Visual Advance | Blogthe personal and professional evolution of danny davis

We have been doing some revamping of our entrance at work (Manifest Digital). I threw together this glorified screensaver to project onto our doors.

Done in Flash CS4, Actionscript 3. You can view the project online here: http://manifestdigital.com/playground/flip/

I made a few small updates to VisualAdvance.com today. I mainly just added all my 2009 work thus far. I hadn’t realized it was that long since I made an update. This includes pretty much all the work I have done since I have been at Manifest.

Making this update made me realize how badly I need to restructure/redesign my site. You learn so much in a 6 month period of time. It was so hard to not just start patching holes as I was making updates, but I would much rather focus that energy into getting it done right for my next release. If anything these updates pushed me to focus on a new release sooner.

My friend Wenner wanted to do another music video for someone’s birthday. I hadn’t done any video projects in a while, so I was definitely in. We only had about a week to compose the whole thing so the only set plan I had going in was to shoot on pretty much every camera I own, and make something happen with that. I trusted Wenner and his choreographer would take care of the moves, so all I had to do was capture it and make them look even better.

With the help of my motion graphics friend Jay Purugganan, and my Producer girlfriend Cristina, I was able to shoot edit, and “color correct” the whole thing in about 7 hours. This gave Jay about 3-4 days to add the finishing touches to make it that much more impactful.

Anyway, have a look:

I recently finished another piece for an upcoming gallery show. I am calling this one The Generative Wasp Landing. Obviously it is a followup piece to my first one, The Generative Eye.

This time I decided to use a slightly different “brush” by using more of a circular glob shape, and I wanted their motion to be different than the first. I ended up using brownian motion to make the brushes move around the canvas this time. This gave it a much more organic feel than my first piece. I also had them scanning over a texture this time so that they would give the impression of real paint much more than just vector shapes. The entire application was written in Adobe Flash CS3.

The final piece will be on display:

Thursday, July 30, 6-9pm
Demitasse Cafe, 1066 W. Taylor ST. Chicago IL

Here is a video of this piece being generated:

And a few other shots I took while working on this final piece.

The Generative Orchid 1:

The Generative Orchid 2:

The Generative Wasp Landing – Detail Shot:

My original photo I used for this piece:

I recently took a fresh look into my site Student Story, and realized things could be done a lot better on the coding side. It is a PHP based site, and when I first built it PHP wasn’t even on my radar of languages. I was pretty happy I was even able to make a full site using it at the time.

Now looking back on it with a good number of years coding in other languages, I am able to comprehend the code SOOO much easier. It actually reads like english to me now. I equate it to how people really know a lanauge once they can dream init. For me, once I can read it in my head like a sentence, rather than syntax, I feel confident int he language.

So I went back in and cleaned up some of the back-end that talked with my database and so forth. Basically cleaned up some security issues that were allowing bots to insert spam, and inject annoying malware into some of my other files.

Should all be fixed now. Look for a MAJOR update coming sometime soon as long as I can keep up the motivation.

studentstory.com

I uploaded a video of The Generative Eye being, well, generated. At first it has this Matrix feel, but then once it fills it it takes on this ‘rain on a window’ feel. I am debating turning it into a screensaver. Check it out.

I just got back from my first gallery showing. It is at this cool cafe called Demitasse Cafe and they feature a new set of work every few months. One of my friends generally organized it and suggested I submit “one of those things I do”. It is the first time I have actually printed my work and I wasn’t completely satisfied with the results, but it was very good to see how the digital work translated outside the monitor. I think the main thing that was lost was all the tiny details you can see on screen of each individual shape of the “brush” that paints the picture.

Here is the final piece and some details: