Apocalypse Animated video

I made this little “trailer” video for ApocalypseAnimated.com . It’s only 3 minutes long, while there are almost 12 minutes of animation (without even looping!) in the project, so this is but a mere sample of the wonders to find at the website. But this has music so people are likelier to share and attend to it.

There are some technical looping flaws that bother me. Apparently when I export HD video from Moho, it omits the last frame of the loop, causing a jerk in the seams. This doesn’t happen when I export gifs. To make my hi-res video archive perfect, I will have to go back and add one frame and re-render every. single. file. This took 4 boring tedious days last time, and I’m not looking forward to doing it again. But such are the responsibilities of an Apocalypse animator.

Choosing the song was not straightforward. I was really smitten by Fuck Everything by Euringer (aka Jimmy Urine). It would have supplied nice ironic tension because it’s not intentionally about the Apocalypse, and it’s from the point-of-view of two bratty entitled lovers, which is an interesting lens through which to view John of Patmos and his God. But Fuck Everything already has a perfect video, and who knows what kind of headaches it would cause me; even if Jimmy isn’t a copyright maximalist, his songs are distributed in a  system that doesn’t recognize Fair Use, and YouTube’s ContentID would surely block even its first upload. I did start making an edit with it, but got frustrated (as one does) and that anxiety contributed to my consideration of an alternative song.

Fortunately I’d already compiled a list of old gospel songs that might work, and the top entry proved a good fit. I found it on the wonderful archive.org, where I always go a-hunting in my research phases. I worried that straight-up gospel wouldn’t be ironic enough with the animation, but When The Fire Comes Down had its own irony, contrasting a cheerful jaunty melody with horrific subject matter. Everything fit right away and I banged out this edit in a single day. Thank you, Internet Archive!

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Mystic Symbolic: The Colorifying

MysticSymbolic has a long way to go, but continues to improve! We now have a rudimentary mandala generator, a Randomize Colors button, and an easier-to-remember work-in-progress URL: mystic-symbolic.art

Though primarily a collaboration between me and outstanding code genius Atul Varma, we now have a “team” including Dave Weaver of Webaissance, and my old pal Maneesh Yadav, who will hopefully dial in the colors. I’ve always scorned work-culture ideas like “team” and “meetings,” but I must say these are making the project better.

Speaking of colors, I am amazed at how well purely random RGB colors are working. I assumed unrestricted random palettes would be 90% horrible, but in fact they are 50% tolerable, and sometimes quite lovely. All the color combos below were generated randomly.


  

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Moar Mystic Symbolic

I continue to design and upload more symbols for MysticSymbolic, finessing most, deleting many. We now have a “Randomly invert symbols” toggle, which I recommend to get a nice balance of black and white. I also recommend a complexity setting of 2 (the slider goes from zero to “bonkers”).

Sometimes I take screenshots and name them.  Here’s my latest gallery:

Bedtime
School of the Arts
Two Headed
Culture

Continue reading “Moar Mystic Symbolic”

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Mystic Symbolic: the progressing-in-progress

Still no color, still no backgrounds, still no animation, but I’ve had plenty to do designing more symbols and getting the hang of the specification system we came up with. I spend hours hitting the “randomize” button (Atul created a keyboard shortcut, control-option-r, so my arm doesn’t get as sore), watching the shapes interact, then making revisions, re-exporting, and re-uploading. Every once in a while I take a screenshot and write a title, and I share some of those here:

She Holds the Moon
Trainer
Mama Power
Tree of Knowledge
Vehicle of Enlightenment
The Book of Life
Lamb of God
Mask of the Goddess
Crush the Hebrews
Strength
Rebirth

Generate your own at https://toolness.github.io/mystic-symbolic/?p=creature

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Mystic Symbolic: the developening

On January 27 I awoke with an idea for a mystic symbolic art generator. I immediately sketched copious notes and put out word I was looking for a coder to collaborate with. By some miracle, Atul Varma responded within an hour, which makes me believe this project really wants to exist.

My plans are vast and sprawling, so we’re starting simple. And by simple we mean bonkers:

Atul and I are on the same page regarding Free Software and Free Culture, so we’re both happy to share as we go along. You can generate your own strange images like the ones above by clicking the “randomize” button here:

https://toolness.github.io/mystic-symbolic/?p=creature

Here is the main Mystic Symbolic work-in-progress page:

https://toolness.github.io/mystic-symbolic/

And if you’re on guthub, which I am not yet but will be soon, there is this:

https://github.com/toolness/mystic-symbolic

This is a mere taste of things to come.

 

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