I’ve been a fan of onedotzero – the forward-looking moving-image festival – for many years. I always try and make it to at least one of the screenings, normally wow+flutter, but with a couple of kids it’s been getting a bit difficult to find the time recently. The content could be pretty “dark”, so it’s definitely not a good idea to bring them along, in fact you have to be 16 years old to get into the screenings.
But this year, much to my surprise and delight, they introduced a special, Sunday-afternoon screening especially for kids, called “Sprites”; excellent! Now I had an excuse to bring the whole family along too! Was it a co-incidence that Shane Walter, curator of the festival, and his lady wife have had a baby this year…? Maybe…
Continue reading onedotzero – Sprites – doing it for the kids →
As part of the sliding puzzle game I’m developing for the iPhone and iPad (well, I can’t survive on the profits from BattleFingers forever), I looked for a way to represent a numeric score and time display in an interesting way. One of the nicer visual effects you could use for this is the “flip-card clock” style, where each number consists of a top and bottom part, and the top part flips down to reveal the next number. It’s been used in a few other places including the home screen in the HTC Diamond device, and its physical, realistic style fits well with the iPad, so I set about creating a version for the iPhone and iPad using the built-in Core Animation library. Read on for more details.
Continue reading Creating an iPad flip-clock with Core Animation →
I took a trip down to London’s Southbank on Sunday evening to see wow+flutter, a showcase of short, digitally-themed animations that are part of onedotzero, an annual festival and tour celebrating “adventures in moving image”. I’ve been several times before when it was based at the ICA (it’s now moved to the BFI National Film Theatre), and I always find it really inspiring. Normally, I can never remember the details of the films I’ve seen – it’s pretty intense; with over an hour of back-to-back shorts each lasting only 1-3 minutes – but this year they provided a list of the films details, so I can report on some of my highlights and provide links to some of the films.
Continue reading Highlights from onedotzero – wow+flutter →
Programming and debugging tidbits