January 03, 2006
AE + Flash “In the Mod”; Flickeur
Drew Trujillo (aka Dr. Woohoo) has been experimenting with ways to use color, Flash, and After Effects together. His In the Mod color analytics app assesses artwork, then generates XML files for Flash and Processing as well as HSL arrays for AE. Use the “Choose a Palette” button in the upper-left to select a painter & work, then check out the results.
Drew’s brushes.paints.stencils project uses AE & the Sound Keys plug-in to analyze audio data & generate keyframes which are then fed to Flash as XML. He then exports the audio from AE as a Flash FLV file, using that to synch up with animation based on the XML. It’s more fun to see than to read about, so check out examples like Radiohead & the kaleidoscopic collaboration with Mario Klingemann.
On a related note, Mario (who’s also made some Photoshop plug-ins) shows how modern processors & the new blending modes in Flash Player 8 can create rich motion graphics on the fly. He’s created Flickeur, a project that “randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.” The app brings in images from Flickr over time, so be patient if it needs a minute or two before it gets interesting.
Addendum: Here are instructions from Drew if you want to play with his files in After Effects.
http://www.inthemod.com/inthemod.html (Flash 8 is required)
0) Optional: choose a palette of your choice. a random one will already be selected for you.
1) Click on: Downloads
2) Click on: Download AE Project Example (under the words ‘After Effects’) and open the .AEP file.
3) Click on: View HSL Array for this palette (under the words ‘After Effects’)
4) Click on: Copy to Clipboard. This automatically copies the h, s + l arrays to the clipboard.
5) In the AE file, there is a Text layer with a Hue/Saturation Effect applied to it. open that Effect up and paste the h array (‘h = [#, #, …, n]’) into the Colorize Hue layer, replacing the following line of code: ‘h = [60, 300, 180, 356, 356, 357, 356, 355, 357]’.
6) Repeat 5 for the ‘s= …’ and the ‘l = …’ arrays for the Colorize Saturation + Colorize Lightness Expressions.
7) Note: there is a line of code for each Colorize Expression that points to a specific value. eg., h points to the 1st color in the array. make sure you point to the same # for h, s + l. eg., Colorize Hue: h; Colorize Saturation: s; and Colorize Lightness: l.