IDEA
In early 2003, I saw a short film by Jenny Woo
at day60
in which she had animated scribbled line drawings on top of digital video
footage. The effect was charming but incredibly labour intensive. She
had hand-drawn over 2,000 frames for less than two minutes of animation,
a process that had taken nearly two weeks. As a result of our converstaion
I became interested in creating some sort of automated digital process
that would create complex and interesting line drawings.
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BASIC CONCEPT
The Scribbler takes simple vector based input (in the
case of the online toy, your drawing) and creates its own drawing on top
of it based on a number of simple rules. When a new scribble line is created
it chooses a few numbers at random that eventually determine what sort
of line it will draw. As it begins to draw it fine tunes those values
to the type of drawing that you've made. Certain scribbles are better
at following straight paths, others are better at outlining curves, and
others are better for filling in large areas of color. Because there is
randomness built into the program, each scribble is unique.
In the version I've posted on-line you can adjust some of the values that
Scribbler would normally choose at random, such as line thickness, line
color, and the dubiously labelled scribbliness setting, which in this
case determines the maximum length of a scribble line. You are essentially
collaborating with the Scribbler on a drawing.
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SOME TESTS
many user generated images can be found in the
Scribbler
Gallery
others can be found on flickr
animation
test - 20 second test reduced in size for the
web
animation test - 1
second full size test, thin black line, 1pt stroke
animation test - 1
second full size test, thin black line, varying stroke
animation test - 1
second full size test, transparent marker fill
animation test - 1
second full size test, transparent marker outline
WHAT'S NEXT?