This has been written about a week later, it's been a busy time here, not just BCT, but also because I'm moving house.

Monday

The week started with our Introduction to Creative Technologies lecture, and we covered  what technology has meant and it's role over the centuries. It was a bit of a dry one really.

Back in the studio, our group discussed the video production so I pulled out my USB key with a mostly completed edit. It was lacking music and could have done with some better images of the results. The group liked it and decided on music to add, as the music in the footage was predictably muffled. It took a while for the music choices to be made and I was thankful we had the video finished. I took images and music home and added them along with titles. I also had to write a reflective statement for the project which proved to be a bit difficult. Usually I'm full of things to say, as probably evidenced here, but I was ready to move on from this project and I'd put so much time into the video that the reflective statement became somewhat of an afterthought. I did manage to put some ideas to paper though. I authored the movie into a DVD image with encore, bought some blank DVDs and created the DVD.

Tuesday

Our group had to hand in all materials by 1. Our class was at 2pm instead of the usual 10am, and we gathered into the computer lab and were introduced to the next project, one that would be individual-based.  I found this rather pleasing. We were also introduced to a program called Animata, an open-source application that you can attach bones and joints to images such as jpg and png, that you import. You can then move the bones and joints and distort the image. Before 10am the next day we were to have an image of ourselves moving in some contorted way.

Also, a group of us were introduced to the 3D labs, that is, the rooms in one of AUT's buildings use for construction of woodwork, metalwork and plasters as well as spray booths and ovens and vacuum molding among other things. Rather exciting. Aside from the cost of raw materials, we now have the tools at our disposal to make whatever we can think of from those materials. This combined with the 3D printer and laser cutter is nice to be aware of.

Wednesday

In the morning we presented our homework, which involved opening it up on a lab computer or our laptops and walking around to see what everyone else has made. I was slightly stung by a difference between the Mac version and PC version of Animata, my photo was high resolution, on the PC you could zoom out. On the Mac, you can apparently zoom out, but not using the same methods. There is no documentation with this program.So it was a bit too close up to see what I'd attempted to do. Animata is kind of neat in what it can do (though there are other programs that can do these things) but it's really not very polished. Not surprising though, it's 004 release which I assume means .04 or something... or at least not near a 1.0 release.

We then started our first introduction to Max MSP, which is a visual programming environment. Behind the graphics is real code in C++ (A low level language, meaning it's powerful - most real software is created in C but very hard to understand for a beginner), but the interface is simply icons that one links up into a process. Despite the simplicity there were a few concepts one had to get familiar with or it would be hard going. One of the main concepts is in order to make a command start working it needed to be banged. - Basically sending an event "do whatever you do now" to an icon. So a Max MSP program looks sort of like a chain reaction. Max MSP is apparently used by communities of people in audio visual presentations, such as VJs and music performers, and it's easy to see why. It's simple interface is easy to program once you get used to it, it's pretty powerful and it can easily control other programs and devices, such as Ableton Live (a brilliant music creation program that has found it's way amongst big players such as Cubase, Logic and Pro Tools), and... Animata. Our homework was to use some existing examples of code that we had been given to control our Animata file with an apple remote.

Thursday

In the morning we presented our work and we'd also been told to bring in an old keyboard to pull apart. The afternoon consisted of pulling the keyboard to bits and tracking the connections to certain keys back to the circuit board in the keyboard.This was so that we could re-purpose the keyboard to be whatever on/off device we wanted. In the afternoon we were shown the engineering lab with soldering facilities and how to solder. Er, well I was busy in the computer lab and missed it, but luckily I'm rather familiar with soldering and electronics in general.

Friday

There was more keyboard work, and we were given a task for the following Tuesday. Our task was to create an Animata file (or use our existing one) and control it with our keyboard hack.

Also on Friday my new MacBook Pro turned up. The last few weeks has proven to me how much of a disadvantage it is to not have a laptop on this course and I was glad that it had turned up. You can get by, but presentations become more unpredictable as you move your working files from one computer to another, you are limited to the size of your USB stick (and 8gb was too small for the video work I was doing earlier in the week), and you are stuck in the computer lab while others are in the studio. One is more likely to go home to do stuff on the home desktop, but then you can't suddenly have a good idea and run it by a tutor because you are at home.

On the weekend I studied Max MSP, as my idea was a bit complicated. I found the keyboard hack rather easy, but I wanted to animate myself from side on walking. This was quite complex as first I had to work out the steps involved in walking, then work out how to program that in Max MSP which was out of the scope of any tutorials we had received.

Mucking around in Animata, the file I'd made of me side-on consisted of several layers, one for each limb that was animated. The process for making multiple layers in Animata is a bit convoluted, and the result isn't always what you expect (you probably can get predictable results with experimentation but the program is so clunky, one doesn't really want to bother experimenting). You cannot rearrange layers in a file once they are imported. So if you don't get it right, you have to start again. Animata has no undo either.

However, the file preview I noticed doesn't show a picture, but what looks like XML. XML is a mark up language that looks very similar to HTML but is customisable to whatever application it's made for -ie there aren't really any commands or markup, you make them up for the program you are using. The object of XML is to be both human and machine readable. Although "readable" might be a slightly rose-coloured description. This was great, all I had to do was change the file extension to .xml and load it into Dreamweaver (or any other text editor, but Dreamweaver has a collapsable code function making it easier to navigate long documents) and I could quickly work out the structure of an Animata document and take out mistake layers and reorder other layers. I did that and it worked. I had a clean file. But I was concerned that what I was doing was overly complicated and straying away from the brief for Tuesday. Plus half my weekend was taken up with checking out a new place to live...