For some reason I can’t find the top portion to my tripod so maybe the next shots will be better.

After adjusting the lighting here’s another shot. I need a daylight bulb for doing this sort of work.

One thing that’s come up for me over these past weeks is that I like to control things. I’ve got this little voice in my head which has an idea of the way everything should be. As I write this post I find myself constantly deleting text and trying to choose my words very carefully. Mistakes get corrected instantly, and while this is a good thing on some level, it also keeps interrupting my flow of thoughts. A part of me wants to throw this whole post out since I feel like it won’t be insightful enough – or won’t really say what I want to say.

So I have to let whatever I’m working on be bad, let it be whatever it will be or it will never leave my editor or my head.

When I think about past projects I’ve tried to work on, I think that I can see this control rearing it’s ugly head. I always want to work on GREAT projects and that means that often I work on no project or work on a project that I get frustrated with when it turns out that it’s not as great as I had envisioned it would be.

I think that seeing other people’s work is actually a problem for me since I see how polished, finished and good that work is and a part of me wants to compare my incomplete play to their finished work.

So on doing – I’ve been finding that for me I need to do more – write, code, draw, act… and NOT read. I know that may sound like heresy in this day and age of information, but I need to respect and get to know MY ideas and that means giving them the space they need to grow, and I find I can’t do that very well when I’m surrounded by the noise other people’s opinions.

Not to say that I will ever STOP reading all together, but for now reading opinion pieces leads to me editing my thoughts and actions and I need my own thoughts and opinions even if those thoughts and opinions aren’t “right”. I’d rather have one original thought that I believe 100% than a palace full of other people’s thoughts that I turn to before thinking myself.

Circling back around, I guess that doing the “right” project is impossible. There is no such thing as the “right” project and searching for the “right” project leads me to completing no project. Rather, ANY project can be the right project if it’s something I enjoy doing and want to do. So anything that comes from the heart is a good project despite the fact that it may not win awards or rain down money. In the end those projects that we do just for the sake of doing them lead us to places where projects do gain us money and happiness, it’s just that we have to give up control. Do what you love and let the details take care of themselves.

So some projects I want to work on:

Standup comedy script

Stories of what the future will look like

Plans for fun things to do with my lady B

Plans for art projects that I think would be fun to do

Create some fictional characters and a story from their lives…

Maybe I’ll do some of these. Who knows. I guess I’ll just play a little bit each day. They key for me is just being sure that I’m playing and not working.

There, I completed this post!

Other examples stand out too – conversations about how donating money is a waste of money. About how prayer is in-effective in helping out people who are sick (by the way I’m not religious). Conversations about how working for non-profit organizations is a waste of time because you’re volunteering.

I think that the common thread in all of these conversations is the idea that the only value created is the value that comes when the goal is reached – When the work is finished what material thing are you left with.

For me I’ve been finding that the value of a thing is in the doing of it. Sure I could buy a piece of software from a store or hire someone to build it for me, but then I would miss out on the wisdom and knowledge that come from me going down a path of creative discovery required to build the thing.

Donating money – sure I have less money in my bank account, but I can look myself in the mirror and be proud of the fact that I have ideals and that I act for those ideals. Sure there’s no correlation associated with people caring and thinking about one another and whether or not they whether difficult diseases, but maybe thinking about someone else is more for the person doing the thinking than for the person receiving the thinking. And maybe when you work because the work is exciting and not because the money is enticing the universe will reward you.

If money can’t buy happiness, what does? Hard work on things you love? That’s a good question.

You can see our upcoming shows at http://www.magicjestertheater.com

I also made a video of the other group we perform with -- Wolves At The Door. One thing I learned, video editing is challenging.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1245IfHWrBU

A quilt of these tiles can make for a realistic and efficient moving space effect.

The difficulty was in finding a way to reliably move a tile to the opposite side of the screen after the tile had completed it’s journey from the top of the screen down to the bottom.

After thinking about the problem, I came up with a cool solution. Turns out that the motion I was looking for was the same motion as a sawtooth wave -

The low point in the wave represents one side of the screen while the high point represents the other side. I can traverse in either direction along the x axis and all tiles will move properly relative to one another.

In my application the screen is 800 x 600 pixels. I wanted a function which would flip tiles every time they had traversed a complete cycle of the screen.

The basic formula for a sawtooth wave is f(x) = x – floor(x).

Floor founds a number down to the nearest whole number. So the only real challenge was to figure out how to make the sawtooth flip every 800 steps.

The eventual equation I found was:

TileY = (cameraY + tileOffset) / (viewportHeight + tileHeight)  – Floor((cameraY + tileOffset) / (viewportHeight + tileHeight))

That quantity got multiplied by (viewportHeight + tile.height) and everything worked.

See:

Yeah, the above is true in so far as it goes (It’s always dangerous being too reductionist). I like the little details though. Like my mind goes back to Spirited Away where Chihiro is putting on her shoes and she taps her shoes against the step to push the front of her toes into the front of the shoes. Details like that make stories beautiful.

Or… I don’t see this happen MUCH in movies, but when it does I’m always blown away. Sometimes stuff just happens in movies because it just happens.

That’s right. There’s no callback, no link, no “God was pulling the strings”, stuff just happens. Just like in real life. I wish we’d see more stories where stuff would happen just because.

I had fun doing this. I used my Nexus 1 phone mounted with a rubber band on top of my tripod. I drew a little bit then I took a pictures something like 65 times. I took all the images and transferred them to my computer via the bluetooth link (seriously the phone rocks). Then I got hold of ImageMagick and used mogrify to bring the images down to a reasonable size. Final steps – create a new flash file, import the photos to the library and drag them one at a time out into a frame in my timeline.

Lots of stuff could be improved, but I rather like it.

Enter photography. Here’s an early test of some stuff I put together in Flash that demos photography as a medium for skinning flash work.