This was a similar experience to the relationship I now have with the American Buffalo. The book changed my perception of the Bison just like Graceland changed my perception of Elvis.

This gets to my original intent of this whole project:

If my perception of the Bison was open, why can’t I help define what it is? (If only for myself) If my mental model of the bison is no longer the James Earle Fraser version, what does it look like for me?

MY version of the bison is something that is beautiful, tragic, ghost-like, and complex. So I began to experiment with building images that matched that;

1. Faux Fur

I started with a series of sketches that looked like this.

Using found images of Bison I built faux fur and pulled pixel information from the images to create a recreation made entirely of fur.

The fur sketches had a nice ghost-like quality to them. I then moved away from the fur and focused on trying to replicate the coin. That led me to thinking about laser-cutting…

2. Actual Nickels — Laser-Cut Silhouettes 

This is a concept that I fooled around with for a short while. I wanted to create an actual coin…dynamic bison silhouettes laser cut from steel. I sliced up torsos, behinds, feet and heads of buffalo images to randomly create a franken-bison shape. It would have been a real nickel you could hold in your hand!! I abandoned this one because it was really difficult to get the seams to match up for all the different body parts.

3. Infographic (sort of)

My next (and hopefully final) attempt is to build an image that is controlled by data that relates to the Bison. I’ve collected data of herd populations in Yellowstone as well as the value of the Buffalo Nickel coin. The information drives the output in a way that becomes a kind of incomprehensible data visualization.

But more about that in the next post when we talk about inspiration and the dos and don’ts of data visualization.

Before I walked away he said,

“What’s up with all the Bison stuff? I don’t get it. Is it a design thing?”

To which I replied,

“Yes… A design thing… Um, It’s hard to explain.”

And that was the end of it. This has come up several times and I’ve always struggled to explain in person this “thing” that I’m working on. So… let’s me try to explain why I’ve been piddling around with Bison pictures on and off for the last year.

I’ve been a little reluctant to share some of my thoughts out here in the open. This is the internet ya know? You can’t just go sharing all your half baked ideas with the whole world, can you?!  What if they all point and laugh at me?

In the next couple posts I will go over my intent and inspiration for this project, and hopefully post the final series of rendered images so I can move on with my life, or at least the next wacky thing I have planned:)

The image is part of a template I created when saving out some low res files… I thought it looked kinda interesting. Hopefully more to share soon.

A template for saving out images for my project

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.

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!

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’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.