Entries filed under processing

A cover that moves and sings

Not so much a book trailer as an ani­mated book cover… and a love let­ter to my Kick­starter back­ers. (And you can see it even big­ger on YouTube.)

I said this over on Kick­starter, too, but for those of you dis­cov­er­ing it here first: As you watch it, imag­ine some future e-​​book with this ani­ma­tion lit­er­ally built into the cover, writhing on your book­shelf. I want that.

If you’re new to this: You can still join up! The project closes on Octo­ber 31.

The sound­track is Demonic With Horns by Boy Eats Drum Machine, a.k.a. Jon Ragel, who “spins breaks and sur­gi­cally inserts sounds while jug­gling vocals, per­cus­sion, and sax­o­phone” and is one of my cur­rent favorites. Another of his tracks, Ross Island—free to down­load—has been in heavy rota­tion dur­ing the whole writ­ing process. Here he is on Ama­zon MP3. Thanks, BEDM!

The visu­als were gen­er­ated in Pro­cess­ing.

Nerd note: after the rush of this book is over, I need to change the way I do Pro­cess­ing projects. Right now it’s totally strung-​​together, totally depen­dent on weird system-​​specific file-​​paths and vari­ables, which makes it basi­cally impos­si­ble to share the code. And I would like to share it! So that’s on the to-​​do list.

Building an imaginary tower

I’m not just writ­ing the words for my book; I’m doing the illus­tra­tions, too. So I thought I’d walk you through the process. This is the most recent one, which I did on Sat­ur­day afternoon.

Quick back­ground: San Francisco’s Sutro Tower is already pretty extra­or­di­nar­ily spooky, so it’s not much of a stretch to think it might play a small-​​but-​​important role in a story about the dig­i­tal and the occult.

Like a lot of things in my fic­tional San Fran­cisco, it’s rec­og­niz­able but… off. It has a dif­fer­ent name. And it looks a bit different—so I thought it would be a fun thing to illustrate.

Here’s how I went from head to page. (Fair warn­ing: this is a very tall post, with lots of images, so get ready to scroll.)

Read on…

Simulated luckdragon

I just had this vision and felt com­pelled to make it. It’s some recom­bi­nant ver­sion of this guy, I think. Built and ani­mated with Pro­cess­ing. (Check it out in HD!)

Aha! Here is the feed.

All you see before you is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 US License.

The background image is based on this CC-licensed photo by Flickr user Diluted.

This Wordpress theme is my mod of Modern Clix by Rodrigo Galindez. Nice work, Rodrigo!

Here is my favorite haiku:

 

    Lighting one candle
with another candle—
    spring evening.

    Yosa Buson (1716-1783)