter course load, I think, or I will go insane!

We finished our final render at about 9:45, putting us 2nd in order of hand-ins and one of only two groups to beat the official deadline. w00t! Dan Byers has been in the art building media lab all day, re-doing the sound effects; the current soundtrack that we turned in was OK, but really not that special, and didn’t incorporate our frenetic recording session last night. Dan, Alice and I all piled into the Techhouse work room, and spent a good half-hour banging shit around, making metal clanking noises, me and Dan yelling at each other and screaming into the camera to create battle sounds, and culminating in my drop-kicking a threaded metal rod all the way down the basement hallway, into a wall. It made a GLORIOUS sound!

I’m back in the MSLab for now, which is kind of ironic given that we’re technically done… after this year I don’t know how much I ever want to see this room again, I’ve spent more time in the lab over the past few days than doing anything else, including sleep. I’ll escape around 3:15, I think but in the meantime I’m waiting for Dan to turn in his final sound file and studying Japanese poetry.

Professor Viswanathan’s Japanese Lit course is tomorrow morning at 9am. We get extra credit tomorrow if we know a hokku (what later became “haiku“; originally, hokku were the first verses in renga, or linked verse, and the only stanza that could stand on its own.) I memorized a hokku by Matsuo Basho (who else, honestly ^_^), written in 1689.

Ah, such stillness:
that the very rocks are pierced
      by the cicada’s drone!

shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe

This winter, if I find myself with too much free time, I think I should register with Wikipedia and rewrite some of their articles on Japanese poetry. Most of the definitions are woefully incomplete.
I really wish I remembered the Tale of the Heike better… I read all but the last 100 pages, but those are a pretty significant 100 pages. I’ll hit them up over break, but das intahrweb doesn’t have a proper summary of the actions of the last third of the book, so i suppose I’ll go to Barus and Holley early to try and discuss it with a classmate. I think I’ll be better off than most on the essay question, though… she’s planning to give us webs of quotations and make us link them together through common themes. I like that stuff. Really, as long as this exam is better than my Japanese Language final earlier today, I’ll be good… that was death.

I’ll post a few sample clips from the animation up on Thursday, after the official debut showing in Lubrano at 4pm. In the meantime, SO relieved to get it done with! Just this literature exam and a philosophy paper between me and home. It’s a wonderful feeling

Well, snow and rain. And hail. With some wind, and ice, and…. eugh. Woke up this morning and it was a nice snow, fairly steady, fairly thick; began to cover the ground pretty quickly, I thought it’d be nice and white when I got outside. I made the mistake of looking away from the window for the next hour, while I studied for a Japanese presentation with Jane. When we left for class, it was a torrential DOWNPOUR of freezing rain. Not. Happy.

It wasn’t that bad, because Japanese happened to be right across the street. I really hope they keep it there, it’s such a nice location on those mornings when I wake up late… Presentation went OK, then we both ran back across Thayer to…

what the hell, my music stopped…

…ok, fixed it. Back to Techhouse, and warmth. I’m thinking we’ll try to have a fire tomorrow, at the End of the Year Dinner. Spent a little while hanging out with Jim and Doug. They were watching an anime called Tsukiyomi Moon Phase, so after I dropped off my coat I came down to watch the end of the episode. I’d seen Nanamimi Mode before, but I’d never seen the original nanamimi mode, the opening sequence from Tsukiyomi. It’s nuts.

Better yet, while looking for that flash animation’s URL, I found THIS:
NANA DANCE!

By the time we went for dinner it had cleared… it’s beautiful now, the snow’s all shiny and pretty. Well, I use “now” loosely, right now it’s dark outside and clouding over again. Owen, Ali and I had a snowball fight, and there was much Ratty food. Came to the CIT afterwards, now I’m working on animation, or should be. With that, back to work.

Shot 18, involving our White Knight hero realizing that he cannot, in fact, get through the metal detector with a sword. It’s not a high-quality render; in fact, the knight appears as black. This is not good, but the timing is correct and aside from a small camera movement, it’s all happy motion-wise, which is my job anyway. The file’s linked here:
Shot 18, No Textures, Low Res Render
It’s a quicktime file, MPEG-4 codec. It’s under 4 meg, so it should be pretty easy to download.

I’m pretty happy with the animation, but it took longer than I’d expected, so tonight’s going to be hell.

Current ratio: 7 hours of animation time to four seconds of footage. w00t.

The project we’re working on for our final is a comedy piece dealing with a knight in armor, who has to find some way to get through security. I’m responsible for animating the sections where the knight, realizing that he carries a sword and is made of METAL, takes himself apart and puts his sword and the armor through security.

Worked last night on the first part of that shot, where he backs up from security before deciding to put down his sword. Spent four hours on it, got it looking OK, then it got messed up… spent another three this morning, still a little jerky and maybe even slow, but it’s there. Take a look if you’re interested.

I’ve uploaded both the original animation of my first try at the clip, and the more successfully animated version (with more fluid movement). Hope they work, they’re in quicktime format:
Good animation, bad texturing
Bad animation, good texturing