Riverfront exhibition

Posted by on 2012/05/12 No comments

On the 9th of May 2012, we were given the opportunity to display Turf at an interactive media exhibition held at The Riverfront Arts Centre in Newport. We obtained a projector and a touch-screen, so that the viewer could move around the map with a simple touch.

Here are cards we printed to promote the interactive experience of Turf available at watchturf.com

Bazyli preparing the touch screen and the projector before the private viewing.

Explaining the concept of Turf to viewers.

Spectators viewing and interacting with the touch-screen.

Editing Turf

Posted by on 2012/04/13 No comments

The editing process was finalized by pasting all the individual animated spaces onto one large (4K) sequence in Adobe Premiere, in order to be synced with each other and with the music.

Turf – Block number 4 test

Posted by on 2012/02/23 No comments

Character number 4 test

Choosing the right platform for the engine

Posted by on 2012/02/11 No comments

Since Barney is occupied with the animation process I have started thinking about the implementation of the animation – choosing the right platform upon which I will build the engine for Turf (working title of the project). Here are some goals:

  • Works smoothly on as many devices as possible
  • Works on Windows, OS X and Linux
  • Works on Android-based and iOS-based devices – touch-screen enabled smartphones and tablets

The two technologies to consider are:

  • HTML5+CSS3 with JavaScript (heavily using <video> tag – which unfortunately presents some problems)
  • Adobe Flash (using Flash Builder to deploy the apps to all devices)

Problems which arise and ideas on how to deal with them:

  • Infinite loop panning (like the map of the world) – no solution yet
  • I don’t have the devices to test on them – using friends for testing (local and network in Canada) and device simulators
  • Performance – since the project will be really demanding (couple times 1080p and multitrack playback)
    • Not using live streaming for the mobile versions [preloaded video should be on the device]
    • Rendering only the part of the video which is visible to save processing power [might be a challenge to cut the videos and to automatically smoothly start/stop them during playback] – need to test if it’s a feasible option and if yes, what’s the optimal number of segments – 4, 8 or maybe even 64?
    • Multiple versions for different resolutions and different recompressions for various devices

I would personally prefer to use HTML5, but on the other hand there are ready-made solutions for “map-like” panning/scrolling in Flash which work very well. Probably the performance for this one would be higher with Flash, since Flash had many years to optimize the video playback whilst HTML5 is really new and edgy (not to say unstable) and might be a pain in the ass to develop. Though I like a good challenge, so I might take that route.

Turf – Hue test

Posted by on 2012/02/02 No comments

Here’s the original colour:

Here is the same image but with an alteration the the hue. A tempting alternative.