So here’s the link to my ICM mid-term in which I sink the Titanic with an iceberg: Titanic. I had hoped to add in a sequence of images from the movie as the great ship sailed to his briny fate, but that proved beyond my abilities at this time as the simple matter of sinking the ship took me far longer to get right than I expected.
What I was able to do is create the icebergs and lifeboats by creating objects of each type, and functions to guide their respective behaviors so they all played their role in this tiny drama. I was able to use texture to get images into the ship in a separate version, and had hoped to put it all together, but I, like the ship, hit an iceberg in trying to get the ship to react to colliding with an iceberg.
The main problem I had was getting the ship to stay sunk once it I called the sink function. Sink is activated by a boolean function that measures the distance between the ship and an iceberg. Once the two come within a given distance (the size of the ship’s hull and the length of an iceberg), the collision function triggers a countdown that trips the sink function, which both slows and sinks the ship and deploys the lifeboats. But the action of sinking the ship and the iceberg’s normal drift–which I didn’t want to interrupt since the ship sank, the iceberg didn’t–caused the two to move apart in sufficient distance to set the ship back on its course. I eventually realized that I needed to add an if statement to the sail function to get the ship to stop sinking and reverse course once it sunk under sea level. That allowed the ship to maintain the distance to the iceberg necessary to keep the sink function operating. If this adjustment had come before I fell asleep, I might have been able to pull off my promised picture show, but unfortunately, the idea occurred to me this morning.
The irony of the situation is not lost on me, but on the bright side, I’ve managed to do what it took James Cameron millions of dollars to do for the cost of a few hours of work. And if the result is not as spectacular as his version of the ship’s story was, at least one doesn’t have to pay $12.00 to see it.
But looking back, I probably shouldn’t have boasted “Not even God Himself could keep me from completing my midterm proposal!”
The lesson, as always, is never tug on the cape of the Big Guy in the Sky.
Here is my first assignment for Dan Shiffman’s ICM, UFD’oh!. Press the space bar and move the mouse to see the light show and if you can make Homer merge with the infinite!
This piece is a tweak of a sketch I worked on this summer while I was tooling around with Dan Shiffman’sLearning Processing that I titled “Bird Dude” about a little bird like alien who could glow when agitated.
Since the actual drawing of Bird Dude was so crude and the point of this week was to draw something using Processing, I decided to try to draw a figure that has inspired me throughout most of my life: Homer Simpson! Homer may not be the brightest person in the world, but things for the most part seem to work out for him, which I believe is because of the fact that despite his selfishness and laziness, he knows deep down that the most important things in one’s life are one’s family and friends…and doughnuts!
I plan on posting a series of videos about my house to this blog. It’s my hope that doing this project will make the process of moving out of the place that my parents left me a bit easier. I’m also going to tweak this intro a little more as I go through my family’s photo albums and scan in more old photos.
Thanks to Gabe for all the knowledge, support, and inspiration, and to my classmates for setting such a high bar with their work. Video for New Media cost me more than a few sleepless nights, but the experience was well worth it!
Here are the wireframes of my proposed site for my video project, A House No Longer My Home.
Main site page:
I’ve added cars on the street and doors/frames to better suggest a home, and corrected the layout of the rooms. I considered overlaying real blueprints for rooms, but prefer this more abstracted look.
Each of the boxes would hold a short loop of a video connected to a given room in the house. Mousing over the room area would bring up additional videos connected to that area, as seen in these room examples:
Hallway:
Kitchen:
MIddle Room:
I also added a side menu to allow places to post videos/information relating to the project but not specifically tied to a given place in the house. Note that when clicking on one of these pages, the main house graphic moves up to the upper left hand corner to provide a “home” button that would take one back to the main page.
Introduction:
Parents:
Donate:
I included a donations page to spur people visiting the site to donate to organizations that are battling the diseases that claimed my parents: Pick’s Disease, diabetes, and kidney disease. I put Pick’s Disease on the top because it is probably less well-known than the others, and therefore most likely receives less support than the others.
My thanks to Katherine for a great and truly informative learning experience, and for my classmates, who made it worth braving the bitter cold of 406 twice a week!
Here’s the update for the site I’m planning for my video on my house:
Each of the blocks relates to a room in the first floor of the house, which is where I grew up and later cared for my parents. I’m considering having each page carry two videos, possibly titled “The Love” and “The War”, the former would lead to a nice memory tied to that room, while the other would be a video describing one of the difficult moments I had while caring for my parents.
(Obviously, I’d welcome suggestions for less pretentious headers!)
Each of the pages would carry through the main page graphic and the colored shape that corresponds to that area of the house.
Here’s an example of the page for the hallway, with the two orange squares representing the windows for the two videos:
I’d also like to have either a page or a link on each page which would allow someone to watch the piece as a whole, rather than in the segments that just relate to a particular room.
Following my awful performance in the color test, I’m looking to redeem myself with the following color exercises:
Here’s my attempt to recreate Pantone 356:
Here are my two Albers’ works, the first done by manipulating brightness, the second by manipulating the saturation of the color green.
Finally, here is my goofy design, which is a combination of my initials and three colors of the Gordon family tartan (blue, green, and yellow) all of which are analogous. I played with the saturation and brightness to vary the colors.
Here is the logo I made for ITP. I wanted to link the letters together in some fashion, since I believe what ITP is about is community and I wound up with this weird shape, which probably would work better if we were involved in aeronautics.
Here is the final cut of “53rd & 3rd”, the video documentary I made with Emily Ryan, Melina Selkirk, and future ITP Rookie of the Year Sebastian Buys about the corner in NY that Dee Dee Ramone made famous. The idea for the subject came from Milena, who is herself a rock star and song writer and so has a lot of connections in the music scene. Our professor Gabe Barcia-Colombo assigned the groups, and I was fortunate to be partnered with Milena, Emily, a rock star in her own right with whom I have collaborated on many other projects, and Sebastian, an incoming first year student who showed himself to be a true ace.
