Sculpture screen savers

Free screen savers of my kinetic sculptures available here.

After many requests over the years I've finally found a way to create screen savers of my spring driven wood sculptures. Time and technology have come together to make it possible.

I've been building animations of my kinetic sculpture ideas in Adobe After Effects for many years because it works well with my drawing program of choice, Adobe Illustrator. The animations I made were too small to fill a screen and when I increased the size the animation files became huge. It wasn't a practical screen saver. Jump forward a few years. Video compression techniques have greatly improved giving smaller file sizes and most internet connections are faster so downloading isn't a problem.

The last piece of the puzzle was finding a way to turn the animations into actual screen savers that would run on any machine. A bit of internet research led me to a program called iScreensaver Designer. It takes the animation movies I create and converts them into screen savers that can work on Macs or Windows computers. The only catch is that the computer must have  Apple's Quicktime installed for the screen saver to play but that is also free and readily available.

Needless to say once I found that I had a whole screen to work with I had to play a little. It's great fun!

You can find my first screen savers at this link. I've decided to share them for free. Each screen saver is based on one of my actual sculptures and shows a brief approximation of how that sculpture moves. Keep in mind that the animation is fixed and doesn't vary over time like the motion in the "real" world. To see that you'll have to come and see the actual sculptures.

Enjoy!

The Radiance edition is coming to a close.

There are 4 sculptures left in the Radiance edition. I'll be making them this August. Three are sold. The last one is still available.

Shipping and Journey

It turns out that with just a slight bit of modification to the way Journey is installed I can ship it in a much smaller box than I normally use. This will save a good bit on shipping expenses in today's high cost energy world. The cost of shipping my normal box to Europe has ballooned to something over $500 with added fuel surcharges. Journey, in this new box, will ship for less than $300.

Happy Father's Day!

Hi Daddy,
For Father's Day we went ahead and set up a Wood That Works blog so that you can start telling the world more about the amazing things you do.

This blog currently resides under Karen's gmail account, so we will need to transfer it to you. It is also currently set to remain hidden from the blogger world and from search engines. This is to keep people out while you finish the set up and write your first post. This can be changed in the Settings > Basic section.

We have also set up comments to be turned ON, but with moderation. The emails alerting you when a new comment exists will be sent to woodthatworks@gmail.com.

Amy designed the beautiful header, and we have it on the most basic template. You can change the template you want to use and keep the header all within the layout section.

Have fun!

Love,

Your Daughters