Music

A possible menu theme for Teal

John Dorsey Music

After I turned in Underground Lake as my final project, I wasn’t finished. So I kept working. I made this loop.

The background I made from a checkerboard, which I distorted+animated with Turbulent Displace and highlighted with Vegas. I pixelated it with the Mosaic effect to add sharp transitions, and then used a very complex Turbulent Displace to obscure the pixelation.

The Aurora effect was created with scatter, glow, and blur, applied to two overlaid audio spectrums.  The blue had a short durational average of 45 milliseconds to respond to the beat, while the green spectrum averages over 360 milliseconds to reflect chords.

Advanced Interactive Media final

John Dorsey Animation, Music

For my final project in interactive media, I composed “Underground Lake” with LMMS. Then, I challenged myself to visualize the music as a pattern of moving ripples in a dark pool of water.

The purpose of this project was to overcome a barrier in After Effects, the lack of a feature that seems fairly simple: A way to transform the composited image data in the Echo effect. For instance, creating a trail for a stationary object.

It would be so simple, if only you could:

  1. reference the image of this layer “current” as it appeared 1 frame ago, through the virtual layer “last”
  2. apply the transform effect to “last”
  3. composite “last” on top of “current”

The Echo effect is sealed shut, and doesn’t allow that kind of tinkering. This project is a hack, using MotionTile to animate layer trails.

My final submission also included a diagram of the entire project. However, I think that my diagram could be refined before I post it here. In the meantime, here’s the video:

Teal

John Dorsey Music

I’m making significant progress on a game called Teal, which I’m creating in Unity3D. It started last year in Interactive Media… with a simple assignment to create a terrain object and give it various rock textures. I knew right away that mine was an asteroid.

Later, our teacher asked us to make it into a playable game using some of the default scripts. There were 2 people in the class with prior knowledge of Unity C# scripting, and I was one of them. So we had some original scripts in our games…

Soon, I’ll clean the project up and start releasing footage and code. For now, here’s an original composition I made with Mulab.