I’ve just heard that Bow Street Runner has been shortlisted for the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards 2009. 
Great news!
Tag Archive for 'flash'
It just doesn’t stop. The multiple-award-winning Bow Street Runner we made for Channel 4 is up for another award, this time it’s the Broadcast Digital Awards. We’re in the Best Use of Digital Technology category.
The nominees are:
- BBC iPlayer
- Bow Street Runner, Channel4.com
- Current
- Freesat
- Mycbbc
- Obama: The Inauguration, Sky News
Wow. That’s quite some company to have!
Since being inspired by Matt’s generative art session at Flashbrighton a while back, I’ve been occasionally working on a personal project. It’s a Flex application where you can generate interesting abstract images and animations. It’s tricky to describe exactly what it is and what it does, so you can see for yourselves when I release it.
It was initially a simple idea of mine to see what something looked like when manipulated in a certain way. After playing around with it for a while and adding more functionality, I began finding myself entranced by the things I/it was accidentally creating. When I’ve added a bit more functionality I’ll release it and see if anyone else finds it as intriguing as I do
If you’re interested in helping me alpha-test this, then let me know.
[Edit: By the way, it's using Papervision]
Here’s some screenshots:
Red
Lines
Rainbow
Distribution
Browns
Here’s part of what I’ve been working on over the last few days.
The Wii Nunchuck is connected to my Arduino using I2C.
For now, the webcam is just a standard webcam with the housing removed, and connected via USB.
It uses hacked up code from here and here.
(If you want to make something like this, Making Things Talk is an outstanding book.)
Here’s a sample video:
[update]: Hello Hack a Day people!
[update]: As Dokument says, here’s an almost identical setup created long before I did this.
[update]: If you don’t want to cut the end off your Wii Nunchuck, you can buy one of these.
Recently I’ve been getting into all things electronic again. Strangely, I was doing this a year ago.
Creating the Shopper 13 game sparked my enthusiasm, and I’ve been gathering new parts to experiment with:
In addition to that, I’ve also got a Wii Nunchuck hooked up to my Arduino which I’m currently controlling Flash and Servos via the accelerometer and analog joystick. Oh, and a Laser.. and some Papervision too. When I’ve got something interesting, I’ll post it. Hopefully that’ll be in the next few days
Well I have to start building my robot army somewhere..
I’ve been working on a game for the Wallace and Gromit installation at the Science Museum.
Here’s a photo I took a while back:
It was a brilliant project to work on, and one of the most fun things I’ve done for a while. Everyone involved was fantastic, and the exhibition itself looks superb. The game is now installed on a row of consoles and is open to the public. The controls are made from arcade-quality components, and uses a Mini-Pac to talk to the PC via USB.
Here’s a very brief clip of it on BBC News 24 (00:30):
If you’re in the area, do go and check out the exhibition, it’s great!
A quick update to say that we’re up for some more awards!
First of all, Bow Street Runner is up for a BIMA award on the 27th Novemeber.
Secondly, Bow Street Runner is up for a DIMA award on the 27th November, along with the excellent Transformers auditions we made for Paramount.
It’s absolutely fantastic to see BSR up for more awards. It was a lot of hard work, and I’d like to think that it really has paid off.
If you’ve not played BSR, it’s a free online game for Channel 4 that was launched earlier this year. It could easily take over an hour or more to complete all 5 episodes, so if you fancy a little taster video to see what it’s all about, take a look at the video here.
I’ve blogged about Bow Street Runner a few times.
Richard Willis gave an excellent talk at FlashBrighton last night about the origin of design patterns. I knew that the Gang of Four’s book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was based to a degree on A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, and it was fascinating to find out more about this.
I love the ideas presented in the book, and Rich did an excellent job of making what could have been a geeky session into one that I feel many people could appreciate.
That book is definitely on my shopping list. Good work Rich.
I should also mention Tom and Chris from Flexible Factory did a good job of clarifying the Event model in AS3
Red5. The promise is: “an Open Source Flash Server written in Java” with support for pretty much everything most people would need. According to Chris Allen’s session I went to at Flash on the Beach, it would be easy enough to get it set up and running.
Well, that’s not quite my experience with Red5 so far. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be a central resource for information. There’s the following – i’m not sure which are official:
- http://code.google.com/p/red5/
- http://osflash.org/red5/
- http://wiki.red5.org
- http://www.red5tutorials.net (spam seems to have crept in)
- http://red5.org/ (appears to be down)
- http://red5world.com/ (last updated July 08)
- Also, I was unable to download the Eclipse plugin from here: http://www.red5.org/projects/red5plugin/
I also couldn’t find any examples using AS3, which was a little suprising. I see that’s planned for version 0.9.
After downlaoding the most recent release (0.8RC1), I spent several hours attempting to get it up and running on my XP box to no avail. I then tried installing 0.7, which I finally managed to get running.
One of the many problems I had was finding out how to log into the admin panel. I read that the username and password was admin/admin – however that wasn’t working. It took a lot of scouring mailing lists to find that you need to register a new user first at this URL:
http://localhost:5080/admin/register.html – you’ll then need to restart the Red5 server. I’ve yet to see that mentioned in any tutorial or documentation… although I may well be wrong
ANT has also been a real pain to set up. The readme for Red5 says to get this installed, and to run “ant server” – after a few hours of battling with this and having a lot of problems with dependencies and environment variables, I finally settled with just running ’start.bat’ from the Start menu. It seems to work, although i’m confused why the instruction to run ant exists.
I won’t even begin to list the problems i’ve had attempting to create a simple ‘hello world’ application. This is no doubt due to my complete lack of experience with Java, but it’s a real shame there’s a lack of well written, up-to-date tutorials on how to get a simple application up and running.
In the end, I’ve managed to create my own Flash app that connects to one of the existing sample Java apps, but it’s far from ideal. At least i’ve got something to show for my efforts though.
It turns out I could have saved a lot of time by reading Robert Silverton’s blog, where he details pretty much exactly what i’ve gone through. Doh!
A short message to the Red5 developers: You’ve created something that is no doubt absolutely wonderful. There needs to be a little more documentation and tutorials. Please try and help more of us get involved with using it. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please let me know.
I’ve just had some great news. The Bow Street Runner Flash game that I worked on for Channel 4 earlier this year at Littleloud has been nominated for a Children’s BAFTA!
The competition is pretty tough, but, well, fingers crossed eh!
Update: We won!
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