Walk in the park, look at the sky: collected thoughts, processes and observations made during the course of making things

Follow this blog using RSS

19.07.20 That Was The Week That Was — 19th July 2020
This was the week my site, and a few sites I host, totally blew up, and not in good way. It started with a text from a restaurant owning…
12.07.20 That Was The Week That Was – 12th July 2020
I have a little device sat on my desk which lights up when I'm uploading uploading updates to my site via the site repo. I built it myself…
05.07.20 That Was The Week That Was — 5th July 2020
A new book arrived in the form of Genetic Algorithms and Machine Learning for Programmers. Much of my work these days looks at using such…
04.07.20 Creating Variable Length Trails in Houdini
Using the Trails SOP in Houdini makes it pretty trivial to create trails from points. However these trails will always have the same…
28.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 28th June 2020
HAS magazine from UNESCO appeared this week, featuring my Art of Cybersecurity work. The magazine looks great though I personally hate…
21.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 21st June 2020
A new piece of client work appeared this week in the form of a second commission from Trend Micro. Originally this was work for an event in…
14.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 14th June 2020
This week I've been exploring some ideas with Vellum — Houdini's soft body simulation system. It seemed my wobbly low-poly horse struck a n…
07.06.20 That Was The Week That Was — 7th June 2020
The notebook I ordered from Armorial arrived and it was very disappointing. The finish of the binding was very badly done, and in the…
31.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 31st May 2020
Danielle Newnham published an interview with me as part of her Beyond Work series, looking at how founders and innovators have been coping…
24.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 24th May 2020
In the course of researching an approach to creating a new piece of client work, in WebGL, I searched around for something node / graph…
17.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 17th May 2020
MOPs is an open source toolkit for Houdini for motion design and is something I began to explore this week. The use of an offset ramp to…
10.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 10th May 2020
Love the work of Jacqueline Casey, especially all the posters she did when at MIT. Stunning work. The book of her posters is pretty hard to…
03.05.20 That Was The Week That Was — 3rd May 2020
During the sixth week of lockdown I explored some sound reactive work in Houdini. I'd played around with this type of stuff before, and…
26.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 26th April 2020
Lusted over the stationery made by Amorial. Like this quote from Freud about consideration when writing a letter: I consider it a good…
19.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 19th April 2020
Saw these Masuya Monakai notebooks, but so far have resisted clicking the add to cart button. Talking of notebooks, this piece in Fast…
12.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 12th April 2020
Sad to see both Computer Arts and Net Mag closing. Whilst I haven't bought it for a long time, in the early part of my career they were…
05.04.20 That Was The Week That Was — 5th April 2020
During the second week of lock down, I started on a new idea, taking the colours from the final fight scene in Kill Bill Vol One and…
29.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 29th March 2020
First week of full lock-down following the announcement on the Monday night. Watching the address from Boris Johnson was certainly "a…
22.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 22nd March 2020
Last weekend we were meant to be in Paris, but of course we had to cancel due to COVID-19. We lost pretty much all our money, with the…
15.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 15th March 2020
Whilst sequences were rendering for this client video piece in 4K, we managed to steal away a few hours at the park — making sure to keep o…
08.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 8th March 2020
This week I've been working towards delivery of the static images for my new Trend Micro commission. Last week I had gone too hard on brand…
01.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 1st March 2020
Notch is something I've been meaning to get into, ever since my friend Marc Theile mentioned it to me last year. As a fan of node based…
24.02.20 That Was The Week That Was — 24th February 2020
Over the year's my desk has been host to many different notebooks, from the default Moleskine, to a super-posh Smythson Soho I picked up in…
16.02.20 That Was The Week That Was — 16th February 2020
I really dislike Slack. Had to use it a few times and discovered it's not for me. I find it a huge distraction to actually getting work…
09.02.20 That Was The Week That Was — 9th February 2020
A beautiful book arrived in the post this week from Christopher Grünberger. Analog Algorithm — Source Related Grid Systems, is a kind of gr…
03.02.20 That Was The Week That Was — 2nd February 2020
This week I started on a new client piece of work — something quite different to the things I've been doing of late, seeing me back using P…
26.01.20 That Was The Week That Was — 26th January 2020
With a new commercial piece of work starting next week, which will see me working in Processing, my thoughts turned to having to switch…
25.01.20 Creating Gradients from the Edge of a Shape in Houdini
This was something which had me baffled for a few hours. I wanted to scatter points onto an irregular shape, but control the scatter in…
20.01.20 That Was The Week That Was — 19th January 2020
This week I did something I've been meaning to do for a long time — I went to the cinema on my own, in the day time. For many, the cinema i…
16.01.20 Making The Art of Cybersecurity
A year on from when this work was commissioned, I thought I'd write up my thinking and process that went into The Art of Cybersecurity — my m…