30 Days of Night

30daysofnight.com

I'm a huge movie fan, an I often look through some of the cool interactive websites which help promote some of the higher profile films. 30 Days of Night has one of the cooler websites I've seen in a while. The site is made entirely in Flash, and is designed to promote the movie by reflecting its overall feel.

30 Days of Night is a horror movie about vampires. It was released in October of 2007 and was directed by David Slade, and produced by Sam Raimi (Spiderman movies, The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness). The movie takes place in Alaska, in town called Barrow, which is the farthest north inhabited town on earth. Every winter, because of how far north the town is, it experiences 30 days of night. You never know where the vampires come from, but you know that they come to take advantage of the people in the town during the 30 days where they can walk freely without fear of the sun. The movie revolves around a small group of survivors who are trying to live out the 30 days and survive the vampires.

I loved this site mainly because of the awesome style used throughout. When I visit it I don't feel like I'm browsing a website, instead I'm traveling through the town of Barrow. The site is set up in a side scrolling fashion throughout the town. When you start it is still daytime, but you can see the sun slowly sinking into the horizon, creating an ominous feeling. The site uses creepy music to ass suspense. During the day their isn't much to do in town, except scroll through and wait for the sun to go down, and once it does, all hell breaks loose..

Once dark the town changes. There are far more things to click on and interact with. Usually when you click on one of the clickable areas you will get a scary flash of a vampire, or a short clip. Their's even a cool little shooter game integrated into the site. The site if first and foremost used as a promotional tool, and the section of links/about/buy/etc. are nicely and unobtrusively integrated into the site.

halo3.com/believe

I'm also a huge fan of videogames. Halo 3 is a game that everyone has heard of. I personally think its a little overrated, bringing nothing to fantastic and new to the table. Their site on the other hand is pretty sweet.

The idea of the site is that you are in the middle of a battle frozen in time. Or you could think of it as being an interactive snapshot of a battle. Either way, you are able to navigate through the battlefield and click on various aliens, people, weapons, etc, and find out more about them. The background music is mainly piano, and creates a very sad feeling of despair and hopelessness.

Once again, the site is supposed to get people amped up to buy the game. But it is also supposed to expand on the Halo universe.

With both of these sites, the designers used non-traditional interactive ways to suck the user in and make them want to see more.

Flash Video

I think one of the coolest things that can done with Flash is the ability to add video.

Adding video to swf files has been around for 4 or 5 years. It wasn't until the last two versions of Flash that flash video became widely used on the web. Websites like YouTube and MySpace are good examples of sites that use flash video.

Web designers now can take advantage of all the benefits flash video has to offer. It used to be that video on the web could only be played back using QuickTime, Real, or Windows Media. These formats didn't give designers many options on how to work video into their websites.

Flash video gives designers options such as transparent backgrounds, subtitles, progessive downloads, and most importantly user interaction. The ability to mix ActionScript with flash video is the key to making your video work with your website

Below are some examples of how flash video can enhance a website.

http://www.flyworld.com

http://www.greatpockets.com/index.php

http://cars.com/waitingroom

http://eccoworld.ecco.com.pl

http://www.quitdoingit.com

ActionScript Physics Engine

I was searching around looking for something to do my blog on and I came across this amazing physics engine.

http://www.cove.org/ape/

This engine was created by Alec Cove and its a great example of how powerful ActionScript really is. Here's a few examples that are pretty awesome.

http://www.cove.org/flade/demos/demo1.htm
http://www.cove.org/ape/demo2.htm
http://www.cove.org/flade/demos/demo3.htm

The coolest part of this is that it's all open source. You can download a zip file that has all the individual scripts for each part of the program, such as collision detection, wheels, particles, etc. With it being open source, you can use the code right into your games and make some pretty amazing games.

What makes me happiest is working with my hands. I love creating anything, but in the past ten years I have drifted more and more into making glass mosaics. Art sites always interest me – they give me inspiration and new ideas for my work.

These two beautiful art museum web pages make good use of flash. The first site comes from the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. It focuses on Edward Hopper, an American artist who was around in the first part of the twentieth century. Everyone knows his art. At the very least, we have seen it in television ads. The web site does a great job giving you an overview of his work and it is fun to peruse.


The second art exhibit site was created by the National Palace Museum based in Taiwan. This is a well done multilingual web site, and it does a great job highlighting the calligraphic work of Mi Lu – a painter, writer and calligrapher who lived during the eleventh century. The site is gorgeous as well as instructive. Enjoy!

This doesn't qualify, but it should

I'm probably one of the last people on the planet not to know about this lecture video... but thanks to my subscription to Borders e-newsletter thingies, I caught on. I have just sat on my backside for an hour and a quarter entranced. I therefore suggest that you find your own backside and an hour and a quarter and watch this video - a lecture by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University on Fulfilling Childhood Dreams.

What does it have to do with Flash? Directly? Absolutely nada. What does it have to do with being in a class on such a creative media, your passions, your goals in life... oh, just everything. Plus, it's darned entertaining.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&feature=related

Liquid Journey

Liquid Journey is another cool experimental flash site. It has examples of AI computer organisms, generative patterns, particles, and more. The examples are made in Flash and best all, the code is available for download. Although much the code is written in AS2, with some experience, I’m sure one could port it over to AS3. The open source modules are broken down into easy to navigate sections as follows: Favorite, AI, Lines, Chaser, Patterns, Dynamics, Particles, Recursion, Generative, Forces, Sound, Video, and 3D. There are also Discourse and Community sections to the site that explain some of the processes and provide further examples. Not to be missed, is an excellent presentation exploring Artificial Intelligence with many examples of code built in Flash. Overall, the site is an inspirational and elegant exposition on the power of flash coupled with the creative and logical expressions of the human mind.

Joshua Davis and Dynamic Abstraction

Joshua Davis is an artist, web and graphic designer who coined the phrase "dynamic abstraction" in art - an awesome idea that reinvents the creation of art.

Joshua Davis was one of the pioneers of the induction of Flash as a mainstream web application. His rise to becoming one of the front runners of web design and all the new ideas to come with it started with the release of his 2001 autobiography featured in k10.net. He describes how he overcame drug addiction in order to pursue his goal of becoming a full time artist. He began to learn HTML at the Pratt Institute in 1995, and soon after began to experiment with the new application called flash. His work had a major influence on the "Y2K" era of the internet's dot-com explosion. Davis has created websites for many companies, people, and bands. Today he teaches at New Yorks School of Visual Arts.

In 2004 Davis was asked to write an essay called "Dynamic Abstraction". This idea finally brought a clear view of the kind of work he had already been creating for the previous few years. Davis had been interested in the idea of randomization in art, and the "chaos theory" and what would happen when applied to computer generated art in a controlled environment. In the essay, Davis states the following:

"Among modern artists I conceptually identify with Jackson Pollock - not that I’m a particular fan of his visual style, but because he always identified himself as a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. There’s something in that disconnect - not using a brush or tool in traditional methods.”

Here is an example of Davis' work using dynamic abstraction:



Basically, the analogy is that the brush never hitting the canvas is like the user of the program (whether it be Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, etc.) never actually directly using a tool from the pallet or various menus. Instead, the actual of creation of art is created by a program written with specific rules and boundaries that use the tools to generate the art dynamically. In other words, the program creates the image, but because the program was created with specific ideas in mind by a human, its still considered (at least by me) art.

Davis also states the following, which helps to explain the above:

“Pollock might argue that it’s the process of abstraction that’s dynamic, not the end result, which in his case is a static painting. In my own work, the end result is never static; by making room for as many anomalies as possible, every composition generated by the programs we write is unique to itself. I’ll program the “brushes,” the “paints,” the “strokes,” the “rules”, and the “boundaries”. However it is the software that creates the compositions — the programs draw themselves. I am in a constant state of surprise and discovery, because the program may structure compositions that I may never have thought of to execute or might take me hours to create manually.”

To me, the idea of dynamic abstraction is the ultimate marriage of art and technology. A human writes a program with rules and boundaries, which control the tools of a program, which in turn create imagery, which finally becomes art. The idea certainly makes unclear the line between art and technology. 50 years from now will a painting created by a robot with a paint brush be considered art so long that the robot was created by a human?

Whats the difference between a person creating a program which creates imagery, and a robot that creates imagery? If the person defines the exact boundaries of the robots movements, and the programs variables, I see no reason it should be different. Anyways, I digress.

Some examples of Joshua Davis's work can be found at once-upon-a-forest.com and joshuadavis.com.

Nathan

Some Online Games

Since I have been attracted to playing some games in the real world such as basketball, snowboarding, kayaking or surfing, I’m not a big fan of video games even I grow up with friends who play Nintendo or PlayStation. For the projects and a presentation in this class, I surfed the web to look for interesting online games that are created by Flash. I found simple games like a jigsaw puzzle which might be a sample of my project, but I picked more advanced games here. So I honestly have no idea how did they script these games for now… ;op

http://nonoba.com/chris/untangle/

To play this game, move dots by a mouse (click and drag) and make sure the lines do not overlap each other. I assume it works by math algorithms. It is cool that how we can control the dots and the lines at will.

http://www.gameshot.org/?id=2399

To play this game, use your mouse to morph the ground in order to get the ball to the exit. If you click a tile under the ball, it is raised and the ball start rolling. The game itself is simple but I like the way how the ball moves naturally (momentum) on the slopes. Also You can create own game.

http://www.nitrome.com/games/dirkvalentine/

This game reminded me “Nintendo Super Mario” that I played a lot when I was small. It used to require a game machine and a cassette to play the game, but now we can play about the same quality game on the Internet without any loading problem.

http://flashkof.fr/hokuto/game.html

I just liked this animation “Hokuto no Ken” when I was small. This online game looks like a real video game; characters hit each other with very quick motions and images are clear. I have not got how to control Kenshiro well; that is the biggest reason I didn’t get into playing video games. User-friendliness would be considered as one of the key elements when we create games.

I had not had no ability to solve mathematical problems throughout whole my student life. Now I wish I have some talent of Math that I can apply for Flash scripting. The other day, my friend told me our brains accept language training while we are small like 4,5 years old, and Math training after we grown up like 20’s or 30’s. I thought I’ve been learning in opposite pattern. So I’m hoping my ability of Math will pick up for Flash scripting and be able to create cool games someday.