Addicted to the internet

Maybe I need to go to reStart 'an internet addiction recovery program'. I love the internet no denying it, so I took the test and apparently there is 'possible abuse'.
Its also a place for 'Treatment for internet, gaming, texting & video game excessive use'. Maybe its just a place for the mtv, blogging, social networking generation then?

I want to see this film

ART & COPY Trailer from ART & COPY on Vimeo.

Romain Laurent

Some really interesting work from Romain Laurent especially the tilt photography.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

I decided to make a fully functioning font yesterday. I wanted to take elements from some of my favorite fronts. Avenir, belwe mono and the dazed and confused font.
I wanted to make s sleek font using circles and lines with a low x height. I don't kow what to call it yet , its not completely finished as I haven't done any numbers, which I would like to do.

Something I would like to see

Nosaj Thing Visual Show Compilation Test Shoot from Adam Guzman on Vimeo.

Sound in Context

Sound in Context (Full Film) from Sound and Music on Vimeo.

Creative Writing with Charlie Dark

Last Saturday I went to a creative writing workshop, I went with the intention to help me get in the mood for writing my dissertation. The workshop leader was Charlie Dark a dj/musician/poet/writer. It was a 4 hour workshop where we had to write about our favorite place, then refine it, then perform it. It was a creative writing workshop but it kind of became a confidence and networking workshop. I do feel a bit less scared about writing because I always associate writing with school work and essays and exams and I'm not good at it, but the workshop freed me up a bit to be a bit more comfortable. But one of the most important things that came from it was to be confident when presenting your work full stop. He said you have to be confident becuase if you come across badly when presenting your work all that time that went into your work would have gone to waste. He also said that if you want anything done do it yourself, makes sense.

Better late than never...

A bit late but here are most of the business cards that I picked up over the graduation show period. The reasons why I picked up the cards were either that I liked the persons work or their business card was attractive or unusual.

The blue ones on the right were the standard Brighton business cards and on the back they had individual circular stamps that represented them.

This is Camberwell's fold out deck of cards book with each card being a different student.
These are mostly from RCA some amazing things going on there.

Life in the UK.

Recently I have come across a couple of people that have taken or are taking the Life in the UK test, to gain British citizenship. In order to become a UK citizen you have to pass the 24 question test on subjects like these::

Migration to Britain

Children, family and young people

Population

The regions of Britain

Religion and tolerance

Customs and traditions

How the United Kingdom is governed

Housing

Services in and for the home

Money and credit

Health

Education

Leisure

Travel and transport

Looking for work

Equal rights and discrimination

At work

Working for yourself

Childcare and children at work

And answer them in the time limit of 45 minutes. Once you pass that you have to attend a ceremony where you sing the national anthem and get accepted at a British citizen.

Well I want to take this and create my own test of brithishness a test of what I perceive as British culture being a mixed race person among thousands of others.

Summer time...

Well a lot has happened since I finished my second year, I was shortlisted for the digital category for the Brahm Sh! Awards, went for an interview which was a useful experience because I'm useless at interview situations. It also helped me reflect on my work and realize that most of it is just a learning process and the feedback that I got was that I should just concentrate on a specific area, but I enjoy doing everything. Anyway I didn't win anything. I have yet to get any responses for internships. And I am scared about being bored over the summer as I rejected a holiday in Malaysia to gain some experience over the summer, but I'm still contacting people and hopefully something will come along.

So far I have been to most of the degree shows to look at the competition. And these are some of the best bits.

St Martins fashion and marketing - Best business cards and promotion.

St Martins mens fashion - Good business cards and interesting clothes.

St Martins Graphic Design, Illustraion, advertising. Was Ok, was expecting more, my favorite piece was an accelerometer controlled doll game.

Chelsea Graphic design - Very impressive the overall exhibition had a lot of thought put into it only problem was they only showed the best work, which is a bit harsh considering the amount of money the course costs.

Brighton Graphic and illustraion - I saw the London show they did, by far my favorite show, the space was good and the work was consistent and had a similar style some very strong graphic work.

Camberwell illustration - exhibition poster.

RCA - MA communication design - the experimental design was amazing there were many arduino projects which strengthens my argument that arduino should be taught at art college.

There were probably more but I cant remember right now, I'll put some photos up later of the business cards that I collected. and some links if I can find them.

Arduino Physical Computing 101.

So I went to the Arduino 1 day workshop last week and really enjoyed it. I had never previously used a micro controller (Arduino) before and found it really interesting due to the possibilities with what you can do with it. I don't think that I have touched a breadboard or played with electronics since my GCSE's. And I have a very basic understanding of java. But it was fine it was a basics workshop aimed at beginners although there were some very experienced people from all kind of backgrounds me also being the youngest there. One of the guys helping out used to work on the movement of eyes of the puppets for the Jim Henson Company which was cool.

Any way for 60 squid I got an Arduino (Duemilanove) a breadboard a bag of wires and a bag of resistors and sensors which consist of switches, light sensitive resistors and a tilt switches.



The Arduino itself is quite aesthetically pleasing, it is well made and quite solid.



The name came from a local bar in Italy, where it is made and this is made quite obvious on flip side of the micro controller.



The practical side of the workshop started off by making an LED blink and controlling the speed of the blink, and throughout the day it got a bit more complicated with more complicated circuits and using different sensors. But overall it was really interesting to see what it could do first hand and that there is a different way of thought bringing things away form the screen and in to the real world.

One of the many basic things that I have managed to do is to light 3 LED's red,green and blue alternatively and controlling the speed.



At the moment I am trying to hack a cheap clock that I bought from poverty aid, I want to make it tick fast slow and backwards and use it for a project.

I'm also reading this:



and listening to this:

ALVA NOTO AND RYUICHI SAKAMOTO - UTP

weyyyyyyy

New website up and running, not quite finished though, but I'm linking it so it will hopefully come up in google.

www.samputera.co.uk

The Maker II

This is basically what I'm going to write my dissertation on. About Existing outside commodity culture and the subculture of The maker and how this could effect the future of design.

'Design doesn't meet the needs of people but meets the needs of manufacturers to sell to people' Papanek.

Dissertation

I was planning on continuing my essay on 'the need to ecologically intelligent design'. But I think I'm kind of bored about that now and don't think that I have enough enthusiasm to be able to write a million words on. So I have been thinking about other topics that I could write about. I thought about doing my dissertation on 'The Maker'. Because is it something that I am becoming very interested in and also I may be able to incorporate some of the ecological design in to it.

Vince Collins

A 1960's psychedelic animator, quite ahead of his time some amazing visuals.





A electronic musician and a vj have used these animations for performances



If I was vj'ing I dont really like the idea of using other peoples visuals for my performance, Id rather have my own stuff, although if you look at vj'ing like dj'ing its is using other peoples work I guess.

C4D+AE

Spike c4d + after effects from Sam Putera on Vimeo.

I took the alpha channels from c4d and put them in after effects and added a blur, glow, and glass effect probably something else but I cant remember.

As Found

As Found

"The Image as it is.
As-Found is our creative response to the trillions of images available on the Internet.
The ‘As’ in As-Found stands for the perfection we perceive in these images. These images, as they have been found, are perfect in our eyes, and we want to showcase them here, giving them a new space in which to be contemplated. Showing them in the context of this site gives them new value.
We often choose images for different qualities than those which were intended to be seen. Therefore the creator is often irrelevant.
If the image has been made by a contemporary artist we don’t want to know about it, because images created with multiple interpretations in mind are useless to us.
We think that a found image can match any image produced within the artistic field, in aesthetic, cultural or emotional qualities.
Our tools have become a significant part of the process as we are able to see further, dig deeper, collect faster and see exponentially more.
Finding is creating."

Plans

This is a quick storyboard for my animation. Doesn't look like much but it looks a hell of a lot better in my head.

Most of it is going to be black and white except for the scribble there which will be this...

(insert video here from vimeo when it is finished being converted, really tempted to get a pro account)


(actually have a picture for the moment)

...but it will be extremely colourful instead of test gray.

I have decided to make it half with Cinema 4d and half with After Effects because I will be able to get much better results and better control over the animation.

1.0

The submission for the OneDotZero gives a few guidelines on what is needed for the submission.

List:

On a playable DVD
. - A preview of my short film / animation.

On a cd
. - A preview movie file, no larger than 100mb saved with extensions .mov /.avi / .mp4
. - Aselection of a minimum of 4 hi-res print quality stills (300dpi, at least 10cm)
. - Brief synopsis (approx 50 words about techniques, software, inspiration)
. - Biography (approx 50 words eg where I studied.

DEADLINE 29TH MAY

I plan to have this all done by the 27th.

This made me think about how to actually format my final moving image, I have never really made a dvd of specific moving image so I had no idea of what resolution to make my animation what frame rate what aspect ratio nothing really, all I was learning was how to make the animation, not how to physically produce it.

So I did some research so that I don't have to leave it to the last minute. I used videohelp to find what I needed to know.

PAL (25 frames/second)

Video:
Up to 9.8 Mbps* (9800 kbps*) MPEG2 video
Up to 1.856 Mbps (1856 kbps) MPEG1 video
720 x 576 pixels MPEG2 (Called Full-D1)
704 x 576 pixels MPEG2
352 x 576 pixels MPEG2 (Called Half-D1, same as the CVD Standard)
352 x 288 pixels MPEG2
352 x 288 pixels MPEG1 (Same as the VCD Standard)
25 fps*
16:9 Anamorphic (only supported by 720x576)

Audio:
48000 Hz
32 - 1536 kbps
Up to 8 audio tracks containing Dolby Digital, DTS, PCM(uncompressed audio), MPEG-1 Layer2. One audio track must have MPEG-1, DD or PCM Audio.

Extras:
Motion menus, still pictures, up to 32 selectable subtitles, seamless branching for multiple storylines, 9 camera angles. And also additional DVD-ROM / data files that only can be read by computer DVD drives.

Total:
Total bitrate including video, audio and subs can be max 10.08 Mbps (10080 kbps)


* Mbps = million bits per second
* kbps = thousand bits per second
* fps = frames per second

AE

Really good tutorial site VideoCoPilot made me realise how powerful After effects was and that I have now decided to use it in conjunction with cinema4d.

Resourceful links

Motiongrapher
Mograph
cgart

Bounce

For this animation I went with a different method, instead of making the animation react to the sound I made the animation first and then the sound. I made the sound using the Max/Msp patch I made previously to create an organic random feel to the bouncing balls.

Bouncing Balls (with audio) from Sam Putera on Vimeo.

Visuals with sound

After seeing the advanced beauty showing and talk, I wanted to make audio reactive visuals for my submission to 'onedotzero'. This can be done with Cinema4d using something call the mograph sound effector. Hear are some of my tests from using it with a simple 4x4 beat.

Sound test 1 from Sam Putera on Vimeo.

I like this one its quite simple and I like the movement.

Sound test 2 from Sam Putera on Vimeo.

This one didn't work how I planned, it took about an hour just to render 3 seconds, which is ridiculous and while my computer is rendering I cant use it to do anything else because its using up all the cpu. And it becomes annoying when something you have been waiting for a long time doesn't work out how it was supposed to. This has made me realise about the complication and detail that goes into an animation, do i sacrifice detail for a more productive and efficient work flow?

Sound test 3 from Sam Putera on Vimeo.

Here I tried to move all of the cubes but only the bottom one worked.

Meatball

Here is the video that I didn't upload before but I compressed it so it fits.

Meatball from Sam Putera on Vimeo.

It was done using C4D, I used the 'worst fight ever glitch version' that I did as a texture fro displacement mapping and as a texture for colour, it Took 3:30hrs to render.
I submitted it for the Lunar night, which I got some feedback from Jack who runs it

"Thought your visuals were awesome man..especially ur more recent one..i really havent a clue how you've done it so im not really sure wat to constructively say about how to technically improve it. I would definately have liked to have seen more in a club environment because they both worked perfectly with any kind of music.

With the more recent one, how did you manage to incorporate faces in there? really cool! maybe if you brought other moving image into it such as motion graphics or organic film, create a whole scenery in which can be part of it could give another dimension to the work...like i say though i really dont know how manageable that would be because it looks really technical what you've done already."

Here is also a little test that I did before this one.

Melt from Sam Putera on Vimeo.

Looking back at this I think I prefer it.

Max/msp/jitter

I sat down last week and started to go through the help files in Max/Msp/Jitter(MMJ)(the only way that you actually teach yourself there are no books or websites that teach you the basics) which are really good, at first they are quite simple but they quickly become quite daunting. MMJ are 3 different programms within a program, it is a graphical interface where you patch up building blocks based on logic and it does what you patch it to do, its amazing.

Max - is the basic framework
Msp - For audio
Jitter - visuals

I read that is is probably best to learn in that successive order so thats how I started. It has taken me a week to get through the Max tutorials, and it is a very practical learning process so far from what I have learned I have made a random number generator that controls the MIDI in logic.



It has made making music a lot more interesting, and I am still going through the tutorials so eventually I can make sound and visuals with unlimited control.