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REALTIME ANIMATION

Demos, as they are otherwise known. I make a lot of them. They are a kind of digital art which is composed as a piece of software. Most of the ones I make run on an ordinary PC or Mac, but I enjoying doing all sorts of stuff with hardware like the Nintendo Wii-U, Commodore 64 and even Vectrex. Making demos is a chance to get closer to the tools that we use as digital artists.

This is a short catalogue of some of my recent work, but you can find a solid archive at Demozoo. Most of the best things here are collaborations, a good demo is a large undertaking and typically done in one's spare time. Besides, who doesn't like a chance to hang out with smart people and make nice things?

Star Window

Star Window was produced by Me and Ash for Nova demoparty in 2022, based on a graphics engine that my partner (credited as Mrs Beanbag) wrote. It began with the music that Ash composed, that had a peaceful, natural, but very precise and mindful feeling to it. It reminded me of the way that haiku make me feel, a simple outline of an idea that is still clear and vivid to let the reader become immersed in their own imagination of the details. In turn it reminded me about a collection of graphics inspired by haiku by Diego L. Rodríguez that captured a similar feeling.

I took that highly-abstract feeling, and cut down the capabilities of the graphics engine I was working with in order to get a similarly simplistic, structured scene-by-scene view. There were no transitions between scenes, relying on the precise visual language to convey a series of scenes borne out of a haiku-like image. I tried to take a feeling of "fitting in place," items having perfect alignment, either starting, travelling, or arriving in perfect alignment with something. I then reduced it to almost nothing, an absurd abstraction of what it could have been.

But of course, that's all just my artist's waffle, and it's the music that carries it. Watch it below!

Sirens

Sirens was released at Deadline Demoparty 2024. It was built using Godot as a graphics platform, SlimeVR for motion capture, and was a work by Slipstream. I developed the concept, RaccoonViolet provided 3D models and Enfys produced an industrial soundtrack that I reworked into the popmpous melodramatic thing with the horns. The ghostly character had a choreography that I produced, but due to time constraints I could not sequence it into the production in time.

The initial theme was the contention between creative communities and passive consumption of creative works. Moving down a tunnel is a recurring theme in demos, and there is an excellent crew called MFX who produce claustrophobic, intense journey demos that I wanted to pay homage to. The concept is that the eye is an observer who becomes drawn in, caught by the demo in the same way that the Sirens lure sailors in Greek myth. (It's also a play on words with sirens as alarms, in keeping with the industrial theme, but I'm trying to keep my use of wordplay to a minimum these days.) As a director you want your audience to be drawn in, to sit back and forget their other thoughts, to be completely engaged. But as creatives in a small community, we also want people to not do that. We want to encourage folk to think critically and step outside of the experience, go away, and make something new. You can't do that from your eyeball-prison. It's a B-movie concept, but it gelled with me.

I resented this demo. I kept pushing on it because I hate to quit, and because the work was motivated by my frustration with my own limitations. The risk you face when you push yourself hard, is you find out in detail how inadequate your skills are. In a lot of ways, it became the suck that I was writing the demo about. We can call out our bad behaviour, but changing it is something harder, and this taught me that. Violet and Enfys were great collaborators, and always up for doing stuff for the project, which made it more worthwhile in the long run. But I had something personal in this, and I worked hard to get something out that looked graphically weak, rushed, and didn't really carry the concept. It tanked at the party, and took me a while to recover from emotionally. But for all I resented it, I am proud I managed to get through my ego, and lassitude, to make something bigger than I'd dreamed before. It helped that a few folks I respect deeply took the time to share some positive comments about it.

The lesson I take from this is: this began as something I was passionate about, something I actually wanted to encourage in myself, but I allowed it to devolve into an expression of my own insecurity. I hope that I can take this learning and incorporate it better in future.

Watch it here:

Download it here: scene.org

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