Steve Lambert: The Making of 98.5%

This one goes out to Josh, our resident wood worker.

Steve Lambert on video making his latest work, 98.5%. From his vimeo page, “While this video only takes three and a half minutes, the actual sign took several days to make. Victoria Estok and Kyle Hittmeier helped along the way – Kyle can be seen painting, Victoria is more elusive. The soundtrack is from some old friends.”

This reminds me that we need to make more stuff.

[via MAKE]

How to Make a Randomly Assembled Text

php script from the Algorithmic Walk by Broken City Lab

Back at the end of March, we went on an Algorithmic Walk with some brave folks (who not only trusted in our custom software generated algorithm, but also ignored the weather). I had previously posted a link to where you could find a custom-assembled algorithm, should you be curious to try it on your own, but I also wanted to post the code, in case anyone has any need for generating  a randomly assembled text.

So, after the jump, there’s the PHP code for those interested. I’ve tried to make helpful comments throughout, and the text is sized to fit on an 8.5 x 11″ page if you want to print it out.

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How to Make a Time-Lapse Video from Stills

assuming you use iPhoto

There’s been a few times that I’ve wanted to turn a number of stills photos into a Quicktime movie. Sometimes it’s for time-lapse or to just present a sequence of stills as a video, like we did for the Making Things Happen promo video. So, this quick how-to is as much a reminder for myself for the next time I want to do this, as for anyone else.

The first step as you can see above is to create an album containing all the photos you want to turn into a video, select all the photos in the album, then choose Batch Change from the Photos menu.

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How to: Text on Ice

Text On Ice, a quick tutorial on how to embed text in ice for temporary outdoor installation

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on making blocks of ice with letters and text embedded in them to create temporary street art. I think this idea came out of working with wheat paste, realizing the enjoyment of working in public spaces, and wanting to continue to work throughout the winter.

I liked developing and working on this project for a number of reasons—especially the durational experience of freezing a number of blocks of ice, cutting out the paper letters, then slowly covering those letters with thin layers of ice, eventually securely embedding them into the blocks.

After the jump, there are some step-by-step photos and documentation of our learning process.

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The History of LEDs

In a post on MAKE about how to embed 720p videos from YouTube, I found this great, short video about the history of LEDs and some quick notes at the end about the simplest way to make them work. I’m on the case of looking into getting a bulk order of LEDs from DigiKey.

Oh, and to embed 720p video (when available) add this to the embed source &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 or add this to the url just to watch a video on the YouTube page in 720p &fmt=22 … adding &fmt=18 will make any video play in high-quality h264 encoding.