A few years ago I worked with a local hookah bar owner to start selling his hookahs and accessories online. The site started out pretty simple, but my buddy Colin got on board and the project evolved into a kind of crazy mix of ZenCart and Wordpress. A redesign was long overdue, and here’s the new look.
Unlike the current design, the new setup will downplay the social/blog element and stress that yes, we do in fact sell things. I’m going for a simpler, cleaner interface that highlights the featured products in a more artistic way. The real stumbling block has been the original photograpy; most hookah and shisha suppliers don’t provide decent images of their products, so we had to do a lot of our own image work.
On the plus side, it’s been a lot of fun getting into the photography. I built a photo stage inspired by this tutorial by Davide Guglielmo. That guy is awesome. His stock photography is amazing and he posts a lot of it free-to-use.
My take on his stage uses a 36×48 sheet of Lexan instead of plexiglass, and the frame is made out of 2×4 connected with wood screws and steel joiners instead of free-standing particle board. I decided to use Lexan because it’s much stronger, and flexible enough to bend into a curve while only needing a few anchor points to keep its shape. Unfortunately, a sheet that big was nearly $70, but I think the increase in material cost was worth it. The result was a large, lightweight stage about 36×30x30. Here are a few really bad pictures I snapped with my phone:
Crappy photos of a photo stage? HAHA! Irony.
Here’s a shot of it in action with the SLR:
Eventually, something resembling the design above will appear here: Hookah.WS [link]
In the mean time, enjoy this nifty article I wrote about how to use a hookah. The photos in that article are courtesy of Colin. He’s got mad skills.
Watch this one with headphones for the full effect.
This is a two-part project for an Audio Art course in the Time Arts program at Northern Illinois University. The soundtrack is a musique concrète piece with a focus on Foley sound — except for the samples of spoken word and explosions, everything was originally recorded and mixed. The second part of the assignment was to create a synesthesia visual element that drew on the timbre and quality of the sound.
This project is a meditation on nuclear energy. Almost a century since the discovery of atomic power, we have not yet succumbed to the threat of man-made apocalypse, nor has the futurist dream of a uranium-powered utopia come true. While it is a nearly infinite source of both energy and destruction, the mechanics of the subatomic world are still not fully understood. To me, it is fascinating to wonder what brief, inexplicable sight occurs at the moment of fission. Beneath the implosion plates, within a perfect sphere of enriched plutonium, the heavy atoms are compressed. They pack tighter and tighter, until the bonds that hold the world together cannot hold — an atom shatters. Within the dense core the particles collide with the nuclei of other atoms, collapsing the sphere unto itself and setting off a chain reaction that releases the power of the sun.
The audio elements used in this piece are meant to invoke an emotional response, as well as carry a vague narrative of experiencing a bomb detonation. The visuals parallel this intent. It could be thought of as a waking dream, starting with visuals and sounds that are ambiguous, even beautiful at times, before abruptly falling into a nightmare. I am not a musician, but decided to use actual musical instruments (viola, guitar, drums, cymbals) in order to convey emotion more effectively than with sound effects alone. My lack of training, in this context, helped me treat the instruments abstractly. I focused on matching the timbre of each sound to a stage of the surreal experience, and in turn use a visual that resonated emotionally.
This is a reflection on fear and awe that I can only imagine. My generation mocks the use of a color-coded scale to indicate terrorist threats; my mother and father were shown a cartoon of a turtle who tells them that everything they know and love might be destroyed at any moment, and their best plan to survive is to hide under their desks with their hands over their heads.
When I searched through the archives of government films about nuclear weapons and radiation, every one contained at least a few sequences of beautifully rendered animation. These cartoons varied in style and message, but all had one element in common: horror. Sometimes it was the intent of the animator to shock the audience, but most of them are clearly meant to be informational or even reassuring. Imagining my parents watching these films, glancing out the window to see if the “Red Menace” was about to strike, I’m not sure how their reactions could have been anything but screaming and ducking under the nearest piece of furniture.
With hindsight, the fear of nuclear annihilation seems surreal, even quaint — like a monster evaporating when the closet light comes on. While that doesn’t mean the threat was non-existent, I believe it can give us perspective about those times of hysterical, paralyzing fear. If nothing else, there will always be an animator willing to visualize your horror in technicolor.
Some fun, trivial information:
- The sound of the building collapsing is a recording of ice being knocked off the side of my freezer.
- The entire soundtrack to the fission sequence was sampled from four arbitrary notes in a recording of my roommate practicing her viola, pitch-shifted up and down perfect fourths to simulate chords and doubled up against a convoluted version to make them sound more orchestral.
- The scurrying noise near the end of the video is a recording of a moth trapped inside a plastic bag with a microphone.
Video sourced from:
‘Medical Aspects of Nuclear Radiation,’ USAF Special Weapons Project (1950)
‘Duck and Cover,’ Federal Civil Defense Administration (1951)
‘Stay Safe, Stay Strong: The Facts About Nuclear Weapons,’ USAF (1960)
‘Radiological Defense,’ U.S. Office of Civil Defense (1961)
My buddy Colin just posted another demo video of the game engine he’s working on, and it looks amazing! In addition to dynamic buildings and weather, his engine renders depth of field and simulates HDR lighting. Pretty amazing for a just-for-fun side project.
I’ve been doing some work with Processing, which is a Java-based development platform for artists interested in creating interactive works. This project draws a self-perpetuating helix wherever you click and drag.
Click on the image above to see it.
A Java browser plug-in is required to view this work.
My first 3D project of the semester. I was going for kind of an ambiguous biological theme, like something that could be the size of a sea urchin or only visible under a microscope. We’ll never know.
The CDs are back from the printer, and the web version is up! The Connections CD is a technical walkthrough for new students at Northern Illinois University. The annual project started a few years before I came to work for ResTech, and in the five versions since I took over, it’s changed a lot (I used to suck at Photoshop).
The screen demos and interface were authored with Adobe Captivate. For the actual CDs, I wrote PC and Mac specific launchers in ActionScript and burned them to a dual-partition format. Hopefully whoever takes over for me next year likes working on this project as much as I did.
My friend Colin is working on a from-scratch game engine for a 3D tower-building simulator. Here is a very early demo of what he’s programmed so far. This expanded-style view is the foundation of the level editing mode.
I looked up one of my old 3d projects from an independent study from 2003 and decided to touch it up. This was a prototype for a standalone DVD copier/media player, where an original and blank would be inserted in the trays and it would create a duplicate. A product similar to this was released about a year later, and now it’s all pretty laughably obsolete.
After reading about the Vertical Farm Project, I became interested in trying to design a building with some type of environmental benefit for my final ARTD490 project. I came up with a scalable tunnel/road-covering for rural roads, powered by solar cells, and intended to provide several benefits:
Off-grid highway lighting for remote/rural areas, increasing wildlife visibility
Supplemental electricity for connected areas
Insulation, reducing icing in winter and cooling roadway during summer
The arch design is essentially in compliance with AASHTO Standards for US interstate bridges and passageways, with a clearance over 18 feet and an inside width of 40 feet. Each section is 10 feet long.
Variations on the design include a longer version with lined troughs on each side so topsoil can be packed into the outer supports, increasing its insulation properties and reducing its visibility in naturally pristine areas. Another variation envisions each section connected to another by mag-lev rails, allowing solar energy to be expended deploying a flexible, weatherproof “curtain” between arches in the case of severe storms or emergencies.
With the exception of the solar cells, construction materials are low cost but durable enough for prolonged service. More concept renders below:
