Hunter S. Thompson once wrote: “There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?” I created this print commentary on AIDS for the Sex issue of a friend’s art magazine.

For this tourism-promotion spot, Motion Theory tasked me with putting Van Gogh’s famous ‘Starry Night’ painting into motion without losing its painterly quality. To do this, I wrote a program that broke the painting apart into paint-strokes, and then animated each individual stroke through a vector field.

Flocking is a great example of emergent behavior: complex behavior which arises out of a system of very simple rules. You can see examples of flocking in nature, in swarms of ants and schools of piranhas. In this post I explore a very basic flocking system and briefly break down the rules that form its foundation.

Want to learn how to build and use your own classes in AS3? I know I did, and after much digging, googling, and cussing, I figured it out. Here’s a simple, step-by-step approach that (I hope) will make it easy for you. As an added bonus: a basic Mass class, which you can use for physics sims or any other craziness you can imagine.

I was digging through some old work and I came across this branding project I did in school. I did it four years ago and believe me, most of the stuff I did four years ago I can barely stand to look at! But I actually still like this one, so here it is. :)

The concept behind this spot is that the environment around the main character reflects her emotional state as she goes through a range of emotions (happiness, sadness, love, anger, etc). I had to come up with a variety of treatments for the live-action footage as well as design various elements that could convey these emotions through both appearance and behavior in an organic, dynamic way.

“Design thinking [is] an approach to problem-solving that is inherent in us as humans, as we seek to improve what already exists and create what does not.”

I explored the new RegExp class in AS3 by writing a Haiku Validator, which is basically just a syllable-counter. It works by parsing through the input strings and checking them against an array of RegExps.

These two :60 spots are called “Eraser” and “Swing”. They’re part of Exxon’s ongoing effort to improve its public image, and they’re about how science and math are everywhere around us. I worked on them at Motion Theory alongside three very talented designer-developers: Keith Pasko, Josh Nimoy, and Gabe Dunne. Our job was to create motion assets that would later be composited with live footage and other 2D and 3D assets.

Spring systems are neat because they are basically self-organizing: each object attempts to satisfy a certain distance requirement relative to its neighbors, resulting in a (kind of) grid layout and fluid-like motion.

A very basic overview of how springs work, as well as an implementation (and source) in Processing, and an implementation (no source) in Flash.