Post-Mortem

Cherubim is basically this program that allows you to arrange pre-loaded GIF animations. My original idea was this sort of interactive art piece where little gif animations would roam around a screen, and you could suck them up into bigger arrangements and then be able to tear bits off or explode it entirely.

I made myself useful last night by sitting in ASH 126 and testing the code Omid sent along to me. It took about 2 hours and 26 chapters of Rice Boy before he reappeared and before Cherubim ran without taking a huge chunk of the CPU of the main computer (if it doesn't run on that one, it won't run unless we figure out a way to send it through ASH's shady Beowulf cluster, FLY, which seems to live constantly at 80% capacity).

In this long period, I learned a few things about myself.

1) I was very scared about all of this. Why? Because I had no control what-so-ever over what Omid was doing.

2)There is an upside to being almost cripplingly pessimistic: things are super-uber wonderful when they work out, and when they don't its exactly what you were expecting. THAT GLASS IS HALF EMPTY, BUT ITS GINGER ALE, hell yes.

So after presenting my programs to Gabe, (Lee is still out sick, probably typing away nearly constantly at his email), I loaded Cherubim onto the main computer in ASH and ran it. It looked the same as the night before, but Omid was out in the atrium and he proceeded to show me all that he had done the entire night.

Attach Mode now worked. RETURN allows you to take and move the animations into position with the anchor points.

Resize Mode was added. ALT allows you to chose an animation with a click and resize with keyboard inputs.

Frame Mode was added, allowing you to pause animations, choose a specific one and cycle through each frame, allowing for timing changes or syncing animations. This was no where in our plans but it turned out to be a well-implemented and thoughtful idea.

Attract function was added. When white field is clicked and held in ATTACH MODE, all animations 'suck' to that point. This would later be 'animated', as well as a 'destruct' function as well.

Some primitive level of object and edge detection was written in, preventing objects from being dragged entirely off screen. This was the first stage in what will be a long and involved process to write object interactions into the program, which was part of the original idea.

GIF export function was added. This would be tweaked so that you could export arrangements that you liked and then have them re-imported into Cherubim, thus allowing some kind of recursive arrangement.

Omid was so psyched about this whole thing. I'm sure if it wasn't for his enthusiasm we wouldn't have anything nearly that awesome to show. Right now Cherubim is in 'alpha'. If we return to this, Cherubim beta will have more mouse controls and less keyboard input, some level of object interaction, gif export, more coherent animations, and a slicker interface that would allow the person to control what animations are displayed.

All in all, very impressive.