#092 – The ButterflHayz (Static)
#092 – The ButterflHayz (Panimating)
A familiar dream shattered by a silent yell.
My spirit stirs, and wanders in a haze.
Are we now, then or later? Too hard to tell.
I only wish to live and see three summer days.
The marvellous vision rushes in, this is swell!
It swirls, and whooshes … eventually it stays.
–A smile in a snapshot, with this reflective gaze,
Sends me spinning wildly, between Heavens and Hell.
All senses numb, although my mind is set ablaze
By letters and symbols traded, illuminating my cell.
These are just a few words, barely one phrase,
Placing the whole world under a wondrous spell.
–From the loneliest bedroom of the sleaziest hotel,
The magic happens, a golden powder it lays.
Dispels the night veil, cracks open any shell,
And sets them free, at last: The blue ButterflHayz!
–Quad Damage
I caught this snapshot along the morning jog: Late winter sun already high above the trees, all plants throwing their leaves at it, and me looking under their skirts, like a candid voyeur. No buzzing bees yet though, nor any butterflies, it will take another few weeks to see the first caterpillars cracking their eggs open.
Why Hayz? That’s to indicate the rarity and nearly accidental character of an event, although it also relates to an incredibly auspicious conjunction, resonance of factors.
In astrology, “hayz” means an accidental fortitude, consisting in the situation of a masculine diurnal planet in a masculine sign above the horizon in the daytime, or of a feminine nocturnal planet in a feminine sign below the horizon in the night-time. The planet is properly said to be in its own hayz or running-place.
Today, as I write these lines, I really feel I am in my own hayz 🙂
It’s been a while since I’ve made something visual on screen, nearly 3 months! Not sure what happened, but I’m a bit rusty … I launch Pixelmator, and start playing with the image. There are definitely some force lines in it, not only the stem and the fractal network of veins, but also the overall heart shape, with this silver lining around. It gives me the butterflies, in a nice way. First balance of colours, and I can tell the right shade will be winter blue, too early in the season to go green.
I first play with Particle Manager, and it brings some fun, some interesting snippets to use in a panimating:
Eventually, I created a butterflies shader animation in Magic Music Visualisation, and made various transformations on it:
Code of the Butterflies shader
Animating the butterflies in Magic
Next step was to animate the leave, and give the impression some life blood was pumping up the stem. This was again achieved in Magic, using the Bad TV distorsion IFS filter:
Bad TV filter in Magic
Detail view of the ripples generated on the stem
Key to the animation was the ability to pan and zoom in the Magic animation, to capture the right point of views. To achieve that, I leveraged two Mac OS X tricks:
- Enabling screen zoom in the Accessibility options
- Installing Cursorcerer as a Preference Pannel extension, to momentarily hide the mouse cursor.
Finally, I generated more footage material in SoundSpectrum Aeon.
The song used to drive animations is “Three of Us“, from Audio Junkies
