The Whiskey Sea

I was super excited when Mike Cohen mentioned the Trapcode plug-in that can be used in After Effects. I started playing with the particle systems, coding it to match sound and other drawn movements I’d worked on already. Chris Kairalla and I agreed that these types of plug-ins (like with special effects in Psd and Illustrator) usually feel generic and unprofessional, but I think I was able to tailor it enough to my piece that it actually works ok. So far I’m pretty happy that nearly every still shot I’ve taken from the animated piece has yielded a pleasing result.

Intro (Example 1.a):

Abstract visuals of waves (Example 3):

Questions:
1) What is the best way to do audio?
2) If live, is it better to do processing, OF?

Neil’s latest sketches in Processing:
http://itp.nyu.edu/~nh724/bigscreens/img/

This week we learned how to set up and execute a simple Processing sketch via Eclipse.  Still working on mine, but I’m glad I got the environment working and some simple motion going in the sketch:

Mike Cohen and I have decided to team up to do our first animation together. Some topics we were both interested in included:

• Disaster capitalism: how our corporate government actively welcomes (dare we say, creates) disaster events in order to further corporate interests.  Based on Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, Klein traces the use of traumatizing situations–such as war and natural disasters–to privatize institutions and strip laws and policies that would otherwise regulate corporate domination.
• Living Systems: a projected video onto a leaf that would somehow recontextualize the leaf
• Walmart commercial
• GM food turning out mutants
• The Quotable Dano
• BP’s enviromental curriculum for CA public schools K-12

From these ideas we narrowed it down to three we’d like to recontextualize:

1. Hitchcock’s The Birds, attack scene
2. Screen shots of Google’s search engine’s “Did you mean” function
3. Stripping away layers of the computer screen to reveal creepy internal workings of a post-apocalyptic system