I took a step out of narrative to do this piece for the massive Illustrative Zurich exhibit which opens on Friday.
Floaters from David OReilly on Vimeo.
The actual piece is a seamless loop.
“Floaters are deposits of various size, shape, consistency, refractive index, and motility within the eye’s vitreous humour, which is normally transparent. They may be of embryonic origin or acquired due to degenerative changes of the vitreous humour or retina… Floaters appear as shadow-like shapes that appear alone or together with several others in one’s field of vision. They may appear as spots, threads, or fragments of cobwebs, which float slowly before the sufferer’s eyes. Since these objects exist within the eye itself, they are not optical illusions but are entoptic phenomena.”
After several requests (and people started producing this stuff without permission!), I opened a store where you can buy some Octocat merch. I did a few other limited edition designs for fun. Take a picture wearing this stuff and you win a prize.
Also, I’m a ‘Boards magazine “director to watch” this month, which actually has nothing to do with surveillance. It’s great to see them interested in stuff outside the commercial world.
These Octocat plush toys were made by Gina Beastly, she rocks.
Unexpectedly there’s been a lot of discussion about my Rotating Grid Illusion… It got on the front of the TED blog and since has been exhumed, examined, ripped apart and reassembled by many people from the science community. As with Octocat, it’s great to see people reinterpreting my work, especially since I don’t consider myself remotely scientific (or in the case of octocat - retarded). I’ve updated the original post here.
In light of all this discussion about optical illusions, I present my rarely seen Ident animation, the original short film which I now use as a logo. The effect you see in this is called a bistable percept, an image or shape that can be interpreted in 2 ways at once. In this case, a rabbit and a bird. Other examples of bistable percepts here and here.
A conclusion finally comes to the Octocat saga.
With the release of Octocat 5, the last episode, it became impossible to hide I was behind it.
First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who made video responses and fan art. It’s been amazing to see this kind of reaction to my animation and it’s really humbling. I will collect and post everything over here, though it truly deserves it’s own site. Feel free to send anything I missed to octocat (at) davidoreilly.com
I hope none of you are disappointed that there’s no 9-year-old kid in Chicago named Randy Peters. I think the last episode should make up for any bad feeling. I wanted it to have such an ending because you all had so much invested in this.
Many of you are expecting the 18 disc Blu-Ray Octocat box set. It’s not quite ready yet, so for the moment I’ve uploaded a high-definition version of all the episodes back-to-back. The last episode can now be seen in it’s full quality.
FULL LENGTH OCTOCAT ADVENTURE
(click here for high definition)
I’m sure I’ll be accused of misleading people again, but I won’t apologize for that. Why? Because you’ve all proved one vitally important point: audiences don’t need polished, slick animation to find a story engaging. They are happy to follow the worst animated, worst designed and worst dubbed film of all time, and still laugh and cry and do all the things you do watching a so-called “high end” film. Its amazing, I’ve never been so excited about independent animation.
Octocat’s journey on Youtube has officially ended, but who knows what the future will hold for him.
CLICK HERE FOR OCTOCAT ART PAGE
Ive just finished coding an application for the iphone/ipod touch. It gives the illusion of a 3d hologram jumping off the screen.
Here’s a video of it in use, featuring the Cat from my award-winning but unfinished cartoon PSS:
The application works by assuming a constant viewing angle (35-45 degrees), typical for when the device is placed on a tabletop. The 3d scene’s perspective is warped using anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. This application does the exact same but updates dynamically.
The software uses the ipod’s built-in gyroscope to calculate rotation on the y-axis, so we can look around the environment around by turning the device, there are also controls for manual rotation with a slider on the left hand side of the screen.
My programming knowledge is limited, if any iphone developers want to collaborate on this stuff please get in touch!
David
embed this video:
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