October 29th, 2008
Processing is a free, open source, Java based cross platform programming environment that’s great for algorithmic art. I could go into a lot of detail about the background of processing, but you might be better off checking out their official website for yourself.
Instead, I will walk you through the first baby steps of learning how to program with Processing. Fear not, this won’t be hard. I think even mom and dad can follow me on this blog post!
The first step is to get yourself a copy of processing. Click here and select which download matches the type of computer you are using. From what I’ve seen so far, Processing runs directly from the folder you extract Read More...
October 13th, 2008
October 10th, at about 7 o’clock, A3F, or the Almost Famous Film Festival, kicked off their 2008 72-hour film challenge. The theme was super powers / special abilities, the prop was an envelope, and the line was “I don’t know what’s real anymore”. You can check out an online copy of the DVD that Got Film? Productions (my team) submitted, titled “Fallen Blue”, at http://www.fallenblue.mikewach.com/
Got Film? Productions is a “company” that a number of my friends from Collins College just recently started. So far, I’ve helped them by photo documenting all of the Fallen Blue shoots, authoring their DVDs, and handling any Read More...
July 29th, 2008
Charity Pictures is a local Phoenix nonprofit organization “designed to improve the quality of life for civilization”. Charity Pictures also severely needed a website makeover. This is a project I’ve been plotting and doodling ideas for over a year since they were originally going to have me do it. There were tons of ideas for designs. We needed something that looked cool and related to motion pictures.
The original idea was to have an entire desk with interactive props sitting on top of it. Each prop, such as a camera, or a reel of film, would take you to a gallery related to that medium when you clicked on it. The challenge was taking a real photo of a charity pictures desk and cutting out each prop in a way that could later be programmed interactive. If you’ve visited the Read More...
July 18th, 2008
Not even a week before the official launch of demitregarza.com, I met with this local Phoenix visual effects artist, Demitre Garza. Not only was this week his 21st birthday, but he was also graduating with is bachelors at Collins College. Now he needed a place on the web to show off his demo reels. I’m not the only person that knows how to use Photoshop; Demitre began putting together a design. The original plan was to have about four or five different pages: home, reel #1, reel #2, resume, and contact. The design was good, but we didn’t use it.
After almost four days (eight different website designs), we began to worry if the design would take longer than the actual website development. I sat down in front of Photoshop that evening and created another new website design (Design 9). This time, I made two pages. Each page Read More...
July 13th, 2008
By request I’ve begun developing a Flash video player with slow motion playback cababilities. There are a number of ways to achieve this effect using either Flash or Flex. One way to get slow motion is to simply keep pausing and playing the video at a specific rate. Another way I’ve discovered is to record the currently playing area of the video stream into a bitmap data cache. Then you could just pause the currently playing video and overlay the cached bitmap data, so it appears as if the bitmap data was the actual video object, even though it’s not. Since the second method sounds much more complicated, I decided to give the first method a shot. Surprisingly, the results weren’t as bad as I expected. I have embedded the resulting SWF demonstration in this Read More...
May 19th, 2008
The original Sony Walkman was marketed in 1979. It was engineered by Sony for co-chairman Morita so he could listen to opera music on long flights. A few years before this in Germany, Andreas Pavel invented a portable cassette player, the “stereobelt”. Andreas patented the stereobelt in 1978 in numerous other countries including the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan. For years Andreas fought Sony in legal battles and the Walkman brand expanded to other media formats. Discman and MiniDisc players were popular for a couple years until replaced by flash memory and hard drive based players. By 2003, Sony finally closed the case with Andreas Pavel. Sony agreed to compensate 10 million dollars and recognize Andreas Pavel as the original inventor of the Walkman. Pavel agreed to never file any Read More...
May 16th, 2008
“Shake it like a Polaroid picture”… something that is being forgotten by more and more people today. Instant photography was at once considered the wave of the future. Today, digital cameras have been outselling film for a number of years now. You can still purchase a Polaroid camera for around $30 to $40, but don’t count on the film being available for very much longer. Polaroid recently announced that they would discontinue film production and close four U.S. factories.
About 60 years ago, Polaroid was towards the peak of its success. Edwin Land released his original “Land Camera” and instant film that developed in less than a minute. The photographic medium was used by some of the most famous name fine art photographers such as Ansel Adams, David Hockney Read More...