I built this clever little thing using Flash. It produces a nice colourful abstract picture that responds to the usage of a room. It changes over time and never looks the same way twice, the program consists of randomly generated coloured people on the screen. They are always different, so its always new. Hurray!

Demo:

Over the past month or so I have been working on a one minute film. It is surprisingly hard to pull off. The time restriction is the thing that makes it so hard, sixty seconds is not a long time so its difficult to overcome overly ambitious narratives. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to draw out a storyboard, then realise as your adding up the seconds of each scene that its not going to fit. However it has been a good experience for me and became very rewarding.

I thought that instead of writing narrative in a traditional manner, I would base it entirely on a random sound. I went around with a sound recorder then later sketched some ideas from my imagination. It hit me how far away you can distance yourself from the real object if you are only given the sound. My best idea was listening to an alarm clock and sketching out a life resusitation machine. This became the device of my choice, so here it is.

Actors: Josh Webber (Patient/ Dreamer) & Ian Thomas (Man in Suit). Also a big thankyou to University Hospital of Wales

Right now, I’m guessing you are frustrated after aimlessly tapping in “audio driver” etc into search engines with no luck. You need to find out the name of your drivers and may have even opened up ‘the box’ to see what it says on the parts.

This happened to my partners computer recently and I have found a fairly universal solution.

Firstly, you need to find out what you need. There is a great free program called Everest, which can in most cases give you the detailed information you need to idenfy your drivers. I downloaded it from here (Theres a few links… to download Everest click one of the ‘Softpedia Mirror’ links.

After the download finishes, open the zip file and run Everest. The program basically looks at all of the hardware on your computer and will search a broad database of information. There are many things you can check, but a fast way may be to just check the manufacturer of your Motherboard. You need to Company’s name and the model number of your Motherboard. When you have that, do a search for the company’s website and it is very likely there you will be able to find the drivers/ chipset for your Motherboard’s model. If you find the chipset (and anything else that goes with it), download it and install. Then restart and your computer should be back to normal.

A good way of checking is to go to Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. If you see yellow question marks, it means there are still missing drivers. Whether they are important or not is up to you.

Say you cannot get any luck from finding the Motherboard Manufacturer or Model Number….. Then you need to go back to Everest and check for things individually. Look in your device manager and you will be able to check Everest for unidentified Hardware. Do the same thing, find out the company who made it, then search for their website and download the drivers.

This worked for me and a lot of other people. Another very useful resource is DriverZone . A website database of companies and drivers.

When you find all the drivers you need, do yourself a favour and back it up to a disk. Oh and…. DON’T LOSE IT AGAIN!!!

Good Luck!

Recently I ran into the problem and idea of making a personal ‘icon thing’ appear next to my web address in the browser. Apparently they are called FavIcons, as they usually used to show only after you’d bookmarked a website. Recently thanks to developments however, doing without one now looks rather ugly and amateurish, because you’ll get a horrible blank page/ document icon (in the address bar and tabs).

So this is how you make a FavIcon:

1. Make the actual design in something like Gimp or Photoshop. It has to be 16 x 16 pixels. You could make it bigger and then alter the image size at the end if it makes things easier.

2. Save it as ‘favicon.png’. It must be named favicon, as the browser usually looks for that name.

3. Don’t bother downloading plugins/ programs etc. Just rename the file (with extensions visible) ‘favicon.ico’ and click yes if it asks you are you sure.

4. In all of your webpages add:

<link rel=”icon” type=”image/ico” href=”favicon.ico”>

under the <head> tag in your sourcecode

5. Upload favicon.ico to your webserver directly into the htdocs folder (allong with the website’s new html files). Don’t put it in any sub folders or directories, else it won’t work.

6. Clear your browsers search history/ cache etc before testing.

7. Job Done

There are thousands of resources for this question, but I recently began as a complete beginner so kind of know how you feel about reading jargon relating to the question “What is a Class?”.

Firstly, a Class is a separate file. You need to write a Class in a new .as (actionscript) file.

Basically, what they do is tell your flash movie everything it needs to know about any element within it. You make classes for elements in your movie. They link and control Movie Clips, the actual Document and just about any other object you want to create in your Flash Project.

The best use for a class is when it contains actions that you can see yourself reusing.

For example; say you have a few different characters that you want to make run accross your screen. If you make a Class called RunAccrossScreen, you can right click any object in your library and use ‘Linkage’ to use the RunAccrossScreen class on that item. If using it on one item from your library you would leave the base Class set what it was on and type “RunAccrossScreen” into ‘Class’. You can use the class as many times as you want however, providing you type it in as the base Class.

For information on writing a Class file continue below:

———–

You store Classes in Packages. Packages are literally packages for what your about to type in. They are also used if you need to organise a complex system of Classes.

Its a bit like sending christmas cards. Say you have one multipack of cards with father christmas, snowmen and presents on…. and another multipack with images of things like Jesus, Wise Men etc. You have bought those cards for two different families. One is religious and Christian, the other is not so religious.

So your going to write in all of these cards with different names and messages for individual people. These could be considered your classes.

Now consider (but not strictly do in real life!), your sending these different cards to only two different addresses. In our personal, kind and gesturous human way we would now foolishly put each and every individual card into its own envelope and send every card to the same address. However, in programming you would need to be a little more practical, organised and cold, but hopefully you won’t… feel… the same about humans and scripts for computers. Consider the above situation again. The most practical thing to do would be to take all of your cards and organise them (all) into just two envolopes with two different addresses and send them off.

Thats how Packages and Classes work. They are a way of organisation and practicality.

———–

Each Class you write is a separate (.as) file, however a Package can be a container of many different (.as) files.

This works as files/ directories on your computer work. You have a Pictures folder, which probably holds lots of different pictures. In the same way, Packages are files on your hard drive that contain different (.as) files.

———–

I won’t go into it to deeply because there are good resources out there for this part, but this is the code used to create a Package/ Class:

For this to make sense and to gain more from this example, I suggest you copy and paste it into your ActionScript editor to read.

package character {                                       /*You always put package { at the start of your Class file. You can name it (ie ‘character’) optionally.*/

import flash.Display.MovieClip;                /*If your using this class on a movie clip you need to import the MovieClip class.*/

public class CharacterMove extends MovieClip { /*You need to make the class either private or public. Add a class name ‘ie CharacterMove. Then tell it that it is going to extend the MovieClip Class’s functionality.*/

public function() {                                                        /* public function is a function that is automitcally carried out every time you use the class*/

target.x + = 40;                                                            /* for example, every time I use this Class, it will make every item its ever linked to move 40 pixels accross*/

}

}

}                                                                                      /* close the braces!*/

———–

Thats it, I hope I helped you understand Classes a little more!

For help and some great references try visiting:

www.flashkit.com

www.kirupa.com

Are you like me. Do you retain the pleasure of forking baked beans?

Good, this game is for you.

Here is draft 1

You may have to click the game before you can use the arrow keys to Fork My Beans.

Enjoy forking my Beans.

http://www.manywonderfulthings.co.uk/forkthebeanv1.html

More Soon

Heres my latest draft for a project on hidden implications. This wasn’t very successful communication wise, but I loved using After Effects.

This is my first try at it, so hope you like it.

I used handmade animation and 3d cameras/ dynamic text in AE.

After a few months of niggling it in spare time between other projects, it is finally here! YESSS!

Its in a very early stage at the moment (not much content), but I am happy with the design for now. Let me know if you love/ hate it.

P.S – Hate is not a bad thing in my World

Me and Hayley have just been given the nod to start planning a wall design for the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. We plan to start on the actual wall around the end of November/ start of December.

The mural/ wall design will be going up in the waiting room of the surgical assessment unit. We still have to develop the designs, but plan for it to be ‘easy going’. We will post more as we go along with this short project.

With most of my projects taking on a fairly cheerful and happy look, I decided to explore how you could visualise something more negative. In my case, I am using a mind as the ‘implied space’ and the words are negative thoughts. To gather the words, I picked out things I considered negative from conversations with people

Most of this is the result of projection experiments. The idea is that your thoughts are sort of dictated by memory and things being experienced. For me memory (in everyday life) comes in short bursts, experiences are projected through my eyes.

So that’s the concept. I originally photographed my projection experiments, but decided in the end it would work better as a mini-film piece. The sound is influenced by Eraserhead which used no music, instead relying on the sounds produced from the World around us. Music and sound is a strange thing, because it can totally change the concept of what you are watching. It was important for me to keep the sense of disorientation. In their case it was a very industrial dominated soundtrack, mine takes more from city life.

As far as future improvements and additions go, I may well make another version. Its been suggested that I use some digital effects, because its all been done in camera up until now.

Negatives Video – Youtube