Happy Little… Snail?

My happy little snail!

What’s not to love about snails? They are perfect in every snail-ish way. There really isn’t much more I can say except looking at this should make you happy.

Assignment-

For the assignment, Spreadsheet Invasion, I had to reclaim Excel and make it fun again and create an animation using colored Excel cells.

How I made it-

I used the suggestion from How not to choose a design assignment, to turn cells into squares before I began. It wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be since I only have a basic knowledge of Excel.

The cell height and width on the initial page are obviously not in the same units, but I learned from Set Excel Cell as A Square how to change my view to page layout. In that view, cell width and height were displayed in uniform units.

I wanted the page set to landscape, but I wasn’t sure how to do this. When I typed landscape into the search feature, it changed to it automatically.

I just played around and came up with the delightful scene of a snail crawling across the ground. It took a while to do the original picture. The next 13 worksheets (making a grand total of 14) were mostly copying, pasting, and doing some adjustments.

I wanted to give photopea a try, and so I found this video about how to make a gif there.

After exporting the Excel files as PDFs, you simply layer the files in the correct order, then go back and add _a_ to the beginning of the file name for each layer. Then you export the files as a gif file. You can adjust the quality and speed before you save your file.

Overall

This took a lot of time, but it was a lot of fun and I love my snail.

How not to choose a design assignment

So I told myself: I’ll do a design assignment. I’ll click the random button and do whichever on it gives me. So what do I get? The Spreadsheet Invasion. What the heck should I do with that? And how the heck do I do it? I though of that Mr. X image I used with this week’s assignments, the skyline reflected in his glasses, and how the geometricness of it lended itself to a spreadsheet grid. OK, I could even call that an 80s tie-in. Then it occurred to me to try to animate a sunrise. I built the skyline in Excel by filling cells with black. Once I had that done I realized I could animate it by making new worksheets and copying the previous one in, sort of like flip animation. Now I had a plan and felt like I knew what I was doing. I made the gradation in the sky using the standards colors. Looking back, I should have looked into customizing the color palette. I’ve never done that with Excel. I’m assuming it’s possible, but you never know with Microsoft. I copied my first scene and made a new worksheet and pasted it in. Then I made adjustments – bring the sun up, move the gradation up, repeat. I made 8 worksheets. Now how do I animate it? I thought about doing a screen grab (Cmd+Shift+4) for each worksheet, but then I’d have to try to make them all the same size, and fail and then try to cover for it. I didn’t see an option in Excel to export a worksheet as an image. So I used Quicktime to do a screen recording and flipped through the worksheets. I’d still have to do some cleanup though, so I took another look for an export option. I highlighted all the cells on the screen and copied. Then I went into Photoshop to create a new image.

The preset size said Clipboard, so I knew I could just paste my selection as an image. I went back and copied the cells from each worksheet in the same manner, and pasted each selection into my image, which by default made a new layer each time.

This is what needed to animate it as a GIF.

I created a frame animation on the timeline, and used the Make Frames from Layers option. I set the frame timing to .5 seconds and used the Save for Web option to make it a GIF.


As far as animations go, it’s kinda lame, but then if we wanted something of quality we wouldn’t be using Excel. I think it’s not so much a design challenge as a problem-solving one. And on that level it succeeds. Looking back, there are a lot of things I could have done differently to make it better. I could have made the cells more square, so they look more like pixels. Then I could have had lights in the windows, and had them turn off as the sun rose. I also could have Googled Excel animation and not have to invent a process on the fly, but I suppose that would have been less of a learning experience. What can I do with my newly developed skill? Damned if I know.

From Academia to Industry, from Bench to Plant. [3M-DS106 Repost]

 

Originally posted Oct 4, 2013 on an internal 3M blog by “HC” a 3M-DS106 Salon member

From Academia to Industry, from Bench to the Plant. (3M-DS106 Repost)

HCHeadlessGIF

“HC” 3M-DS106 Salon Member

This week one of my friends from Australia finally landed an industry position in the US after many years.  He did his masters degree where I was doing my postdoctoral research and that was when our path first crossed.  He later moved interstate to another university to do his doctorate (when I started working at 3M).  He finished his research and then went to Virginia Commonwealth University for his postdoctoral research.  As his project is winding down, he asked if 3M was hiring any inhalation scientists and at that time, we unfortunately weren’t.  Found out this week that he got into PPD (Pharmaceutical Product Development) in Middleton, Wisconsin and one of his first comments was that “Industry is so different from Academia!”

I agree with that statement, and now that I have about the same experience in industry (5 years at 3M vs 4 years as a research only academic) I see some similarities and a lot of differences.  Some people prefer the deep understanding that being in academia can get you while some prefer taking that knowledge and commercialise into products.  Academics live off grants (unless they get tenure, but even then, grants are still good), while in industry we use internal grants to fund research/development on projects that interest us and could lead to success for the business and company.  There are plenty of articles comparing the two ‘worlds’ and I probably won’t add too much wisdom to that body of work.

Having said that, one thing that my academia friends might not get to see is the manufacturing plants (or even those friends in Silicone Valley).  It is a complex facility that also require ‘magic’ to get products out.  This is where 3M also excels in, taking development from the bench and scaling it up in manufacturing.  Currently I am working through scale-up of one of the products that I am the project lead on and looking at the manufacturing path on how we can make the products.  We typically draw a schematic of the process flow but what if we can animate it to understand the flow better?

One of the DS106 assignments had a topic that is “Spreadsheet Invasion“, where you use a spreadsheet (in this case, Microsoft Excel) to do your animation on.  I decided to do a rough schematic that is kind of realistic (probably 80 % close) but not exactly the process I am using..

Spreadsheet Invasion - Example Manufacturing Scheme

This shows how complex the manufacturing process can be, with multiple inputs at different site locations.  It is also something we like to show how much work our Product Engineers do such that the end user does not notice any change in performance of the final product – that particular information has been animated using PowerPoint in a presentation and will not be shown here as it does show real actual manufacturing processes and the number of input materials as well as test standards to maintain.

Do most people know how complex manufacturing can be when they were still studying?

—-

Animated GIF notes:

  1. Planned the images to draw and the sequence
  2. Coloured the cells for the frame, do a screen capture of everything.
  3. Paste As New Layer in GIMP
  4. Save as GIF, as an animation.

Pong

Holy bejebus this one took forever. I actually started it in class on Wednesday and did not finish until Saturday afternoon. The assignment was to animate something with Excel to make it fun. I decided to use the highlight functionality to animate a quick shot of Pong being played.

At first I drew it all out and then copy/pasted it below itself, changing just one thing at a time. I figured I could do a screen capture of me scrolling down and animating it. Turns out that didn’t work and there was a much easier way to go about it. I ended up taking a screen shot of each frame and draggin that into iMovie. Much to my chagrin iMovie puts the Ken Burns effect on any stills you drag into it by default. No offense to Ken but that was really really obnoxious and it’s not the easiest thing to change. eventually I figured it out and from there all I had to do was upload it to youtube. Enjoy.

Spreadsheet Invasion: Animating Pong

After seeing the inspiring work so many ds106 folks had done with the Spreadsheet Invasion assignment, I knew I eventually had to try it myself. I’ve been on an Atari 2600 kick for some reason lately, so I was originally wondering how much work it might take to re-create Asteroids for Atari 2600 in Excel. After looking at what that would entail (basically endless hours, though I’m not ruling it out in the future) I decided to animate the first great, mainstream video game: Pong. It seemed like the perfect option after seeing this video of the game play to spark my memory.

So, using the video as my aesthetic guide, I opened up excel and homesteaded a sheet in excel that was 81 columns wide (at .2″ a column) an 42 rows high (at .2″ as well). I filled in that area with black fill to create a basis to work from an then used five vertical squares in a column to create the paddles with white fill (each 1″ high) and I used one square that was .2″ x .2″ as the ball. The center line was made by shrinking the two center-most columns down to below .1″ each and highlighting every other cell in light gray. After that I had the field, an what was amazing to me is that it looked exactly like a game of Pong!

After that came the laborious work. I had to animate the movement of the ball diagonally from cell to cell as well as moving each of the paddles with every movement of the ball. It took me about a minute or so to animate each movement of the ball, and after each animation I had to take a screenshot. Like the one below:

After about two hours last night, an another two today I animated the ball moving at an angle from one paddle to the other, after that I decide if I wanted to finish my fifteen stars worth of assignments this weekend and still see my family I couldn’t animate another volley back, so what I did is grab all the stills I took and reverse them so that it gives the illusion of the ball going back and forth. This is a strategy I often use to make the animated GIF look smoother, so I figured I would make this animate spreadsheet an animated GIF as well—another play on the assignment I figured. Given that all my screenshots weren’t exactly the same I re-sized the layers and cropped them all to hide as much jumping from shot-to-shot as humanly possible. Of all the many GIFs I have made I might be proudest of this one, it was like making a game from scratch, and it gave me a real sense of just how complex a system video games represent. What’s more, what could possibly be cooler than using Excel to make an animated GIF of a game of Pong. I would love to finish my work with this as a more complex game but the labor is too much right now, so I am uploading my Pong template in Excel here and all my screenshots thus far in a zip file in the highly unlikely event that anyone else would want to spend endless hours animating Pong in Excel. Excel Pong anyone? ;)

That’s 11 stars, I have 4 more to go. here I come Animated Comic Book cover.

Geology of a Canyon via Excel

I’ve been daunted by the ds106 Spreadsheet Invasion assignment where you are charged with creating an animation using the software designed for… sales reports, etc. It is, ironically, the first Design Assignment. And one that is least frequently done.

But thankfully, it was my student Tiffany who undertook it bravely in her Tale of a Flower version that pushed me over the hump of inertia to try this.

So here, I tell in a rather horribly inaccurate fashion, the process of Geology that form sedimentary rock (invasions of inland seas, rivers, and desert environments over time) and uplift/eroison processes that shape canyons.

I did this while idling time yesertday at BWI airport, wine was involved (Malbec, I love relaxing at Vino Vola). A lady at the next time working on NUMBERS in her spreadsheet must have been tsk-tsking me coloring in cells.

There is a fair bit of slop, I was not careful to move the selection box (I could not find a way to get it out of the way). But more or less, I just kept adding to it, coloring selections of cells and reverting them to no fill as needed- I ended up with 82 screen shots.

When I wanted to elevate the landscape, I just deleted 3 rows from the top, and colored the empty cells at the bottom.

I used an old Mac file renaming tool to change the file names to be “geo01.png, geo02.png” etc. This is because in QuickTime PLayer 7 You can do File- > Open Image Sequence…, select the first one, and it grabbs all the rest into a video file. I set the frame rate to be 1 second…

Which was pretty horrible, so I brought into iMovie. I broke the main clip into sections by finding the pots I wanted to have different speeds, and splitting the clip (control click for menu, select “Split Clip”)

Then for each clip, I use the little menu in the top left to do a Clip Adjustment, and change the speed to make it go faster or slower:

Beyond that, it was a matter of adding some titles, a few transitions. I grabbed a bit of the opening of John Mayall and the Blues Breakers “The Mist of Time” as a sound track.

Another little trick is get some black screen on the end. You cannot use the “Fade to Black” transition without something to fade into. Sometimes I import a black PNG, but what I did here was to add a title sequence with just spaces in it (no text), which creates a video sequence of black. I could then extend the audio sound track to match, so there is some outtro music.

This was quick and slightly dirty, I’d like to think about how to do something more elegant. It would be more useful to do some things with different sized columns, maybe make them square so you have pixel shapes to work with. Or perhaps the animation could eb done by creating the action as a long horizontal sequence, and doing a screen recording as you scroll the horizontal.

But I love using Excel for something it was not built for, this is so Ed Parkourish.

Spreadsheet Invasion– The Tale of a Flower

I saw the Spreadsheet assignment and knew I wanted to do it. I’ve never played with the colored blocks and never thought of telling a story in Excel, but I wanted to give it a go. Basically, what I did: I had to first think of something that would be possible to express and then [...]

Spreadsheet Invasion

_cokwr: Excel is usually a place where people go to suffer. It is time to reclaim it. Animate a scene using colored Excel cells as your medium. , _cpzh4: Design, _cre1l: vimeo.com/16845078, _chk2m: Tom Woodward, _ciyn3: 1, _ckd7g: , _clrrx: , _cztg3:

back on track

Sooo, I’ve been busy. Haven’t had the sort of time I’d like to put towards this class, but I’m here with another edition of “Take One” (I’m working on leaving some assignments, I swear!).

This week, I decided to try my hand on Spreadsheet Invasion, mostly because it sounded deceptively sinister.

Anyways, the concept was simple enough: create an animation using Excel.

Thankfully, I have a copy of Excel installed, but to make this assignment a little easier to do I did go out and download a few tools. First off, I wanted something that would auto save my print screens, so I could quickly take a screen shot for each frame.

After some googling, I found FastStone Screen Capture, which did the very simple job of saving my screenshots to a folder every time I hit print screen.

Next, well, was actually taking the screenshots. Not too hard in itself, but it was a little tedious.

Earlier in the course we had a GIF-making assignment, and since then I’ve forgotten the tool that I used to compile photos into a GIF, but after a quick few searches I found the necessary tools.

Copying my files to my Linux VM, I used a nifty little tool called ImageMagick to first convert each .PNG to a .GIF, and then another tool called Gifsicle to compile those images into one GIF.

Thanks to those tools, what could’ve been a very tedious process boiled down to typing two different command-line operations.

Anyways, here’s my animation, appropriately titled “DS106 on FIRE!”.

note: to see the animation, click on the picture!

I hate Excel

I am in my last class for my Masters in Instructional Technology.  The topic of the class is data.  We have been forced to use a ghetto version of Excel (2004).  I am a Mac user and wish we could use Numbers.  However, I don’t have access to a version that will allow me to do what I need to do.  This video expresses my frustration towards Excel.

I Hate Excel from Frank Fitzpatrick on Vimeo.