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

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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 …
16.07.20 Untangling Andy Warhol
Untangling Andy Warhol From the New Yorker: "Andy Warhol’s life may be better documented than that of any other artist in the history of …
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 …
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 …
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 rule …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
01.02.20 Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours | …
Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours | News | The Guardian Great read about the concept of Wilderness …
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 …
17.01.20 Handy Timecode to Frames Calculator
Handy Timecode to Frames Calculator Right now, find this very handy.
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 …
12.01.20 That Was The Week That Was — 12th January 2020
The Entagma Houdini tutorials are always really high quality, so I wasn't surprised to see just how good this series of videos were …