jacobmake

I read this book a while back. The American Bison as a symbol/metaphor was one of the books main themes. The animal was powerful, abundant, and dumb as a rock. There are some interesting bits about Buffalo Nickels in the book. Buffalo nickels were a part of my childhood. I remember studying the powerful beast on the back of these worn weathered coins.

From the book I learned that the actual animal used for the model lived a sickly caged circus-type existence in New York City. Not exactly the symbol of adventure and wide-open prairies it evoked for me as a kid, but a perfect metaphor for the relationship bison had with North American settlers.

These are the output from a little Flash experiment.

The St. Louis All-Star game has come and gone. It was nice to have our city in the spotlight for a week. Many people were involved to prepare the city for this swell of attention. I did my fair share by helping to build an experience to greet travelers on behalf of the St. Louis Arch and National Park Service.

There were 6 bays total and each one highlighted areas of cultural interest in the city. We installed 3 touchscreens behind a glass bay that included an interactive fireworks display and served as an information kiosk for activities available at the arch grounds.

Here is a video that shows a little bit of the preparation and the finished product. It was a really fun project!!

Similar to the curve drawing and ranking algorithim addiction. I let heatmapping in Flash takeover my life for a brief bit a couple weeks back. It’s strange how these obsessions come and go. Here is a link to some assembled parts.

Flash Heatmap

There are some really good Flex based examples out there, but I wanted a pure AS3 option. I found Michael VanDaniker’s examples the most beautiful and easy to understand. So I pulled out what I could to just AS3. I also got some help from sunild. I manually convert pixel to lat / lng coordinates on each map move. There is probably a more efficient way to do this. But I’m going to put to rest AGAIN, tinkering w/ math that is way over my head!

Again tooling around w/ Trapcode for someone on the print team. Might make it into a comp for Ghost of Versaillles.

boring helpful code stuff…

Did you ever notice that if you try to navigateToURL() from inside Flash in Safari it will refresh the Flash on the page? Here is a quick work around

You need to setup a JavaScript function that uses the DOM to fidget w/ the window.location.hash. It looks something like this;

function mapAnchor(anchor)
{
window.location.hash = anchor;
}

Then from ActionScript setup a navigateToURL() like this;

var _anchorlink:URLRequest = new URLRequest("javascript:mapAnchor('"+anchorname+"')");

where anchorname is your anchor.

It’s been quiet around here I know. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. I’ve got some exciting things in the works. One of which is a geo-social application called citypulse.

This is definitely a team effort. More when we roll out the beta.

For a recent project I needed a skinnable AS3 Video Player. Everything I found was either over-developed or just didn’t work.

So… I created a super-simple skinnable AS3 FLV player. It’s still got a few kinks, but might be a good starting point for anyone to add-on. Feel free to use as you see fit (pls don’t be a dick and try to go sell it somewhere).

Here is what it has:

• Play / Pause functionality
• Video Scrubbing
• Buffer display
• Jump To section

Here is what it does not have, but what could be extended w/ a little more effort:

• fullscreen
• time display
• sound controls

Link to AS3 Video Player Page
Download Assets

I recently had a video project that was going to be displayed vertical monitor w/ a looping DVD. I was presented w/ a problem regarding pixel aspect ratio. After Effects, Quick Time, FCP all have built in aspect ratios for certain settings. DV / NTSC has a 720×480 format with a 0.9 pixel ratio. The problem with is that I needed to work in a vertical space….

So, ideally there would be a setting for 480×720 with a 1.1 pixel aspect ratio. Unfortunately that doesn’t exist. I thought I’d share how I got the best results in respect to .9 pixels in NTSC.

Here are some tips:

1. Work in 480×720 square pixels.
2. Setup one master comp that has all your nested content in it. Set your master up for 720×480 with NTSC .9 pixels.
3. Rotate your content 90 degrees (You’ll still have some content handing over the edges)
4. Reduce the scale of your nested comp so that it is 90% height (which is really width now after rotation) and keep the 480 portion (the height in vertical mode) at 100% b/c NTSC only squishes the with width.
5. Now your content should line up with the NTSC height and width. It will look squished in After Effects, but if you have correct for pixel aspect ratio turned on it will look fine, and most importantly it will display correctly once you get it on a DVD and on a vertical television.

Side Note: Make sure you make TWO versions before you go test your DVD onsite, b/c you never know  how the monitor will be mounted. You could end up with upside down content if you guess wrong. Found that out the hard way:(

I took the nest a bit further. I sketched out some twig shapes, scanned them in, and traced them into vectors. Also added some color variation. I might play with pulling color information from an image w/ getPixel and maybe write it out to a massive PNG and get it printed.

I’ve got some other projects in a similar vein that I will be trying out. They will all have a nature/animal theme, and they will be built with hand drawn elements positioned by code.

Dan had me whip up this for a background of a comp he was working on. Trapcode Particular did all the hard work, but it might fit w/ some of the other stuff I’m doing here.