Generative Flowers II Generative Video Installation in Downtown Dallas
Generative Flowers II at Victory Plaza in downtown Dallas
Generative Flowers II at Victory Plaza in downtown Dallas (click to enlarge)
Generative Flowers II
Generative Flowers II was created in Adobe Director MX 2004 using image lingo. It was created for an upcoming outdoor installation at Victory Media Network in Dallas Texas. Victory Plaza has a 50×30 ft HD super screen they intend to show works from an international array of video and new media artists.
Basically the program generates really colorful video by running color fills through animated grayscale masks of flowers then applying video feedback. The color fills and certain portions of the animation are unpredictable. Some procedural processes are employed that sample the animation as it is being generated. In its pure state as a piece of software it is designed to never generate the same video twice or loop. For Victory Media Network I chose a specific order for the central flowers since there are two screens facing each other across a courtyard. The videos should appear closely synchronized but different at the same time.
Generative Flowers II was created, programmed and scored by Don Relyea. Mark Charneski photographed and scanned the original flowers.
Generative Flowers II from Don Relyea on Vimeo.
I chose Adobe Director because it is simple to use, supports object oriented program structure and provides rapid results. I created several classes of objects designed to communicate with each other to create the animation. There are flower objects, procedural objects, an event manager for syncing to bpm and a rendering object for rendering out the frames. All the objects check with the event manager to draw in sync with the music.
More on the process…
Below is a web video preview of the video(4.6mb). If you would like to grab this video for your blog grab it here. If you would like to preview a higher resolution mp4(13.5mb) you can download it here.