aaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwww

shucks.


The file is now 19MB, and as such won't fit on swfcabin anymore. boooo! I even tried making a sound-only version so you could hear the most exciting developments, but that was also too big >.<


Ian gave me a load more sound clips to put in the video last night, I put them in but didn't listen to it at the time. Was pleasantly surprised when I played it today and heard a lot of familiar sounds from the first album, Oh God It's Warm. Although the lead and extraneous percussion are still very prone to going out of sync, there are some nice little remixes happening now :D


also been working on some backgrounds, which i guess i can screencap for you, since you've been good.

the bubble isn't a constant feature, it will soon be interchangeable with the inside of a cockpit, a cardboard box, a clifftop, etc :)

on a roll

updated version


more music clips added, code altered a bit to make it a bit more interesting (switches clips less predictably)


coo'


*edit: for some reason swfcabin's shrunk this one, so you can't see the pretty new animations :/ hopefully this'll fix itself in future uploads, cause i didn't do anything different

man that's a lot of live tracing

so i've spent the least [year, it seems] week cutting out lots of photos of all the band playing, stuck 'em in a bowl, mixed the heck out of it, and got a pretty decent sprite of each band member. apart from Tommo, soz mate yours is under construction still. Just wanted to show roughly what it'll look like, which you can see right about here.


The more blessed of you will also notice within a minute or so that some drums are playing. this is possible thanks to my tutor Chris helping me to CoMbInE tHe CoDeS from my video- and sound-focused files. So once i get some lovely backgrounds it'll move AND play music AND change how it does both depending on the time.


:3

current progress

right where i'm up to is i've got the concept down, gonna have the band dancing around in a 'room' of sorts. got some lovely photos to animate. this is what i've done today:


http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1321019830

pop

'nother one, this uses the left and right channels to make the Russes' faces pop out of holes. Just what you want.

bug eyes

used the code from my last post to make Russ' face and eyes pop according to the volume in the right and left channels respectively. not a perfect fit but that could be fixed by putting his eyes into two separate movie clips.


In fact I just did that:

i also put the eyes within the movie clip containing the head, so they stay in the right places compared to the face. This meant i had to play the sound channel again within this movie clip, as i don't know if you can access properties defined outside of the object you're writing the code in. help with that?

useful bits of code

found these in the Sound Programming Video Textbook section of http://www.developphp.com/list_flash_video.php

Define the sound object and the sound channel:

var snd:Sound = new Sound();

var req:URLRequest = new URLRequest("mp3_files/raquel my body.mp3");

snd.load(req);

var channel:SoundChannel;

channel = snd.play();

status_txt.text = "The song is now playing";

This could be useful, as it allows streaming of external mp3 files. The dude doing the tutorial says that having whole songs in your .fla file can greatly increase its size, along with that of its .swf file. However my idea depends heavily on the clips syncing up perfectly, and varying loading/buffering times could affect this.

Enter Frame Event:

addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnterFrame);

function onEnterFrame(event:Event):void {

    

leftpeak_txt.text = ""+(Math.round(channel.leftPeak * 100));

rightpeak_txt.text = ""+(Math.round(channel.rightPeak * 100));

leftBar.height = (Math.round(channel.leftPeak * 100));

rightBar.height = (Math.round(channel.rightPeak * 100));

}

Initiates a function every time the movie reaches the frame the actionscript is in. In a one-frame clip this will correspond to the framerate.

Sound completion event function and its listener

channel.addEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, onPlaybackComplete);

function onPlaybackComplete(event:Event){

    removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnterFrame);

status_txt.text = "The song is over";

}

Can be used to start another sound clip immediately after one finishes.

dum dum tish

made a working model of that drum. soz about the dock in the screencaps

zoooooooom

http://zoomquilt2.madmindworx.com/zoomquilt2.swf


well good, might use a zoomy kinda build for the video.


alternatives:


- side scolling, à la Sonic - possibly a video game theme?


- a visualizer, perhaps also 'listening' to the mic input of the viewer.


- some sort of facial morphing.. thing. using the band members' faces, switching different facial features along with which part of the song is on.


- videos of russ singing the lyrics. various costumes/effects depending on current lyrics?


- graphical representations of instruments which resemble theme of current lyrics/song. EG Rohypnol Romance's drum section may trigger a graphic that looks like a drum AND a glass with a pill dropped in it:

other visuals i could use:

- band photos; existing pics from gigs/practice/photoshoots; new pics taken by me especially for this

- the band's logo - possibly animated

- colour scheme: Black and yellow of logo
                         Purple and green of mascot:

sound channels in actionscript

been playing with sound channels. something clicked and i feel i understand it a lot better than before. (ie; none.) I've used colours so you can see which parts refer to which.






var drumming:Sound = new blob();       


assigns sound to variable 'drumming'. 'blob' is the name of the sound in this case.




var drummingchannel:SoundChannel = new SoundChannel();    


creates the sound channel 'drummingchannel'




drum2.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, playsound);  


assigns the function 'playsound' to event a mouse event, which in turn is connected to the movie clip 'drum2'




function playsound (Event:MouseEvent):void{                

drummingchannel = drumming.play();

}       


makes the function 'playsound' access the channel 'drummingchannel' and play the sound (blob) assigned to the variable 'drumming'.




so there y'are.

re-jig

had a little bit of a thinky wink and i'm gonna try assigning the drums to the seconds, rather than the 'tens of minutes'

just so you know what i'm talking about.

errrrrrrm oh yea so this means i need some very short (1 second) drum clips that can just repeat and alternate and whatnot.

email to my tutor

"hi Chris,

i've been playing around with some sound clips in flash, the basic setup is the same code as the photo-clock, but with sound clips attached to the changing images. the thing is i can only make each clip play once, or repeatedly. what i want is for the clip to play repeatedly until the value it's assigned to changes.

for instance i want a drum loop to play for 10 minutes, between 10- and 19- past the hour, then stop bang on 20-past. i'll see if i can come up with something in the meantime but if you happen to know how to make this happen then i'd appreciate the help.

see you on monday,

Beak"

... i came up with something :)

to stop a sound that is already playing, create a keyframe where you want it to stop, then on the properties panel (1.), find the sound dropdown and then select the name of the sound you want to stop (2.). next, in the 'sync' section select 'stop' (3.). done.

the only minor inconvenience this has created is that i've had to create another layer, so that i can have one sound start and another stop in the same frame.

s'all good though. onwards :)

drums

so this evening i asked my musically inclined pal Dean if he'd be interested in making some sound clips for me, so that i can assign them to various times of day. i don't have a specific idea yet but the general thing is to make a 24-hour song, which plays different parts of the music at different times. so for instance, a particular riff might play at 5 past the hour every hour, and the drum beat might change every 20 minutes.


so far we have one drum beat, which plays for 1 minute every 10 minutes (the first prototype is expected to be 24 minutes long, possibly an hour for easy loopage). I changed some of the code from the BeakClock to do this, thusly;


drums.gotoAndStop(Math.floor(minutething/10)+1);


Possible brands to align my work to: iTunes, Spotify, Youtube, soundcloud, last.fm, a particular band/dj, a music magazine.

exciting stuff, unnecessary screencap, happy Beak :)

TODAY WE MADE CLOCKS.



A rough explanation:


Made a timer that ticks every 1000 milliseconds (1 second).



var timer:Timer=new Timer(1000);
timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, thingy);
timer.start();


function thingy(event:TimerEvent)
{



Made variables to obtain the hour, minute and second from the system clock.


var time = new Date();
var hourthing = time.getHours();
var minutething = time.getMinutes();
var secondthing = time.getSeconds();


So by this point, flash knows the hour, minute and second, and checks these values every second. Next up I made an analogue clock, by making a (rather beautiful) clock face and three hands, placing the hands on the face and naming their instances myhourhand, myminutehand and my secondhand, which rotate at different speeds to .. well, tell the time:

myhourhand.rotation = 30 * hourthing + minutething / 2;
myminutehand.rotation = 6 * minutething;
mysecondhand.rotation = 6 * secondthing;

Next was digital, which was just a case of creating text fields and applying the digital values to them. If the value was less than 10, I asked it to add "0" to the front, to keep the value 2 digits...

if (hourthing <10){
texthour.text = "0" + hourthing +":";
}
else{texthour.text = hourthing + ":"; 
}

that does hours, made similar for minutes and seconds...

there was also a bar clock (think a graph for the time) based on the window being 400 pixels high:


hourbar.height = (400 / 24) * hourthing;
minutebar.height = 400 / 60 * minutething;
secondbar.height = 400 / 60 * secondthing;

and finally a digital clock with a photo representing each number from 0 - 9, à la http://www.exquisiteclock.org/clock/index.php?live=1&tag=random. Some poor guy got roped into posing for the photographs, and the result was rough, but it worked. There was a tricky bit of actionscript needed to find the value of the digit for the 'tens' and 'ones' columns of the time values (EG; the "2" and "6" from the value "26"), which is here:


second1.gotoAndStop(Math.floor(secondthing/10)+1);
second2.gotoAndStop(secondthing - (Math.floor((secondthing/10))*10)+1);

So there it is, some clocks what I made. This is only a very basic visual representation of some of the things that can be done with the functions associated with time. Hopefully will have some mint stuff up over the next few weeks. Peace. :)