On the difficulty of creating - part one thousand

For the last days, I haven’t been listening to much music, and even less to chillout. During a lengthy car trip I did listen to the matchless Motown compilation though, Hitsville USA: Motown singles 1952-1971 Amazon UK. I have also ably bought but not listened several albums from iTunes Music Store: Feels Closer by Layo & Bushwacka, Takk… by Sigur Rós (although I hate them for being too trendy), Likes… by Dani Siciliano (lot’s of ellipsis going here), In My Mind by Pharrell, The World is Gone by Various and finally, the single track Ain’t No Other Man by Christina Aguilera (don’t ask…).

Meanwhile, I have basically been hitting my head on the wall with the next Softys release. The situation is this: I got an idea of an extensible animation, one that allows switching in alternate graphics without altering the actual Flash code running the animation. The code was done in two afternoons, one laying and planning on the beach, the other sitting and coding at the office. Easy.

The difficult parts turned out to be the actual graphics and the music.

As you might know, I do have a stack of ready-made tracks for these animations. For this video though I wanted a specific kind of track, because the whole point is to have the visual and the music beat sync together in surprising and random ways. I finally got the music done today (we’ll see tomorrow if I still think that way…) and I’m quite satisfied with it. But the visuals are still bugging me. The idea is to have a “big thing” appear in the beginning of each bar, and a number of “small things” on each beat of the music. What I have now is so ugly it can’t stand daylight, let alone site visitors.

It’s probably a mix of self-criticism, fear of failure, and laziness that keep me from finishing this release. But whatever it is, it’s annoying me to death.