Wearable Tech: Intro

Our intro to the next project was to do with making an animation with the program Animata. This particular animation is the result of me playing around in the program.

I really like this animation I made because it's the first animation I've ever made. I was feeling horrible when I made it, so it's a picture of all the feelings I had at the time: rage, anger, sadness---all expressed with my favourite bodypart (hands), and colour combination (black, white, red).

One thing I liked about the program was that it's easy to use as it's just clicking and dragging---nothing complicated. What I didn't like was that it's rather stupid. You'd think that the first thing you'd put in when you create a program would be an undo button. Also, there's no way to export your animation, none that I know of anyway. The basis of the animation is a moving warp tool like in photoshop. Only that the photoshop one doesn't move. Thus, you get distortions in your images; that I didn't like either because it fails to preserve the beauty and form of any image unless you made your image to remain beautiful when distorted.


The next day we had to use a patch to control one particular object in the animation. I chose to control the hands together shape because it's interesting and a little less complex that my other shapes. I successfully did that, I can now make it clap with an apple remote. Hmmmmmmmmmm, I thought that was a little boring though. Which is why I refuse to do the next exercise, which is controlling the animation using a keyboard hack+patch. This is because it does not interest me, it can be easily done, and I see no gain in doing this exercise. If I did do it, I would use the patch that James showed us with the remote, and simply replace one of the keys with a computer key to make the hands clap.

I'm also glad that we can stitch together various patches to work for us in this new project as long as we reference it properly and understand how it works.


In my honest opinion, if there isn't a need to do something, don't waste your time working on it when it won't give you anything.