The Ultimate Seventies Cliché

Well, I had to do this in Inkscape sooner or later, and this morning I had three quarters of an hour spare and I couldn't resist it any longer.

I only ever used to get Spangles in that netting Christmas stocking that Mars used to do. It always had a board game on the back with a hexagonal spinner thing you had to cut out and put a match through to use instead of a dice.

Click to Enlarge

I used to find the Old English Spangles absolutely disgusting as a child - trying to eat a whole packet was probably the closest I'll ever get to a bush-tucker trial - but I'm sure I'd love them now.

PNG to PNG Sequences

When I'm putting videos together, one thing I often find handy is being able to turn a single PNG image into a PNG sequence. That means I can import the resulting sequence straight into Avidemux or VirtualDub and to add filters to it.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Convert png file into a png sequence for video use

for i in {1..150}; do
    j=$(printf "%04d" $i)
    cp "input.png" "pngs"$j".png"
done

The Bash script above does that - it takes a file called input.png, and creates copies of it to make a PNG sequence of 150 frames numbered from png0001.png to png0150.png.

Album of the Month

Changing Times

Well, as we prepare to put the clocks back, I thought I'd show you the clocks going forward. Today's Sunday Matinee is a slice of Granadaland from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s...

No Sleep Til Closedown

My interest in all things Granada was piqued recently when I came across a copy of "Easy Go" by Nick Glennie-Smith. This was the breezy mid-80s start-up piece that was usually heralded by a very naff block graphic transition and ended up with Colin Weston talking over it cheerily in-vision to let us know how parky it was outside.

It's blue, it's CGI - it's just like Avatar!

I've always wanted to have the Granada block graphic transition available as a Flash file should I ever need it, so when I got some free time recently I decided to recreate it. For source material I had an old RealVideo file of a VHS recording of a Granada closedown which I downloaded from the web many years ago.

The Granada transition is based on a grid of 32 x 24 squares, meaning that each square was 24 pixels in size making up the full 768 x 576 PAL resolution. So the first thing I did in Flash 8 was change the grid from 18 pixels to 24 pixels. I then added guides every four grid squares to help positioning on screen.

Setting the Flash 8 grid

To help me create the animation, I needed to view the video file frame by frame in Avidemux. However Avidemux didn't like my rather antiquated RealVideo source file. Luckily I was able to convert the RealVideo file into an mpeg file using the command line video tool ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i granada\ close\ 1985.rm -r 25 -target dvd -b 3000kb finalvid.mpg

After that I trimmed the resulting mpeg file in Avidemux so that it only contained the transition.

I didn't bother turning the video file into an FLV to import into Flash - just as well as it turned out. I had enough problems with memory as it was! As I run Macromedia Flash 8 using the WINE compatibility layer for GNU/Linux, Flash 8's performance tends to struggle with files over about a megabyte in size.

My approach was to use a symbol for my pixel, and build up each frame using multiple copies my pixel symbol.

A really stupid way to do it...

Although it worked fine at first it was a big mistake in retrospect as it meant I eventually created a large, unresponsive Flash file. This is because when you use Flash in WINE for large files you have to use Save And Compact... for each save to stop the file growing exponentially in size and eventually corrupting. Worse still, whilst it is saving Flash becomes completely unresponsive.

As I worked on the Granada transition each Save and Compact... took longer and longer and would often throw me out of Flash completely so I had to reload it again. Flash also became increasingly slow and unresponsive while I was working. It got so bad that in the end the majority of time was spent "Saving and Compacting" rather than animating.

By the time I'd finished it had taken me an hour to do one second of animation - absolutely ridiculous! My end result was 2.4MB Flash File that took about six minutes to save after each alteration but output a SWF animation that was about 6K in size.

In order to be useful obviously needed a file I could actually work with sensibly. After breaking apart all the square symbols I got a file that was a more manageable 237K - and that could be saved instantly. However the output .swf file went up in size several times to nearly 23K.

A more sensible approach

I kept my original Flash file so that at a later date I can create a 16:9 aspect ratio version of the Granada transition. But I think I'll wait until the performance of Flash 8 improves in WINE before I tackle that one!

The only other problem I had when creating the transition animation was the RealVideo file I had dropped the odd frame, so I had to create two frames from one at certain points.

Finished Transition in Flash Player

Once I had the Granada transition, I decided it would be a shame not to put it to some kind of use, so I decided to recreate a Granada closedown from the mid-80s. I had a recording of a Granada closedown in another ancient RealVideo file and luckily I only needed two extra items - the Granada computer generated station clock and the Granada computer generated ident caption.

I was lucky enough to have some excellent source material for the Granada station clock - the output of the actual clock generator itself courtesy of Greg Taylor. Having the clock output also allowed me to get the RGB values of the actual colours exported by the electronics used to generate the clock and caption. Looking at off-air recordings of the clock and caption in use, I reckon these were often tweaked a bit in the gallery to make them a more Granada-ish powdery blue.

The clock itself was an interesting job. A couple of years ago I would have drawn and animated the entire thing in Flash 8. However, I did a mix and match for this. I drew the bottom of the clock with the Granada Giro G and namestyle in Inkscape 0.47. Then I exported the result as an EPS, imported the EPS into Flash 8 and then drew and animated the clock face itself.

Clock base created in Inkscape 0.47...

I was quite pleased with this - it meant I could use the best tool for each bit of the job. Inkscape is far more suited to drawing logos and lettering, whereas Flash is far more suited to both drawing and animating things like clock faces.

... and finished off in Flash 8

The clock was a pretty quick job, polished off in under an hour from start to finish.

Inkscaped Granada CGI ident

The Granada electronic caption was another quick job, as I had a large, high quality scan of a genuine caption card from Matthew Gulliver's collection to work from. This caption dated from the same era as the closedown and the proportions of both the logo and lettering were identical.

Once I had all the bits and pieces I stuck them together in Flash 8 and exported the resulting sequence as a PNG sequence. I turned the PNG sequence into an uncompressed AVI file using VirtualDub. Then I imported to AVI file into Avidemux to add audio and export the result as an H.264 video/MP3 audio MP4 file.

I uploaded the finished result to my YouTube channel, and here it is:

Probably The Ugliest Test Card In The World

When I drew my recreation of the IBA electronic test-card ETP-1 in Macromedia Flash, I only captioned it with the large IBA caption.  As I only needed the card to recreate an HTV start-up sequence, I never bothered adding the two best known captions that appeared on the card - for Channel Four and S4C.

IBA ETP1 recreated in Macromedia Flash 8

This always annoyed me, so whilst I was listening to a podcast this morning I finally decided to finish it off. I used Inkscape to draw the lettering - I'll export it as an EPS file for import into Macromedia Flash at a later date.

Beautiful calligraphic script

If you enlarge the image below, you will see that letter is designed on a 10 x 10 pixel grid, with 2 pixel leading between each letter.

Snap to Grid and Clone Object are your friends

Now all I need to is some KPM tracks by Keith Mansfield and I'm back in the early 80s again.

Distractions...

My children have been nagging me to add internationalisation (i18n) to testpilotmonkey's brilliant game ClapTraps.

Well, the road to good intentions - I got distracted and ended up designing a level.

Not bad for a first attempt

It was supposed to be very cerebral and contain Repton style apple and grass puzzles but ended up as something to rival Giant Clam in Repton 1. Now, better get back to adding some Magyar to ClapTraps before my daughters get back from school today or they won't be amused!

Showing Off

Well, I've had Prof. Steve Furber giving lectures in front of my artwork, now I've got the legendary Sophie Wilson playing with robot arms next to it.

Sophie's choice

The event was the Vintage Computer Fesitval, which was held on the 19-20th June at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park.

Nice banner, shame about the carpet.

The artwork, a long banner, was produced for R3PLAY - an computer exhibition which is going to be held on the 6-7 November in Blackpool. I've spent a lot of time on various bits and pieces for this event this year.

R3PLAY vectorised - click to enlarge

The extremely striking R3PLAY logo was originally designed as a raster image by Darren Doyle - better known as "Greyfox". I just about managed, using Inkscape, to reproduce this image in vector format so it could be blown up to enormous sizes for use on banners and posters.

Outlined - click to enlarge

The hardest part of vectorising the logo was reproducing the faint images of flags that are superimposed on the lettering - I had to trace these by hand and it was a long and quite fiddly job - particularly because the effect of the flags is quite subtle.

Flags of all nations - click to enlarge

I also had a problem getting the Inkscape filters to superimpose "raster" lines on top of the lettering. I ended up having to superimpose filtered stripes on top of each other several times.

 Stripes - just squashed ellipses

The raster lines themselves are squashed ellipses in a layer with the "Screen" blend mode enabled so that they make the layers underneath them lighter.

Five layers of outline with glow filter stacked

The final challenge was getting the red glow around the letters correct. Again, this involved layering several filtered copies of the lettering on top of each other, and it was quite a struggle to get it just right. However, the glows scale unpredictably, which means reworking them every time I resize the logo.

Underneath the logo were vector images I created in Inkscape by tracing photographs I managed to find using Google images. Tracing vector computers is a very straightforward job, and quite a pleasant one provided you have some music to listen to. The only hard part is matching fonts, and even that is easy if you have a Letraset catalogue from the seventies!

Not all the vectors I produced were used. For instance, here is my Acorn Electron:

The thinking man's ZX Spectrum

One trick I used when doing this sort of thing is to make good use of the Inkscape Perspective plug-in to map square on views onto a parallelogram.

The pixel artwork at the bottom of the banner was produced by the world renowned pixel artist Gary Lucken (aka Army of Trolls). 

A Gary Lucken masterpiece...

In order to produce magazine advertisements from this artwork I did have to extend it slightly horizontally in The GIMP - I did it by copying elements form Gary's design - I even manage to incorporate the BBC Computer Literacy Project's owl.

...ruined by me. Sorry.

Once I had created this expanded version of the artwork I set about creating the artwork for the adverts that appeared in retroGAMER* and gamesTM magazine. This was quite nerve wracking - to be honest I haven't been so nervous since I was first did graphics to be broadcast on television.

After much experimentation I decided on the 50s font Microgramma to be the "corporate font" for R3PLAY. I like the font, it looks both retro and modern and it was also the Commodore font from the early 80s.

Finished Flyer - lots of Microgramma

I also produced an A5 version for fliers - Dave Moore is one of the masterminds behind the R3PLAY event, and shamelessly uses the fliers for promoting the show at every opportunity.

So my flier was stuck to Daleks....

Stupid tin boxes...

And brandished by attractive young ladies...

Edward Bernays has nothing on Dave M

Another early job was creating the tickets for the event. Again, another Inkscape job for a huge print run which I always find nerve wracking. I recreated both the Macmillan logo and the National Museum of Computing logo as vector images as I didn't have vector copies.

Tickets, please...

The tickets looked rather striking in the end, but Dave Moore told me had to bin the whole of the first print run of tickets and have them reprinted elsewhere in order to do them justice.

The final graphics for the adverts, fliers and tickets were exported as enormous TIFF files. However for things like the roll-up banners I had to produce PDF files. I found the best way to do this from Inkscape was to Print To PDF, rather than export to PDF from Inkscape. The latter method produces absoltuely terrible results, where as printing to PDF produces results which are flawless.

R3PLAY is organised by the non-profit organisation the Computing and Gaming Events Union (CGEU), and I was also responsible for tarting up their logo. The original was again designed by Darren Doyle. I placed it in a roundel, made the Pac-Man image a vector shape and added some depth to him and finally added some lettering in Inkscape:

CGEU logo tarted up

One of my main jobs for the R3PLAY event was producing its website. In order to "save time" we decided to use Joomla and base the design of the website on an existing Joomla template from a commercial supplier who shall remain nameless.

r3play.info

This was a very frustrating experience as there were numerous bugs and several unfinished bits and pieces in the template we purchased and I ended up having to get rapidly expert in PHP and CSS in order to get the thing working as required. There were also no useful Photoshop templates for the artwork, so I ended up having to recreate all the source files for the graphics in The GIMP from scratch.

Obviously this was all good practice for me but not what you want when you are working against a deadline for a very exacting customer!

One of my favourite jobs on the website was producing the animated Pac-Man gif that is displayed about the advert on the home page.

Snapper is nothing like Pac-Man, honest.

To do this I took several screenshots from version 1 of Acornsoft Snapper in Tom Walker's excellent BBC Micro emulator B-Em, traced the sprites and animated them in Macromedia Flash 8 and then exported the result from Flash as an animated GIF.

I produced a forum Post footer too

R3PLAY looks like being an absolutely fantastic show, and well worth a visit if you can make it. Besides which, by attending you will be helping to raise money for two very worthy causes - Macmillan Cancer Support and The National Museum of Computing.

It has three strands - Consoles, Coin-Op games (including Pin-Ball) and Computers. The latter includes a strong retro contingent of the well known names such as BBC Micros, Electrons, Archimedes as well as the more obscure things such as Commodore 64s, Amigas, STs and ZX Spectrums.

Take You To My Leaders

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. My first documentary - my entry for the Golden Spigot of Hinton St. George:

It's poorly made, factually dubious, and won't tell you anything worth knowing - just like the real ones on the telly!

Mogrifying

When I'm using video as a source material for a recreation, I often use Avidemux.  Avidemux will either export .bmp files or .jpg files.

Exporting from Avidemux - limited options

I like to export .bmp files from Avidemux as they are lossless. However, they are also very large and I usually want to convert them to .png files to save space. To do this using a graphics package would be boring, time consuming and prone to error.

Luckily I'm able to use a handy little free software utility called ImageMagick from the GNU/Linux command line. It has a command called mogrify to do this sort of job.

To convert all the bmp files in a directory to png files I simply use:

mogrify -format png *.bmp

And then to remove the original bmp files I can use:

rm *.bmp

And the finished result:

Mogrified!

This has saved me literally hours of work over the past few months.

ClapTraps v1.1

You might remember that in April I blogged about the computer game ClapTraps, which was written by my friend testpilotmonkey. ClapTraps is a fiendishly addictive puzzle game written in Python using the PyGame SDL library.

ClapTraps v1.1 -  reworked title screen

Back in May I also blogged about my Inkscape reworking of the graphics for the game.

ClapTraps v1.1 - reworked graphics

Since then testpilotmonkey has released a new, expanded version of the game - ClapTraps v1.1. It includes my reworked graphics and a number of new features.

For instance, you can now redefine the control keys. This is very useful if you, like me, have a Hungarian keyboard!

Even better, people who can code in Python can easily change the behaviour the game objects, just as you can in Repton Infinity. To demonstrate this, ClapTraps comes with a XOR-style came called Arrows which has the potential to be very interesting indeed.

Arrows - a real head scratcher

Despite my best efforts to recommend the game to everyone I know, ClapTraps has been largely ignored, even by fans of Repton. I think this is inexplicable and a crying shame. It's an absolutely fantastic puzzle game and has given me and my daughters a lot of fun. It's free as in beer and free as in freedom so there is no reason not to download it and have a go - and let testpilotmonkey know what you think too!

It is available to download for Windows, GNU/Linux and OS X here.


NB for GNU/Linux users: I found I couldn't run the ClapTraps code by double clicking on the main ClapTraps.py icon from Nautilus, the GNOME file browsing program. After much experimentation I found the problem was simply that ClapTraps.py was corrupted in some way. If you copy and paste its contents into a new file it will work correctly. The copy and pasted file will be 2K shorter than the original, but work perfectly.

(Yet) another version of Letraset Oxford

Whilst browsing dafont.com the other day, I noticed that (yet) another version of the classic Letraset Oxford typeface has been created, and this time it's another free (as in freedom) version.

The font is named Oxford-CP and was created by Diogene. It's licensed under the GPL with the font exception rather than the SIL OFL which I used to license my version.

The non-free version of Oxford, called Sportowy, which boasts some beautiful glyphs for things like @, is available here.

My version, which I called "Scene" in honour of the BBCtv schools programme that used the face for its logo, also features capital letters and Central European accenting and is available to download from here.

BBC Micro game Pipeline used Oxford

Ironically, after the huge amount of effort I put into creating it (see here, here and here), I still haven't actually done anything with my Scene font - but hopefully I'll get around to doing something with it soon.

Let's Go Nationwide

Recently I've been playing about recreating various SMPTE and custom made film leaders in Flash 8 and Inkscape. One of the most interesting for me, and one that reminds me of Blue Peter for some reason, is the BBC's own film leader. Here it is:

While working on film leaders, I've settled upon a hybrid Flash/Inkscape workflow in which I create the individual frames in Inkscape as Inkscape SVG files.

SMPTE Society Leader frames created as SVG files

I then export them all as EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files so they can be imported into Macromedia Flash 8. You could export all the files from Inkscape by hand, but to save time I use a little Bash shell script instead:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Export all SVG files in a directory as EPS files

for i in *.svg; do
    inkscape $i --export-eps `basename $i .svg`".eps"

done

Then I import the EPS files into Flash and I'm ready to start putting the animation together.

Election 1970 - in Colour!

After seeing this, look what somebody very kind sent to me:

 Click to enlarge

Diamonds are for 1 minute 58 seconds

I've always had a fascination for the BBC schools diamond. In case you are not familiar with it, the BBC schools diamond was a mechanical model devised by Murray Andrew for use in the last two minutes of intervals before BBC programmes for schools and colleges.

I am ancient enough not only to remember it, but to have watched it as nature intended at primary school every week before a programme. I was always mesmerised by it, but my unimpressed teachers used to complain that it wasn't as easy to understand as ITV's schools clock.

The diamond mechanism itself is fascinating and it was very satisfying to work out how it worked.

The diamond animation as outlines in Flash

The four striped version of the diamond was originally only a static caption card, intended for use in place of the mechanical model in intervals less than two minutes in length.

I always wanted to see it being animated. Hence another lame mock that I produced, as always, in Macromedia Flash 8.

As I'm exclusively using GNU/Linux these days I exported the diamond from Macromedia Flash 8 as a PNG sequence. I imported that into the free software video tool Avidemux, added the music and exported the resulting sequence into an MP4 container with MPEG4-AVC video encoded using the x264 video codec and MP3 audio encoded using the LAME MP3 audio codec.

I find the overall effect is rather akin to seeing one of those 4x4 or 5x5 Rubik's cubes for the first time.

Anchor Cliff Michelmore

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt have been bored witless by my endless posts about the creation of a TrueType font based on the output produced by the BBC analogue character generation system Anchor.

Although I was very happy with the end result, I was aware that when compared to one famous example - the BBC's coverage of the General Election of 1970 - it didn't look quite right.

Here is an example image taken from this video - apologies in advance, as the quality is appalling:

Anchor used in anger, 1970

The characters looked fatter - squarer - than they did on my version. I was curious to know why.

Whilst browsing the internet for something else entirely I happened to come across a BBC .pdf file from January 1973 that explained what was going on:

"The addition of the lower-case facility has involved a change in the format of the display from 14 rows of 25 characters to 12 rows of 32 characters. This has been necessary to accommodate the descenders of such characters as 'y' and 'g' whilst preserving the appearance of the character set." BBC Engineering Design Information - 10168(1).JAN73.ECG.

So, here is how Anchor would look before January 1973:

Anchor, pre January 1973

And here is how it would look after January 1973:

Anchor, post Jan 73

And here is a gratuitous picture of Cliff Michelmore as, personally, I think you can't have too much Cliff Michelmore on your blog:

Click to enlarge

So, imagine you are doing something with Anchor.ttf on a 720 x 576 image that is supposed to be from pre-1973. In that case use Anchor at 41pt, stretched horizontally by 128% with 85% line spacing. And you mustn't use any lower case!

If you are doing something with Anchor.ttf on a 720 x 576 image that is supposed to be from post-1973 then simply use it at 41pt with 100% line spacing.

Inkscape to Flash 8

These days, if at all possible, I like to use Inkscape for creating vector artwork. At one time I used Macromedia Flash 8 for all my vector illustration work. But these days, if I have to create artwork in Flash it makes me feel like I'm being forced to write with my left hand.

There are also a number of things I can achieve easily in Inkscape that are harder to do in Flash. One recent example was when I was working on the animated menu for Simon Buckley's new website. I was given a signed off design as a bitmap illustration and was asked to turn the design into a vector animation in Macromedia Flash format.

Most of the design was very straightforward to achieve, but there was one part that was more fiddly. The name of the website was written in a font called Chalkdust, and it was fringed with a thick black outline. This is one of those things that looks simple to do until you actually try and do it in Flash.

The way I tackled getting an attractive vector outline for the Chalkdust text was to enter the Chalkdust text into Inkscape, turn the text into vector outlines and then use the Inkscape "Linked Offset" option to enable me to expand the text outline to the desired extent.

 Cleaning up Chalkdust in Inkscape

Chalkdust, like most typefaces, has very messy vector outlines with large amount of redundant nodes. This meant that the resulting expanded outline needed a lot of cleaning up and simplification - a job I could do very quickly with the node tool in Inkscape.

It's always worth making your vector outlines as clean as possible.  In the old days of dial-up modems this was because you hand to shave every last byte off of download times - I used to hand optimise everything I did in Flash to get Flash animations within bandwidth quotas set by customers. However these days it's because the more elegant your outline the better it looks (due to the vagaries of anti-aliasing routines) and the better it animates.

Cleaned up outline

The finished outline was soon cleaned up and ready for transferring from Inkscape 0.47 to Flash 8.

After some experimenting, I found that my favoured method of transferring vector Inkscape artwork into Macromedia Flash 8 is the Encapsulated Postscript or EPS format.


There is one important thing to be aware of when transferring between the two programs using this format. Take this Inkscape vector drawing as an example - it's 400 by 400 pixels in size.

400 x 400 pixel Inkscape drawing...

When imported into Macromedia Flash as an EPS it arrives as a vector drawing 320 by 320 pixels in size.

...becomes 320 x 320 pixel Flash drawing.

There is absolutely no way around this - Flash thinks EPS files should be 72dpi, Inkscape thinks EPS files should be 90dpi and neither program lets you do anything about it.

However, it's simple enough to use the Flash 8 Transform panel to scale all the EPS files you import into it by 125% to make up for the difference in dpi between the two packages.

Doing this becomes automatic after a while!

One final point to bear in mind with EPS transfers between Inkscape and Flash 8 - avoid gradient fills. These always seem to be imported as bitmaps in Flash 8. You will have to recreate any Inkscape fills again from scratch in Macromedia Flash so I never bother creating them in Inkscape in the first place.

The finished animated menu can be seen here. I've also written a blog post about my preferred method of getting my vector drawings from Flash 8 into Inkscape here.