Darren gave a welcome, especially to our first-time members and we split into small group for a quick discussion about what makes Creative Coding different from normal Coding. Despite our varying viewpoints, a fairly common theme was fun or humour. That led us nicely to the first talk.

Jack Wild and VVatch.tv##

Front-end developer and digital designer Jack Wild talked about YouTube for the post digital TV. Although he’s a web developer professionally, he wanted to show his experiments into back end dev. He’s using a lot of Node.js at the moment, which he described as JavaScript for the backend of the server. He sees that as exciting because a front end dev can now do some work on the backend using similar tools.

Jack also showed us a work in progress VVatch.tv. It’s a big collaborative video playlist built using the YouTube API that creates the illusion of traditional TV by allowing you to ‘channel hop’ so if you come back to a channel 5 seconds later, you’ll have missed 5 seconds of video. They’d used some amazing arthouse b-movie clips for the demo, which added to the fun. He’s building it with his colleagues at futurecorp.london.

The backend code uses MongoDB (a NoSQL) database to cue up the videos at the ‘elapsed time’. Each video loops. There’s a web socket connection to the server, which is a nice efficient way to manage the communications to the client, or more often multiple clients.

They also have a way to use an iPhone as a remote control for the local host. It’s coming soon and has already picked up some great press reviews. Check it out.

Adam Heslop

Adam’s a 3D designer by training and he works at Jason Bruges Studio on design/development of digital interactive art installations, visualisation and content creation. His tools of choice are Cinema 4D, Python and openFrameworks.

He showed a Cinema 4D plugin he’s been working on for interfacing with DMX moving head lights.

He also shared some behind the scenes images and debug screenshots from a recent Jason Bruges Studio project where they’d taken over the top few floors of what’s currently Europe’s tallest building, The Shard.

I stopped typing at this point because it was interesting. :) See Adam’s work for yourself at Pixels In Progress.

Lighting talks and other business

We had our usual excellent selection of impromptu lighting talks at the end of the evening. Someone, I’m sorry but I forget who, introduced us to this excellent work cabbi.bo/PhysicsRenderer which is as weird as it is amazing. Here’s a great interview with the creator, Issac Cohen.

Thanks for coming down, see you again next month!