TATE KIDS

Hello all!

My name is Dom and I’m the Creative Director at Plug-in Media. I bring you news of our webcam painting app!

 

As you may have seen (if not, have a look), we spent the first week of development working on getting a green dot to follow your hand in web cam view. It seemed like a simple enough idea and Alan (our lead programmer) cleverly got it to work.  Now (having spent a week on it)  he now sees wobbly green dots in front of him every time he closes his eyes. Not to worry – he’s used to this sort of thing! Just one of the dangers of working in a company that designs games. Our ultimate aim is to turn the green dot into a brush that you can paint with, so our second week of development has been about coming up with suitable styles.

The app is not designed to be super-precise, but it will be very expressive. We wanted the marks you make whilst moving in front of your web cam reflect this, so the first thing we did was to research artists in the Tate Collection who we felt managed to convey the greatest sense of movement within their paintings.

We came up with quite a long list – here are some of our favourites:

 

 

 

 

Trying to create these styles on a computer is tricky. What we’ve done is modify a piece of technology called a Particle System. This is normally used in games to create explosions and special effects. Instead of shooting particles out all around the screen as you would in an explosion, we’re shooting slightly different coloured particles straight on to the canvas to create our paint effects.

Have a play with our progress so far.  We haven’t added the webcam controls yet, so you control the paint icon with your mouse, but we’ve  added some buttons on the left of the screen. Click on the buttons with your mouse or use the arrow keys. If you use them you can change your paint effects with one hand, whilst you are painting with the other. Up and down selects a button, left and right gives you some options.

Have a muck about with it and let us know what you think. Also, come back to the blog soon as next time we’ll be talking about how the app should look and showing you our designs.

Bye for now and ENJOY!!

Dom

Tags: About Us, Games, Plug-in Media, Tate Kids

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Four questions!

1) Do you and your family want to be a very short film I’m making about Tate Britain and Tate Modern?

2) Do you want to wear a camera on your head and run around the galleries and ride on the Tate Boat?

 

3) Do you want me to pay your travel fares, feed you AND give you some Tate Kids goodies (and something for your parents too, of course)?

4) Are you all free on April 20 and 21?

If you can answer yep to all of the above, then please ask your adults to email me  - kids@tate.org.uk –  by April 4 with a snap of your family, and one line about why you want to take part. Please put ‘YES! I WANT TO BE IN THE FILM’ in the subject line, so I can spot it easily.

THANKS!
SJ

Tags: Competition, Tate Britain, Tate Kids Film, Tate Modern

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Your favourite part of Tate Kids is the Games, isn’t it? I’m guessing it is from reading all your comments and emails, and looking at the figures of where you all spend the most time on the site.

Creating games – coming up with the early ideas and then getting those ideas made into something you can play and have fun with is a major (and the best) part of my job.

With that in mind, I thought you might like to see how we do it and maybe (just maybe) you can help shape the game along the way. What do you think?

I’m working with our friends Plug-Media who live in windy Brighton.

You’ve probably played some of their games before – if you haven’t check out Extreme Pamplona , Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab and Octonauts.

They came to me with an amazing idea, and that was to create a game that allows you to paint using your webcam.

You paint in the air, and onto your computer screen.

How could I say no? It’s going to be amazing.

We’re at a really early stage with it, figuring out exactly how it works – what brushes you have, and how the colours work etc, but we can share with you what we call a technical prototype. This is an early version of how the game works. If you have a webcam have a go – try moving the green dot around with your hands.  Don’t worry if you don’t have a webcam – there will still be a very cool version you can play.

We’ll be back in touch when we have more to show you, but in the meantime let me know what you think, and if you can come up with a good name for the game, I’ll look in the box of tricks under my desk and find prizes for the best ones.

Until then,
SJ
Tate Kids Editor

Tags: About Us, Competition, Games, Plug-in Media, Tate Kids

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Amazing news, Tate Kiddies, Amazing news!

I can now share with you details of the Tate Movie Project (link to TMP). Ready?

The film, that many of you have been working hard on, is called

The Itch of the Golden Nit.

Evil Stella drawn by Ayomide Jawoniyi, aged 8. YOU GO AYOMIDE!

Beanie will be helped by his mouthy older sister Beryl, who has been shrunk to teeny-tiny doll-size by one of Evil Stella’s electric bubbles.

It’s going to be BRILLIANT and I can’t wait!

Loads of stars from British comedy are going to be doing the voices for us including David Walliams, Miranda Hart, Miriam Margoyles, Catherine Tate, Rik Mayall, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Ralf Little, Lucy Montgomery, Vic Reeves and Alexei Sayle. Phew, that’s a lot of awesome people. Trust me – ask your adults!

There’s also going to be a very glamorous red carpet premiere in London’s Leicester Square on Wednesday 29 June. The film will also be on the BBC this summer AND at screenings at galleries, on big screens during the Olympics, in cities across the UK, and at Vue cinemas nationwide over the August Bank Holiday.

I hope you love it and maybe see you at one of the events…?

SJ
Tate Kids Editor

Tags: Aardman, About Us, CBBC, Games, Tate Movie project

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