Friday 4th March 2016
For the second and final workshop that I had signed up for during this week, I chose to do the creative code session. It sounded like an interesting topic because of previous coding experiences that I have had - definitely something that I could get more involved in for certain works. Anyway, for this workshop we were given a walk through of how the program 'Processing' works on the Apple Mac computers, and shown specific examples of what we could do with code. At first we were run through the various variables that made certain attributes of the code come together and work in their own ways. Then, we were moved onto more live examples of what we could create visually.
The first thing that we were shown that we could create was how to make a constantly running brush out of our mouse, and how it would work on the specified area. In the first clip, it shows how the lines of code that we were given were creating a consistent eclipse shaped brush running across the page, and how the different variables would alter different parts of the image.
As you can see above, the brush runs continuously without intervals from any functions like mouse clicks or key presses - also, half way through the clip the brush changes to just a floating eclipse moving around the screen. Moving from this we were then shown how to make the brush so that it would only function once the mouse button had been pressed. As you can see in the example given below, the code runs without error and thus the brush can be created - but with this iteration of the code, the line left by the brush would then disappear immediately once the button on the mouse had been released. Here is the clip:
And finally we went onto create a visualisation of sound piece, in this section we were asked to find a clip of our liking to work with that involved some sudden movements, so I went and found a clip from the show 'Sherlock'. Once we had taken our clip, we would then transform it into a series of JPEG images that would be input into the coding in the next stage. Bringing the image count down from around 100 or so to 7 frames meant that there was plenty of jagged movement to go around in this final visualisation. Alongside the images, the coding held the data of a drum based sound loop of which would then move the image accordingly. As you can see, the rough changes between the beats can be seen clearly through the speed and count of the characters movements.
