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A Deep Dive
Part of my assignment was to review military symbols and to "future-fy" them. So I studied the deeep and extensive library of military symbols, and their meaning, how they stack, when they are used, etc. It gave a me a large amount of respect for what looks like simple design, but is a very complex system of good ideas.
After Effects: Design with Code
I fell in love with After Effects when I was doing commercials for Yamaha. The program was fairly new and although it wasn't the first program to bring design to video, it was the friendliest. As a programmer and artist, After Effects lets me feed both sides of my brain.
I'll place some examples here, but you will find more on my blog.
I needed to create text that looked "military" but wasn't direct jargen, so I created a little script to make words that looked military enough for small buttons and graphics. These were used throughout the video.
Sometimes you need to have text large enough to recignize as smart-science-stuff but you aren't going to sit and read it. I brought in Lorem Ipsum from Star Trek the Next Generation and broke out the words so they could be randomly thrown on screen. The code is pretty similar to what I have above, but a lot more fun to read.
a = ["elementary","valuable","statement","science","beginning","wisdom","porters","off","manual","sweep","anomalous","airborne","electromagnetic","readings","Radiation","levels","atmosphere","percent","Electro","magnetic","subspace","wave","fronts","approaching","synchronization","deflector","shields","maximum","output","wormhole","size","short","localphenomenon","sufficient","data","compile","holographic","simulation","wormhole","phenomenon","remarkable","bio","electronic","engineering","EM","spectrum","ranging","heat","infrared","radio","waves","interior","heat","geo","thermal","energy"];
l = ( a.length - 1);
w = Math.floor( random( )*l );
a[ w ] ;
Not a lot of code...
I know what you are thinking, but in design a little snippit of code can go a long way. A little bit of text that you can place and not worry about what it actually says is a huge time saver. If you really want to see something more invloved... here is what I used to create animated nodes in 3D space:
columns = effect("Columns")("Slider"); //number of columns in grid
tHold= effect("tHold")("Slider"); //hold time (must be less than tmin)
tMin = effect("tMin")("Slider"); //minimum cycle time (can't be zero)
tMax = effect("tMax")("Slider"); //maximum cycle time