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day 1 – 9 am bright and early at La Fondrie de l’image
I was finally able to get my hands a little dirty with some coding this weekend. While I’d briefly attempted to teach myself Processing when I started The Thesis last year, I only got as far as making a circle follow my mouse before having to give up all my free time to writing. Needless to say, my short progress was not very impressive. Hence my excitement about this year’s Processing Paris workshops. I’d missed out on Processing Paris 2011 by a meer two days so I’ve been anxiously awaiting for this third edition to happen. As the weekend would prove, I was excited for good reason.
day 1 – playing with x,y,z axes, adding noise to my sketch and of course, throwing in a little mouse interaction.
Organized by the very amazing Mark Webster, the weekend had Marius Watz teaching the Master Class, Julien Gachadoat keeping the intermediate level busy, and Andreas Gysin got the heady taks of teaching us beginners.
I admit I was a little nervous going in. I thought I’d be the only girl, that I’d spend the weekend in a dark room in front of my computer surrounded by anti-social über-nerds, that I wouldn’t understand a thing, that I would have to slink slowly and quietly out of the beginners class on the first day only to never show my face again… What can I say, the idea of drowning in a sea of cryptic algorithms reminds me way to much of the horrors I lived through in every high school math class I’ve taken, ever.
Day 2 – playing with layers, fog, camera angles and loops. Here I added Mike Mitchell‘s killer care bear illustration to my sketch. Check the video below to see the final project.
But unlike the uninterested teachers that plagued my youth (North American public education system… blech,) everyone that came out last weekend was there because they wanted to be. In fact we all wanted to be there so much that we barely left each others sides during the three day event. Classes ran over, only to be followed by so much drinking and merriment that I’m still recovering three days later.
day 3 – color blending and blobs. Really quite simple, so I was surprised (and a little proud) when someone from the Master Class asked me for the code I’d used.
While the boys did out-number the girls, there were actually a decent dozen of us which surprised me. Two were even in the Master Class. (I have some serious catching up to do… ) There were no über-nerds to seen, no dark rooms to lock ourselves away in, and thanks to Andreas’ unyielding patience, all of us noobs came out of the weekend with a solid foundation to continue to build on.
In the end pretty much every single one of my preconceptions turned out to be false, which is fine by me. It was so great to be around as many interested and interesting people. I’m already looking forward to next year.
For more information on Processing, see here.
For more information on Processing Paris, and the Processing Cities project, see here.
Photos by Mark Webster
