processing experiments #2

January 29, 2008 at 3:15 pm · Filed under design, play

I’ve been also playing around with Processing the past couple of weeks. We decided that we need to hack this platform as it crystallizes a lot of our interests in computers and art. So we’ve started coming up with simple experimentations that we can get our heads around, eventually working towards more complicated interaction between film, code and visuals for some of the projects we are prototyping now. It’s funny, unlike Soum, my background is in visual arts rather than computer science so for me it’s been trying to first figure out the somewhat unintuitive relationship between code and aesthetics. I have done some Flash and Actionscript earlier but still mostly a rookie in these matters. But after the beginning difficulty, things seem to be now coming along rather nicely. Its always fun to be able to learn something while the end is something that, occasionally, also looks rather pleasing. These ones were some simple experiments I made while trying to get my head around drawing in 3D. Basic ellipses can go a long way. Click on the image to see the original experiment. The generative animation will open up in a separate page and you will need to download the Java applet to see it.

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processing experiment #1: adams and eves

January 29, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under play

One of my first experiments with Processing that simulates human population growth (starting from one Green Adam and Red Eve), with built in pregnancy, probability, death and life expectancy. Needs lot more tweaking (think proximity, mating behavior, natural disasters etc).

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auto-cutting of indian weddings, stray dogs and rajasthani men footage!

January 29, 2008 at 6:49 am · Filed under film, play, technology

As Matti and I weaved around central London on foot for hours, we conceptualized the next BCG Labs experiment – the idea is around designing a system that is able to perform any number of randomized cuts on set of video clips, sync it with music, text, beats, or even meta-tags, and apply that specifically to Indian content.

Interestingly, as Matti pointed out, there have been several such experiments in the past in the european art scene, but very few have been automated, and none of them have played with Indian content.

Fact is, between Tatu (filmmaker and friend) and myself, we have hours of extremely diverse footage from India – from the weddings, to the stray dogs that live in Mumbai, to Rajasthani life and other such tourism cliches. If there was a way for us to compile and tag the usable bits, and the system is able to map that to a script, and generate thousands of cuts to the video, which I could then do next few cuts with, it could actually turn out to be a very useful tool. We’ll see anyhow.

The plan is to work on it over the next few months on a slow burner, as NewsRoots is on highest priority (with an impending prototype deadline). But once an initial model is ready, we will put it up on both our labs section, and here. In the meantime, we will continue the brainjamming here, while sipping on bottles of Kingfisher and playing with Flash, Ruby-On-Rails and After Effects code.

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