VoiceOfEmerika

This T-minus project has been a series of ups and downs and some wildly creative thoughts. I’ve almost given up on the project several times and been almost silly with glee thinking of things I want to do.

I have written a couple of new programs for this project. One was a tool for renumbering a folder full of images and the other a tool for doing transitions.

Renumbering

I’ve wanted this for a while for the sake of neatness, but it was a requirement for this project. I am combining a number of different projects into a single movie. The tool that builds the movies needs a folder of image files ordered sequentially. In order create my meta-movie I need to renumber everything before I combine them.

A somewhat obvious spark was that I could reverse the image order while renumbering. It was just a couple of line of code for a whole new view on a movie.

Transitions

I never really planned on writing a tool for this, but I found myself doing a transition from the command line one file at a time last night and the absurdity was not lost on me. I stopped and wrote a transition tool this morning.

Immediately, I imagined two transitions, the a to b transition and the a to b to c transition where b is something like an image of all black or white. Standard stuff– a straight linear interpolation from a to b or a to b to c.

Just about the time this was done, I realized I could achieve another little dream of mine and transition from one of my regular movies to a painted one. Another half-hour or so of work and it was done.

Creativity

I took a walk after it was all working and my mind was a bit of a whir. I had another little spark. Instead of using a simple linear interpolation, what about some kind of a curve? Maybe a log function? Maybe something really strange?

Instead of a gradual blending, you could do a slow blending that snapped to a quick finish or you could even do a sort of whaa-whaa thing where it started blending then retreats a bit and then finishes.

All this thinking did little to slow the whirring in my brain…

It really struck me then how important it is for one’s creativity to think beyond the tools you have. I suspect it is easier for me because I build tools. My experience suggests that most people are skilled at working with the tools they have and moving beyond that is difficult and possibly a waste of energy.

If for no other reason than creativity, I think kids should be taught to build tools. I doubt it matters terribly what kind of tools: programming, spreadsheets, a lever to lift something heavy. The point of it being that a tool is meant to do the job more than once, therefore it’s worth putting a little thought into it. And once you start thinking that way, spark, spark, spark.

whir, whir, whir…