What am I anymore?

Hi friends,

It’s been Halloween and half-term with the kids, and we spent the week roaming around London. Wanstead Park was the highlight: peaceful, quiet, with a transparent pond where I even spotted a heron.

Meanwhile, my head has been super busy with new possibilities, and if I’m honest, a little bit of existential dread. For almost 30 years I’ve known what to call myself: a motion designer. Lately, though, I keep asking myself: what am I anymore? Am I still just a motion designer? A creative technologist? An AI creative?

I know there is a strong sentiment against AI right now, and I completely understand it. Last month in New York, I spoke at Google’s Creative Accelerator alongside motion design studios from around the world, and my point was simple: I have zero interest in asking AI to make my art for me. What excites me (even as it blurs my old job title) is using it as technical muscles to finish lost projects and build the tools and weird physical ideas I could never code on my own.

01. Our Front Window Monster (and Manny Calavera)

Everything started a couple of weeks ago when I built a wearable 1:1 EVA foam Manny Calavera mask from Grim Fandango, using Google Antigravity to unfold the original 1998 low-poly mesh and pack all 31 bevelled seams onto a single roll of foam.

Once that worked, I wanted to build something physical for Halloween night on our street. I turned our two-pane front bay window into a giant reactive creature.

As you can see in the behind-the-scenes shots above, the physical setup is held together with tape and optimism: £2 frosted film on the sash windows, a £50 projector inside, and a tiny webcam sitting on the sill that had been lost in my drawer for months. It worked and it was great.

02. ParticleFlowX (and Keeping My Bezier Curves)

On the screen side, I’ve been building a series of native After Effects plugins with Google Antigravity.

This one is ParticleFlowX. The idea was to make two plugins that talk to each other inside After Effects: the first extracts optical-flow motion vectors straight out of any precomp or footage, and ParticleFlowX uses those vectors to push millions of particles around like smoke or liquid ink, sampling the shot’s colours along the way.

The best part? As you can see in the top-right corner of the breakdown above, the base layer is still 100% hand-keyed. I’m not giving up tweaking Bezier curves anytime soon. The plugin just lets my keyframes drive the physics.

03. Surprisingly, LinkedIn Is Working (Without Dancing)

I know plenty of creatives who dislike LinkedIn, and for years I felt the same way. But lately I’ve had to admit something surprising: it has easily been the best platform for sharing these experiments in my natural tone of voice.

Both the ParticleFlowX breakdown and the Halloween Window Creature blew up a little bit on there, sparking genuinely nerdy conversations in the comments about multi-frame simulation caching, motion vectors, and projection mapping. Best of all, it happened just by showing the work and the process, with zero need for me to dance or point at floating text for the algorithm.

04. Three Things That Caught My Eye

• PISS · you made me / skin on linen
  This new album by PISS is incredible. I listened to it with tears in my eyes. It samples radical feminist voices like Andrea Dworkin, Toni Morrison, and commentary on the Gisèle Pelicot trial, and it’s a powerful record that forced me to look at myself as a man and really educated me.
• mur mur
  An open-source DIY speaker by oio and Mattering with a tiny living soundscape inside instead of a playlist. I’m trying to build one right now.
• Wanstead Park
  Go for a walk by the pond if you need a break from screens.

See you next month, and hit reply (gasta@gasta.org) if you want to say hi.

Gasta