2021 – Future Girl Madeline Zen (Second Set of Fashion Pictures)

A Zen Picture presentation with Moog sounds and Madeline’s voice featuring shots of Madeline Zen mixed with the Focuso of Dan Zen.
(see http://www.danzen.com/focuso)

http://www.zenpicture.com/zenpicture/2021 – show

http://www.zenpicture.com/zenpicture/2021/index.php – thumbs

The poetry or story was written based loosely on Nodism the philosophy of connections and in particular a single hierarchy to node zero. It also alludes to some aspects of META the anti-gravity sci-fi mystery that also works through concepts of Nodism. Nodism should be very much in tune to anybody who does object oriented programming as a way to model life or XML as a way to store information. It is an open for discussion philosophy that explores all sorts of important concepts of meta such as generational thought, movement movement, feedback feedback – it involves orgalines, chronolines, nodes, paths, etc.

Full size pictures are available on Flickr under fashion:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danzen

The picture above tells of feedback – often thought of as a thwarter of hierarchy but in reality, does time prevent the same thing happening and actually what occurs is more of a curl or helix.

Enjoy, and please leave a comment or any questions. Once again, you can do this stuff too… Zen Picture is free to download and includes Zen Sort which is a very simple yet effective tool for story telling. Arrange pictures and write captions. You will create very interesting and unique plots trying to get from one picture to another.

Focuso – Photos with Focus Out!

Focuso is a little gadget that explains various techniques for Focuso – the art of taking pictures out of focus. Just click the little circles to see examples and a brief explanation.

http://www.danzen.com/focuso

For more information see the Focuso post.

Blending, Branching, Affecting and Tracking Video, Video Motion Capture, Dynamic Frequency Lip Synch and ActionScript Classes

I’ve been developing a few new courses – well new for me – in our Sheridan Interactive Multimedia one-year Post Grad Program in Oakville Ontario between Hamilton and Toronto.

• http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca
• http://interactivemultimedia.wordpress.com

These are Audio Video (AV) and Motion Graphics (MG). In first term AV I wanted to turn away from making movies and move to interactive video. I gave this some thought and broke Interactive Video down into the following – click for samples except the Tracking one which is fairly traditional and I had the students create samples – I’ve been doing that since the 1995 McLuhan CD:

• Affecting Video – i.e. Blurring Flash Video as Cursor Moves
• Blending Video – i.e. Putting one video on top of another
• Branching Video – i.e. Playing different video depending…
• Tracking Video – applying and letting users apply cue points
• Motion Capture – with a $10 video cam and Flash alone…

For this last category, we did a joint project with the multimedia pioneering class I teach to make Big Interactive prototypes where people just wave at a $10 Web cam to interact with the features. This is accomplished with a MotionCursor ActionScript Class – to be launched one day. We put on a show called Interactive Interactive that highlighted these:

• Interactive Interactive – Art Technology Show Pictures

In the second term Motion Graphics course I have created the traditional bouncing balls with stretch and squash but made them interactive. This was just a quick exercise to show the Flash Tween Class. It does not behave exactly like real life but you can pick up the ball and throw it around

• Dynamic Animated Ball Example
  

I also made a tool and set of ActionScript Classes to scrub audio and apply markers or cue points and in particular to apply common mouth shapes to sounds to affect lip synching. This tool is to be used at Authoring time so the example is in a sense disabled but you can imagine how it would work by scrubbing the timeline and placing markers – the record button will not work for you.

• Scrubbing Lip Synch Example – Record Disabled

Perhaps not as effective but more efficient is using sound frequency analysis to activate lip synching. A very quick example is shown here where data is brought from Spectrum Lab into Flash:

• Frequency Analysis Lip Synch Example
  

And then just recently I’ve been working on the old animated mask stuff to create a sample class for Focuso… Please see the next post or click the link here:

• http://www.danzen.com/focuso

Still to come, DVD authoring. A few students and I went up to Collingwood to video the Canadian Summer Olympic Team during their spirit building and preparations for 2008 Beijing Games. We took 30 hours of video and made a DVD in Adobe Encore. It was quite an amazing experience. You can read about it here:

• Sheridan IMM Makes DVD for Olympic Team

I’m also in the middle of building (just about done) and online Chess game using ActionScript 2 Classes – it will be launched as Zen Chess soon.

And I have started in on code name SspotT – a Flash based MySpace – so that is a fairly large project that will probably take the summer. I’m working on that with my friend Aron who is programming the back end – he wants to.

Dan

Canadian New Media Awards Judge

I have been selected for the 2007 Canadian New Media Awards (CNMA) Selection Committee. The awards are like the Canadian Oscars for New Media 😉 http://www.cnma.ca