Hypercompendia

Just had a thought this morning after responding to a long-growing thread of commentary involving several friends on the Facebook site. Since it was a lively, interesting, and informative discussion, I was thinking of copying the whole thread to one of my websites, likely Spinning since it was more relative to literature, reading, and writing. Why? Because at a site such as Facebook, the main driver behind the purpose is being up-to-date, the latest statement or news, and the rest seems to roll off into oblivion after a few days. I didn’t want that to happen to this discussion. Damn technology, I thought, completely disregarding that weblogs have longer, searchable archives, true, but are as transient in nature as anything online, even as it is everlasting. For while it may be online for all eternity (we don’t know that yet), in anything that is geared towards regular updates or postings, the old news becomes the past and usually goes unread.

But there was another path to this theory of constants. Before the internet and its blooming crop of social networking sites, this conversation and all other online 1) would be unlikely, since the participants are globally located, and 2) even in a sit-down, face-to-face discussion, unless someone had thought to bring a recording device, everything said is instantly lost except to memory. Interesting.

With a few little glitches of memory and some software changes in Text Edit (Mac) that I wasn’t aware of, I still managed to complete a short little hypertext story and post it up on site here: Little Lives

The first four text boxes (pages) are directly taken from the Tunxis New Media class project called “Apartment 9″, run by Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I believe this piece began in an earlier semester and when I visited a current class, the students were being asked to jump in at some point in the work and continue on with a separate trail from that point. I chose to start right from the beginning and focus on three characters already introduced (though I’ve assigned a name to one of the characters that was nameless and I’m not sure somewhere in the huge project she hasn’t been killed off).

Here’s the map, from the Tinderbox software which I use and which is being taught in the classroom.

It’s a really silly story that I’ve chosen to continue, but the important part was merely getting back into the style of writing a hypertext non-linear piece. It seemed natural to me to choose the two sisters and the husband of one as a good basis for story.

With the story unfolding, I knew that each sister served a purpose to the story and the husband of one was a necessary tie-in. Another was the theme of food and cooking. I had some fun with that. I threw in online gaming, and of course, a contest, and managed as well to come back to the concept of recipes which was also part of “Apartment 9.”

Then I ran into a problem with exporting from Tinderbox to html files for uploading to a website. What I found was that my simple little free text editor that comes with Mac suddenly didn’t look at all the same as I remembered it would and I needed to change colors and sizing and add some info to the text that wasn’t necessarily in the Tinderbox stage of the piece. It took a little bit of searching around and checking settings, until I found the “ignore rich text commands” on the text edit under “Preferences” and that got me back to the view I could work with, to change and add tags.

I didn’t do anything much new with this piece, instead followed the css and html I’d used on the 100 Days Projects, Blueberries, and a few other pieces. It was just that first step towards getting back into the game.

Not as impressed at all with the photo mix feature. While I did not select maybe the best to work from and don’t have the experience yet to have that in mind prior to selection, it seems that while features such as nose, eyes, mouth, can be spot on, the rest of the images just sort of overlay each other and end up looking weird. The samples provided in the tutorial look to have some more work done on the backgrounds that I haven’t quite figured out, so practice may be the key. The other possibility is to first make the images more alike via Photoshop, then put them into Morpheus. Then again, I think Photoshop may already have a morph feature.

Anyway, here’s the layout with the final in the preview window at the bottom right. I think I’ll play a bit more with the warp feature, and maybe a little with the morph again before I stock this experience for the future.

Just played a little with the warp feature of Morpheus, and though it might be a neat thing, I still firmly believe that Photoshop may be the more flexible method of distorting a photo to get the effect that is wanted. However, I will try it for something in the future, using the points at perhaps a more selective, carefully plotted progression. The triangles that show up when the points are moved could be done in a “slower” or more “frequent” series, to achieve the effect.

That said, here’s a quickie:  Window Warp

This project has just been a dabble really, working with images that have already been used and worked into a short film clip. This, I think, was the easiest way to get into the program quickly, since I was focusing on 1) using more than two images, and 2) morphing rather than warping.

Now I’m playing a bit with the warp feature and already, while I think it’s neat, I don’t think it’s as flexible as what I’ve done in Photoshop. I think that in Photoshop, using the Liquify feature, there was a lot of fine detail moving that used a point that could be controlled by the cursor as to what was moved and how much and in what direction (also, the size of the selector tool). Morpheus would work differently, using dots as markers set up on one image, then moved point by point (dot by dot–see photos in post below) where there could of course be a lot of control and accuracy, depending upon number of points placed, but it would be a lot of work.

Also, Photoshop allowed the use of other tools in its vast array; color tones, shadows, effects, etc. whereas Morpheus does not include anything like this in the software.

I’ll see what I can come up with in Morpheus using Warp, starting with a new image and post soon on the progress.

I think I have it here in a flash file:

Recycling Transition

The other thing is that I was able to fix a major mess up in the marking layout; what happened was that I must have been moving a dot and hiccuped, thus moving the dot way northeast of where it was originally on the previous image. This resulted in some odd stuff happening.

I never would have figured out how to fix it until I selected “show triangles” from one of the menus and came up with this, which obviously showed the dot that was off on vacation (can’t see it here, it’s been fixed, but think of taking one of these dots and moving it and the resulting effect on the pattern).

Well, aside from some major mess-ups–didn’t realize that any dots added to an image in the sequence adds dots to ALL the images, even those prior to that image, I’ve put together this file from the Recycling segment. Problem is, that while I can email the preview in a .swf version, I can’t seem to send it to a website like this to include it in a post.

Workin’ on that problem.

Found out that yes, I can do a series of images into Morpheus though I haven’t finished the sequence. What concerned me was that I wanted to be able to replicate (for now, as practice) the Recyling transition from face to fetus that needs to be done in stages. Since it follows the lines of a poem, the images relate to those specific lines, and this is what happens throughout that poem, from Poe turning into Jesus Christ, to the finale of tunnel to birth canal. This may come up in future work.

Evidently this can be done. I’ll have the short clip ready probably tomorrow, but the work area of the program, at the portion where I’m currently working–image three into image four– is below. What is being done is dots made on one image show up on the others (that follow), then those marker dots can be moved on the next image to bring them into sync when the sequence is run. More later.

Just got myself a few new “toys” – that means software that’s fun to play with despite its nature of productivity. What I got was Smith Micro’s Poser 7, Anime Studio Pro 6, and their Morpheus Animation Suite. (Links are to the latest versions.) Obviously, these aren’t the latest version of each, but at a total cost of $60, it was better for me to feel I could afford these on a whim rather than either wait until I could afford to get them at full cost or feel pressured.

The easiest one to learn was the first one I’m trying and that’s Morpheus. There is a limit to exactly what you can do, but I must say that already I can see where I could have used this to make my life much easier in the 2008 production of Recycling, a poem I made into a movie with images I worked over in Photoshop and then dropped into Windows Movie Maker.

The sequence in particular that I’m working with is the transition of a photograph of a face (mine) into a fetus. Here are the images I’d used in the final piece:

Now there were several images in between these as steps in the process, but these were the finals I used. There were transition effects between them, available in the Movie Maker program.

But Morpheus, while still requiring much of the work to be done in Photoshop (though I haven’t learned the Warp feature to see how much it can do) I think that the transition between the shots in the sequence could be much more vibrant, more physical, in the Morpheus platform.

I intend to play with these to see what possible effects can be achieved, for example, I am not sure if it’s possible to do a continuous strip from a series of images such as the above eight. The program has a setup of making A into B, but there is also a movie strip with frames so that may be the way to work it–though between the pairs, I’m not sure what happens.

At any rate, I’ll be back with the details as I work.

I’ve been a fan of Dreaming Methods for a long time though I’m still stubbornly into text as the load-bearing walls of story, but today’s tweet offering the free source code of many visual effects and my new zest and zeal for taking my hypertext pieces further was more than I could resist.

My other problem has been that I’m rather a purist about not copying what’s already been done (excluding what Steve Ersinghaus has taught me in effects, but he’s a friend) and seeing it as unoriginal. I’m just accepting that I am incapable of both seriously understanding and developing the code and instead am better geared toward story and language and should use the skill and talent of the creative coders to better advantage.

Dreaming Methods also has a resource kit available that I’ve been eying for a while.