Zach Archer Blog » iPhone

Video Reel 2011

Zach — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:04:44 +0000

Yes indeed, I created my own showreel!

Watch: regular, or HD version. (Vimeo, 4:00)

The clips have a bias towards art and animation, because: 1). It shows well in a video, 2). This reel was created for an application to an artist's colony. (More on that later.)

The intro & outro animations (the flying moths) were created specifically for the reel. They're my favorite clips, yet they took less than a day to assemble. The moths were left-over from an old project (you'll see an experimental Too Many Moths interface within the video), and I felt the convergence motion was a strong opener.

The moths were composited in Flash. They were arranged semi-randomly, then the image was "baked" onto their wings & body. I flew them backwards, and recorded their positions on each frame. Then I reset the moths and flew them forward, again tracking their flight paths.

Actually, this was done in memory, so it was very quick. My laptop needed 3 seconds to arrange, bake, & move 120 moths. Then the harness presented me with the frozen frame, so I could evaluate how well the moths covered the images. If the coverage was bad, I hit a key to build new moths from scratch.

When I found a nice arrangement, I hit another key which stepped through the animation, and rendered each frame at a ridiculously high resolution (2160x1440, to cope with scaling problems in Adobe Premiere, unfortunately). The frames were encoded as .PNG's and uploaded to a PHP script running on localhost, which saved the 200+ images to disk. The intro took about 20 minutes to render & export. The outro, being more complicated, took over an hour.

Looking at the reel, I'm happy to present so many types of work — animation, audio programming, visual design, interactives, games, kiosks, websites. These four years have been amazing.

Twang… in Flash?!

Zach — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 22:02:32 +0000

Yep, this is a "Twang Player" prototype, built in Flash. There's only one embedded song, a groggy rendition of the ditty from the first video:

(click to launch)

The next version of Twang will record & save songs (this is done), and share them in some capacity (a bit more complicated). So that's where the Twang Player comes in. The Flash version looks like it wants to be touched & strummed. I need to revisit the design and convey that Twang Player is just a music box, you can't compose anything in the browser! ...Yet.

There are performance issues on some of my machines, too. This version uses Vector. objects to handle data, but it looks like ByteArray or even BitmapData structures are the way to go.

Brakebills, Twang, Stuff!

Zach — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:37:14 +0000

Oh em gee. So much to report.

First, do you know Lev Grossman? He's an incredibly talented author who recently toured Portland. If you haven't read his book The Magicians, then stop whatever you're doing and procure a copy immediately. Without trying to spoil anything, the major college in the book is named the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. Lev saw the Brakebills T-shirt that I designed for my sweetheart's birthday present:

Long story short, my Brakebills shirts are now officially endorsed by the author! Please buy twenty of them, or thirty if the spirit moves you. Zazzle's print quality is great. The colors are vivid, and the ink has survived many washings. Rabid fans are buying and even customizing them! I love the internet.

Lev blogged some of my other work, too ("the guy who does this has the enviably fake-sounding name of Zach Archer"). It's true, I have an awesome pro wrestler name.

Second, my new iPhone app has landed in the App Store:

Twang is a handheld guitar. It's easier to play than a real guitar, and is very expressive. Instead of using audio samples, Twang uses physical modelling techniques to create a more natural, dynamic sound. No two plucks are identical. Watch my grainy first video if you disbelieve.

In the next version of Twang, left-handed people will be able to switch Twang's orientation, and serious musicians can dampen or mute strings with their fingers. And probably more! This version is already in development, and may be submitted in a week or two? Follow Control Z, Inc on Twitter if you have a ravenous thirst for updates!

Here Comes the Metal Mouth

Zach — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:40:53 +0000

My first iPhone app has been submitted to the app store for review! Metal Mouth is a text-to-speech synthesizer that mimics the talking devices of the 80's (Speak & Spell, "Wizard needs food, badly", etc.) The functionality is similar to my Synthetic Speech In Flash demo, but with many new features (male & female voices, auto-tune, pitch & time scratching) and a snappy interface with talking robots.

This took about 5 weeks to develop. Meanwhile, I've started another app, and I envision releasing Metal Mouth 2.0 in a few months, with more voices, and the ability to record audio.