Creativity Base

I often remind myself that mankind’s seat of power on this planet is something of an illusion. At sea we are reminded that we are no longer at the top of the food chain by wonderful creatures like the Great White Shark, while on land, tectonic movements and geothermal explosions take that sense of humble perspective to a whole ‘nother level. I see events like the ongoing eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland as great calls for us to ponder how insignificant we really are, and remind us all that we are not as well insulated from disaster as we think.

Thanks to the fine people of the twittersphere, I’ve been privvy to two particularly stunning visualisations of the Eyjafjallajökull effect… both photographically in native Iceland, and in animation projected over the European continent. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did- and please take a minute to consider the Earth magnificent power, and just how impotent we are in the face of it.

This first video is a spectacular series of tracking time-lapse shots of the volcano’s ongoing venting, May 1-2 2010. The footage was shot on a Canon DSLR and looks terrific.

The animated visualization below shows flights operating around the first major ash cloud interruptions of April 18-20 2010. It really illustrates the way nature can bring our crazy civilizations to grinding halts with just one big subterranean sneeze!

Naturally, being a creative person, I made my own artistic response- a cheesy T-shirt making light of the situation. Always fond of a pun, ‘Volcanic Ash Got Me Down’ T-shirts and hats are available through our Zazzle store. What’s your take on the volcanic ash scenario, and how did it stir your creative thinking?

Volcanic Ash Got Me Down T-shirt (light) by danimations

Our passion for retro lo-fi pixel art has really fired up these last 2 years. It all began with the discovery of the freeware progam IcoFX which allowed us to reconnected us with our c64-generation creative urges. I produced our first pixel art poster for a Supermarket show in Big Star Records’ basement in September 2008 and things have snowballed from there!

Happening around the same time was the erection of a giant public lo-res screen at the end of Adelaide’s busy Rundle Mall- The Rundle Lantern. Astonishing in both scale and low-resolution, it wraps around two sides of a multi-storey carpark at a highly trafficked intersection. Emma Sterling and I leapt at the opportunity to produce original animation for it. Our ‘how to’ guide to producing animation for it is available here at Creativity Base. Merge Magazine also caught wind of what I was up to, and commissioned artwork for a front cover and feature article spread.

Meanwhile, in North America, a man I met through a chiptune email-list was cooking up a grand design. Emerging theatre writer and director Steven Gridley put a call out for chiptune musicians and pixel artists and animators, to help create a world that slips between the ‘real’ and that of a glitchy 1980′s Nintendo game. I was originally eager to animate many projected sequences throughout the play, but in the end the team expanded and the workload was shared nicely. Below is a showreel featuring some of the animated sequences from the play, and a chiptune score also written by Steven Gridley. Mine is the flat-looking Mario-esque sidescroller. You can read more about the show at the blog Brooklynshiner.

Since then, I’ve had enough compliments on my pixel art to decide to open an online store, and make designs for merchandise and apparrel. Dead Pixel Designs launched late last year, and the inventory in the Zazzle shopfront is growing nicely. Recent friend and gun programmer Jay Straw also helped me integrate the store into my website, closing the associative gap between danimations and Dead Pixel Designs.

In March, Emma Sterling and I are running a pixel art and animation workshop as part of the DIY cultural event Format Festival right here in Adelaide. Keep an eye on their website, and come along if you love pixels as much as we do- finished works will be screening on the Rundle Lantern!

I’ve been a fan of custom culture for the best part of my life- since churning out personal designs on my 9-pin dot matrix printer back in the ‘eighties. Lucky for us (the makers and the consumers) the days of home-made Print Shop calendars and greeting cards are mostly behind us now, and an exciting and (relatively) new trend is taking hold. I’m talking about custom merchandise, made to order from uploaded designs, delivered direct to customers through the wonder of the internet. A few years ago, a friend tipped me off to the existence of one such site called Cafepress, and then in 2007 I discovered its more evolved counterpart, Zazzle. A string of mugs, shirts, shoes and miscellaneous purchases (and sales) later, Emma Sterling and I have finally made some of our internationally crafted photographic works available as a premium quality Redbubble calendar.

The calendar features images taken by Emma Sterling and myself, over our last few years of artistic globe-trotting. The USA, Canada, Mexico, Singapore and Australia are all featured, with subjects including landscapes, scenics, architecture and the occasional detail. I hope you enjoy the images as they flick past in the RedBubble slide show below- and please check out the link above if you’d like to take a closer look at our very first deluxe photo calendar. As fondly as I recall those days of brashly printing out black and white greeting cards on sprocketed computer paper, these are pretty amazing times we’re living in. Surely there’s never been a better time to be an in independent artist, with tools like these at our disposal?

Oh, and if you make a purchase, be sure to take a photo of your item once it’s on the wall, and we’ll happily post it in our flickr gallery. We’ll also mail you a little surprise follow-up gift… it is nearly Christmas after all!

Dan Monceaux