Minus Grid v.2 – screensaver


A long time ago I attempted to emulate in Flash a grid system developed by Burak Arikan who Ali Demirel collaborated with to produce the Minus Contakt visuals, I called it Minus Grid and made it into a screensaver. You can read the original blog post from back then.

During renders today I decided to upgrade the screensaver, as it needed some tweaking.

Preview | Download

In the preview there is an extra bar full of controls that isn’t in the screensaver, and also in the screensaver the “lines” are always set to ON.

Don’t forget that once you install it, you can customize the grid size by clicking Options… in your System Prefs. Different grid sizes produce various interesting effects!

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After posting this I started browsing through Burak’s site again after all this time, and I’ve found some new screenshots of his Meta Control visuals. “Gridnet” is the true name of what I’ve been trying to replicate. Check out his incredible work here. This is the stuff that blew my mind and became a huge source of inspiration for me when I first went to the Minus Contakt show a couple of years ago.

Also to be noted is that my Minus Grid is actually (if you haven’t noticed already) quite far off from his original (run his Applet here). With the last version I decided to randomize the weight of the lines, and also to randomize whether two dots connect or not.

2 September 2010 23:28
Flash Screensavers

Krix (music video)

Flash: Some time ago I built an engine called “Random Shape Generator” that generates random polygons and moves them around (I also made a screensaver based on it)

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Music: Last week I made a track called Krix.

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Video: Yesterday someone sent me this video by Haythem Zakaria, so I decided to try something similar out using my Flash engine, I dropped the shapes animation into Final Cut and played around with them, using Krix as the audio baseline.

Credits
Music / Video by David Terranova

16 October 2011 12:31
Experimental Flash Music Music Video Video

Shaper Screensaver

Another Flash-based screensaver I made some time ago, based on the Random Shape Generator I built.

download (Mac only). This will appear in your Screensavers’ list as “SWFScreensaverMac”.

17 May 2011 15:08
Flash Screensavers

Screensaver: Enemies

Over the past couple of years I have developed a Flash-based engine that I can run at clubs to control and generate randomized visuals. I can basically just let it run all night without needing to control it, as it picks and chooses different generative animations (for example one of them is an alternate version of the header at the top of this page), always randomizing parameters such as time, scale, velocity, colour, etc. It’s built to run on its own, but I have also built in extra functions so that if needed I can interact using the keyboard.

So in this engine there are a series of different self-contained animation files, and my latest addition to this series was one called Enemies, which I made specifically for Resolute’s party with Lee Burridge in New York. I posted the actual animation a few days ago on my main site under the Flash Toys section.

Anyway, I really like the energy of this, so I made a screensaver out of it.

Preview it here
Download it here (Mac only)

27 July 2010 23:26
Flash Screensavers

Website for Marc Regas

I have a neighbour called Marc, he’s from Barcelona and he’s a photographer who has lived in London for most part of his adulthood. Like me he relocated to New York two months ago in the search of the new, and seems to be really getting into the swing of things here. We live two floors away from each other, so elevator trips to and from his and my place are becoming frequent, sometimes transporting goods such as sandwiches, wine and cakes to fuel our hard-working ethos.

He needed a new website, so I whipped out the old Flash and knocked this up: marcregas.com

4 March 2010 00:11
Flash Web

Skunk Anansie website

As video is becoming more and more prominent in my portfolio, I can’t help but feel more and more detached from Flash. So having something like this in my portfolio makes me feel a bit better about betraying my geeky roots. I really hope to spend more time on Flash as it would be a shame to let it all go after how hard I pushed to study it years ago; but I fear that time is going to be difficult to find and that maybe outsourcing work to new talented kids would be a possibility if a company structure were put in place! This company is actually in the pipeline and logistics are being discussed during these weeks, so maybe I’ll have some news in the near future about this.

Back to Skunk Anansie, the website for the return of this 90s rock band has been all over my schedule for almost a year now, and finally having it out of the way is a relief to say the least! I worked remotely with Casper Franken from Shotopop to make it all happen. He too care of Art Direction and Design while I fiddled around with things that fall under Development and Interaction.

skunkanansie.net

5 August 2009 17:11
Flash Web

Random shape generator

Once again I’m sitting around waiting for a video render to finish: I’m working on the second part of Damian Lazarus’ visuals, which will be played in full for the first time this thursday in Stockholm. I consider this to be the second beginning of his world tour, as so far he has only been performing half of his set.

Anyway, I’ve been staring at the render progress bar for far too long, so I decided to upload a little Flash toy I made to be used in Damian’s visuals, the “Random Shape Generator”.

…it does exactly that! open it up

20 April 2009 22:59
Flash

Skunk Anansie are back

During my incredibly busy times working on video-based projects for Damian Lazarus I managed to squeeze in a nice little web project for Skin, who I’ve got to know through Smokin Jo. While talks of a website for her Format 3 project are still being made, Skin also asked me to build a brand new website for the return of Skunk Anansie.

I remember telling a few people in LA about this fairly big news piece, but to my surprise they had never heard of the band. Is that just an LA thing? I found it quite intriguing.

Anyway, I don’t know how much I can say about what’s happening exactly with the band (apart from the fact that they’ll be playing at the Water Rats tonight and tomorrow), so I’ll just stick to explaining my side of things briefly: I brought in talented designer Casper Franken from Shotopop to art direct the whole project, and I’ll be taking care of the “creative development” (that is my job title, after all).

The holding page is up right now, and the full site should be live towards the beginning of May, so take a look: skunkanansie.net.

The photo above is by James Mountford.

2 April 2009 14:41
Flash Web

Minus Grid

A few weeks ago I attended Contakt, a yearly event hosted by the people from Minus. I came out feeling completely blown away, and the memories of the event flashed obsessively through my head for many days after. But apart from the musical side of things I was most taken by the visuals, the work of Ali M. Demirel and Burak Arikan. In a similar way to Minus’ sound, these visuals were MINIMAL, but had a catastrophic impact that was jaw-dropping.

Here’s an interview that might give you an idea of how Ali plugs into the Minus team.

One of the setups they made was based on a grid of dots, each with their own small square-shaped boundaries, watch it in action here, made by Burak. This is one of many other ideas based on a single concept called Meta Control: “Collection of visual/kinetic performative artifacts. These software pieces have a single organizing principle: their control mechanisms are not hidden and often exposed.”

The grid idea in particular has been stuck in my mind since I first saw it, probably because it was one of the few that I managed to figure out, so yesterday I tried to re-build it in Flash.

Stupidly, before I started building it I didn’t look for a video to refresh my memory, in fact I’ve just realized by watching this video that he didn’t actually use any vertical/horizontal lines to connect the dots, which is how I built mine.

Anyway, you can check out my first version, which I’ve creatively named MinusGrid here. Maybe I’ll upgrade it one day.

I also made a mac screensaver: download

26 November 2008 21:57
Flash Screensavers

My screensaver

Screensavers with style are extremely difficult to find: I wanted to find a nice slick one for my newly fixed computer, but after years of occasionally google-ing “slick screensaver mac” and finding myself in very scary websites, I didn’t even go near google. Instead I made my own, based on a clock.

There’s an interface that lets you choose which style to use. You can preview it by clicking on the image below, which will load one of the 4 styles randomly each time it’s opened.

Click here to download (Mac only). Just unzip the file, and open up “The Clock.saver”. It will automatically add The Clock to your list of screensavers.

I’m looking for name ideas, so any suggestions are very welcome. “The Clock” is a bit too Apple, I’d like it to sound as slick as [i think] it looks. Suggestions? “SLOCK”? “CLICK”? huh?

4 October 2008 19:27
Flash Screensavers

My banners for secretsundaze
View the banner version.

Making banners gives me the shivers.

Back in the day when I use to work fulltime for an ad agency, banners used to come in by the dozen every month, often promoting the release of things like dvd boxsets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or 24! Those of you who know me will totally understand why I might have a problem designing banners promoting these types of products. I seem to remember that a few of us hated them so much that eventually the design studio got divided into Banner Lovers and Banner Haters, which in turn caused the design team to split into departments. I sat proudly in the non-advertising department until I left few years later.

Those days are long gone and I’ve decidedly moved on, only working on advertising projects occasionally. So it was a bit strange for me when the other day James Priestley, who came to me through party contacts, asked me to make some banners to promote a secretsundaze event on Resident Advisor. Surprisingly though, I really enjoyed it! Mainly because the secretsundaze brand and corporate identity focuses on slick typography, but also because I believe in the product!! A party under some arches with Carl Craig? That’s my thing! Just like Buffy is the thing for Pam from Milton Keynes.

16 August 2008 21:16
Flash