KeithHandy.com

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This probably means something…

…not sure what, though. Anyways, happy ghostie day, peeps!

“Add child back to adjusted parent”

The entire weekend — apart from a couple of alarm-free mornings and one two-hour VIP rehearsal — was spent continuing work on a set of hand-coded image processing algos, to help make reality look more arty-cartoon-surreal for the just-barely-started film project.

What that means is writing stuff like this:

Translating it into stuff like this:

And compiling and running it to make effects like this:

Which you can see animated (in crappy quality) here:

This is not the “complete” effect, just the stage of development that it’s at.

The pseudocode in the top picture was written in a restaurant, and it wound up being one of those rare occasions where the waitress actually asked what I was doing. I did my best to explain it in human terms without dumbing it down to the point of condescension.

Just below that is the code resulting from that handwritten idea, in this case a combined blur/sharpen filter, which happens to be my first-ever recursive function. What that means is, when the function “happens”, it spawns a copy of itself, which also spawns a copy of itself, and so on. As you might guess, this would lead to some kind of crash, if it didn’t have some built-in way of eventually stopping itself — which, I suppose, is part of the thrill of writing it. Honest to golly, though, I went this route because it was the best solution for a problem, not for the sake of flirting with danger.

Most of what you’re seeing are other effects: a median filter, an auto-outlining effect, and a partial desaturation.

I’m still here, still active, etc…

I didn’t mean to leave the Rick Wright obituary at the top of my blog for week after week after week, as if it Wright’s passing had eternally crushed my spirit. I’ve literally been so busy lately that it’s hard to find time to adequately cover the activities I have going on.

And that’s a good thing.

I do promise to get the long versions of my updates up here sometime soon. In the meantime, if you want the short versions.. I don’t have enough friends on Twitter (hint, hint). If you have an account, I’d love for you to head over there and start “following” me, and I’ll certainly “follow” you back.

More soon…