Forray into FLASH!!
That’s right! The fun never stops!! So this January was a very interesting time (as they all are, right?). Well after the end of last semester I felt pretty spent so I took a couple of weeks to just relax and not worry about producing work. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t thinking about it! I can NEVER stop thinking about it…
Thinking ahead to my January-Session class, Interactivity and Animation in Flash, I thought I would be able to create a simulation of the next phase of Waking the Invisible. Turns out a 2-times-a-week-for-3-weeks kind of class is not the appropriate setting for such an endeavor. It is however, a great place to get started on such a project!
I began by developing buttons that would send out a visual “ping” while emitting a sound and tried to work through the Action Scripting 3.0 to get them to respond to each other. IE- the button that plays the A flat 4 would trigger 2 other buttons/notes to create a triad AND trigger a visual connection. The result would have been that every time you click a button, you would “connect the dots” to create A) a constellation and B) a triad, effectively using this Flash app as a musical instrument.
THEN I had the idea of somehow translating this into a multi-touch application so that I wouldn’t have do any crazy ActionScript 3.0 work, which was a VERY WRONG IDEA. The world of AS3.0 is way more intense then I am ready for at the time. I still want to develop a piece that can be played on any multi-touch screen device such as those fancy new Dell computers or, ahem, an iPad or iPhone. The problem is even if I did manage finish a multi-touch programmed version I would need to hack an iPhone to do so, which neither the time nor money exists to do so right now. Eventually. Don’t worry, the “Cosmos Player” iPhone app by yours truly will surface soon after CS5 is released… wink wink.
SO since I couldn’t really develop a multi-touch version of this project in 3 weeks I did this one:
So the thing with this version is that the ‘stage’ is set to 1980 x 1220 pixels, so I could get a nice, wide field of view for the “night sky” instrument. While it is not a multi-touch instrument right now, each button/star you click pings outward through the layers (creating the illusion of depth) and plays a note in a 6 octave scale. If you have a sound system with good bass response, some of the lower pitched stars are pretty cool. While I don’t have the knowledge needed to upload the complete Flash version to this website, I can email you a self-contained copy of it. Just let me know! Email me at
