Techniques: PhotoPresenter 4, CrazyTalk 8, Final Cut Pro
Nearly 3 years ago, started this idea of having a blog, some personal space online for creative brain dumps. This idea grew on me more and more, as I struggled to really find the right persistent medium to record my intellectual errands. And with the cloud growing ubiquitous and more reliable, online storage was becoming the obvious answer. Back then though, I did not anticipate this would be in such a visual form, since I was essentially passionate about coding, artificial intelligence and machine learning. But the discovery of the amazing Processing software acted on me like the flick of a switch, a light bulb turned on within my brain, and this emotion setting my mind ablaze, about the infinite possibilities.
I have fond memories of my baby steps with Processing, playing with mouse interactivity, and the fading trail of an array of white bubbles on a black board. The first post title was simply “Fun with Processing”, and the short URL a simple:
As the Roland Garros French tennis open started in May, I kept playing with tennis balls on a clay court, and eventually experimented with pointilation techniques. This is what led to what I consider being really my first creative post, the Moonwalker: QD-001
The untold story behind the first static image I generated is that the first screen rendering froze my little Macbook Air 11”, so that I could not save the uniquely beautiful image I just created. Overcoming my frustration, I took a picture of the screen with an iPhone, before rebooting the machine. The result turned out to be quite positive: Apart from the aluminium frame of the Mac we can guess in the top right corner of the image, the pixelation of the screen gives the image a fantastic grain, as an extra, unwanted yet desirable, FX!
So that’s how the story of Quad Damage begins, with trials and errors leading, if not to beauty, at least to beautiful emotions. And as I am approaching from the iconic opus #100, I think time has come to look a bit backwards to connect the dots. Hence this attempt at a mini-video series giving accounts of this 3 years odysseus, a QDysseus.
To do so, I thought I needed a jingle, and I made up one with the good old PhotoPresenter software, for which I am yet to find a suitable replacement, for quick and dirty 3D effects on pictures:
As for the tune, I’m borrowing DeadMau5’s Pet Coelacanth, which is one of these tracks I listened to back then:
Now the other thing you need for a good TV show, is an awesome presenter. This cannot be myself since 1/ I don’t have the right physique for that and 2/ My French accent would be to the least a distraction, and worst case scenario a turn off. That’s why I had this idea of creating my own digital avatar.
Over the years, this vector shaped icon has become my own personal avatar on most cloud platforms, so it seemed a good place to start:
Now to bring it to life, I rejoiced to have finally found a suitable use case for this absolutely amazing piece of software by RealIllusion, Crazy Talk 8:
