Category: Origami

Busy Season

Lots and lots going on here these days. It’s the end of the school year for the kids. Last week they had their spring show for their theatre group YAA. It was a The Wizard of Oz. It was a really good production. Michelle was a Munchkin and Lizzy was Glinda, the good witch of the north. She was really perfect in the role, and I think her singing and acting has improved even since February. Either that or they had better sound reinforcement at this place. Jeannie taped the big Munchkinland production number. I’ll try and post a bit of it. As an added bonus Lizzy and Michelle have been singing songs from TWoO and Wicked around the house. They sound pretty good; they can actually harmonize. And I practically have the Munchkinland number memorized at this point. I’m thinking it’d be fun to get the sheet music and learn it, and somewhere down the line record it interpreted as a prog metal epic. Maybe rename it “Monsterland” and use low growly voices instead of high squeaky ones.

This week Lizzy sat for her algebra final. If she does well she’ll get to skip a year of math in high school. Meanwhile Michelle has been getting me to watch a bunch of math-oriented youTube videos, about things like the Fibonacci series and plant growth, fractals and other fun stuff. This began when she told me she got a book of graph paper and began making fractal doodles in it. The girl is definitely one of mine! The one on plant growth, even though it mainly contained material I already knew, explained it in such a way that I got a new idea for how to make origami pinecones, pineapples, and other forms in way that’s more realistic and naturalistic than anything that’s been done before. (Yes, we’re still talking about pineapples!)

But right now I’m busy with other folding projects. I’ve been working on a pair of Zeppelins, one for this upcoming exhibit and the other for myself. This is probably my most labor-intensive model. I’ve been at it for over a week. I only ever folded one and that was few years back, at the end of a long road of attempts. Now it’s a fair amount of experimentation and reverse engineering. Today I had to make a study of how the nose went into 3-D cuz I couldn’t remember. Tonite I finally got them more-or-less made into full 3-D form. I still have to do the final sculpting and finishing. These models will be wet-folded for sure, and probably (don’t tell anyone!) have a few paperclips and bits of tape on the inside to keep them from spreading apart over time. Once that’s done I still have to make a stand (sometimes in life you just gotta make a stand) and a road-worthy container. One that’s done it’s back to working on fractal polyhedra, which was going to be my Big New Thing this year. Oh yeah, I’ve also been asked to contribute an Armadillo for the exhibit. Ah well, there’s still a week to go, and I’m taking a couple of days off.

I’ve also been busy because now that my book is soon to be released, my publisher wants me to get my “social media” presence up. I created an author page on Amazon, and an artist page for my Origami on facebook. Not much there yet, but it’s a start. I also created a Buzzy Tonic page on Amazon, and checked in fb to see the one there needs some attention. Yet todo is iTunes. My feeling about all this alternates between thinking that its pretty cool and it’s just a big time suck. I’m looking to get the whole thing driven by feeds when I post to my blog with certain tags or categories. I suppose if it make some sales its worth it.

The music thing will have to wait until July, after the origami convention and some travel. I’m close to finishing two songs, Black Swan and Is It Safe?. Last thing I did in recordingland was to lay down sax parts for Is It Safe?. Martin’s original parts were out of tune on the high E’s and F#’s. I got those notes, but had a lot of trouble with the high B’s. Anyway, closing in. When I’m done I’m gonna take what I have and organize it into a logical EP, and go back master what I have so far. I also have a concept for a logo and some album art, but I need time to draw it nicely. When that’s all in place I think it’ll be time to form or join a live band. That’ll be a whole nuther adventure. I’m continuing to develop a set of covers and my own tunes. More on that soon, but probably after the origami convention.

Penfractal Dodecahedron Tessellation in Origami

Here’s my prototype of a Penfractal Dodecahedron Tessellation. It’s a 3-D evolution my Penfractal Tessellation. Each face of the dodecahedron is subdivided into six smaller pentagons. The model also makes a reasonable representation of the dodecahedral analog of the tesseract, albeit in 3-d hyperbolic space rather than true 4-d space (trust me on this; I looked it up). Now that my proof of concept is done, I want make another version that’s more ball shaped by making the tessellated sub-faces bulge out. And you should know that although I almost always work with a square sheet, I’m considering using a pentagon for this one, so I don’t have to deal with all different ways to handle the unused paper in the corners. I think the subject may justifiy this.

I’ve been folding lots of other stuff too. I’ve perfected my dog and cat and made a whole bunch over the weekend. A few are to give away, and others are for my exhibit and the convention model menu. Soon as I get around to it I’ll take some pictures with the good camera. I’ve also been invited to contribute a model to an upcoming exhibit. More on that soon. The model they want is my Zeppelin. This is one of my hardest models. In fact I’ve only really successfully folded one. I’ve been meaning to fold one out of better paper for a long time. So now I’m making two, one for me and one for the exhibit. Luckily I diagrammed the first half of the model (the precreasing part) so I don’t have to work that out.

If I get that done in time, my next model will be a new attempt at a one-sheet Stellated Dodecahedron, since it uses the same base as the Dodecahedron Tessellation.

Dogs and Cats in Origami

This weekend we’re having the first real hot weather of the year, in the mid to upper 80’s. It’s also the weekend of the carnival at the kids’ school. I helped out last night at the Fathers’ Club Food Tent, and will be helping out tonight and tomorrow in the games booths. These school events get more and more fun as I get to know more parents and families. There’s a great sense of community that I never felt in the old school. Plus it’s interesting, but I guess not surprising, how Establishment it is. The local cops and firemen are all out showing support. Heck some of them are parents of the school. I’m still conditioned from the days of my youth to see cops as a threat, so it feels weird to learn they’re normal, friendly guys.

I have alot of vacation time to use up this summer, and so I’m taking my first summer Friday to do some origami so I have some new models for convention. I have few things that I’m working on. First is a pair of new animals, a dog and a cat. I’d been thinking about doing a dog and cat for a while, but they’re pretty challenging subjects. There are lots of cats and dogs out there, ranging from simple and stylized to realistic and complex, capturing a wide range of moods and styles. Plus cats and dogs are very familiar to humans. It won’t do to simply have the right configuration of limbs; the model has to say something.

I found my way in to approach these subjects as a request from a friend. She had recently created a website for an animal adoption service in Queens – Timber’s Legacy (timberslegacy.org). The website logo features a dog and cat in silhouette and she asked me if I could fold them as gift for the lady who runs the service.

The idea that the animals are sitting allowed me to focus more on the overall shape and sculptural aspects rather than worrying much about the base and where the points for all the legs would come from. The dog in particular has pointy ears, and you don’t see that much in origami dogs. Once I had the dog worked out, I figured the cat would be a simple variation, but it turned out the pretty different. Not only is the head and face totally different, but the long tail required a whole new geometry and base. Finally, the body posture, neck and shoulders were different enough to have to come up with a new treatment.

I’ve been folding lots of cats and dogs the last few weeks. They’re not too complex and take less than a half hour to fold. I’m still refining the details, particularly on the cat, before I attempt to fold exhibit quality ones out of good paper.

The other thing I’ve been working on is an approach to combine polyhedra with tessellations. I came up with a successful prototype for a sixty-sided shape based on a dodecahedron. More on that soon.

Joy Spring

I took a few days off while the kids were on spring break from school. Got a bunch of stuff done and slept in alot. Played piano every day. Naima in particular is coming along nicely. I worked on some new origami designs and diagrams. New models include some spaceship ideas and some polyhedra tessellation ideas. After all, why just tile a plane? I’ll post some pictures when I have some results. On the diagramming front I’m now midway thru my Rocketship and Zeppelin, and have started in on my Quadrose tessellation.

I did some painting around the house in the stairway, living room, kitchen and hall, and rearranged some of our art. Did a good chunk of yardwork too, and even got our on my skates for the fist time this season. I took the kids to Medieval Times for a fun family outing one night. That turned out to be a great time. Real horse stunts and staged jousting and melee combat. It was pretty cold the whole week, though. Down in the 30’s every morning. The one thing I wanted to do but didn’t get the chance was to take the Mustang around to get estimates on restoring the paintjob. I did take it out for a drive at least.

I also finished up my recording project for Lou for the time being. I have rough mixes for his songs and the next step is to have him come in and lay down the vocals. So I went back to working on my own songs, which I put aside last fall to concentrate on finishing my book. I finally worked out the middle section and ending to Black Swan, and laid down a new bass part. I also found a gem from Martin in my pile of demos. It’s called Is It Safe to Go Outside? and features a really cool loping bassline that fits neatly with an angular, intervallic melody. The song is about the feeling you get at the end of winter, hoping the first real day of spring has finally arrived.

Origami Publications

Winter lingers on. Believe it or not, we still have some snow on the ground from last week’s freakish snowstorm. It looks like random chunks of styrofoam. Still can’t do much to get started on the yardwork.

So instead here’s another update to my web site. I created a page for my origami publications. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/origami/zing_origami_publications.php

Speaking of which, the video for my book is done, and I’m back in waiting-to-hear-from-my-publisher mode. I’m starting to work on a new batch of designs, including some advanced polyhedra, so I have some new stuff to exhibit at this year’s convention.

Everything Going on at Once

This was a really busy weekend. I was sort of stressed and feeling down in the middle of the week, but now I feel great about everything. I’ve probably talked with more different people in the last 48 hours than I sometimes do for weeks on end.

First off, work has been busy. Thursday night into Friday was a big messy snowstorm that cancelled school and made going into the city an epic adventure. We’ve had three releases of our product in three months, all with pretty bug new feature sets. The last of them was last week. On Friday we had a big demo for the new stuff going into the next – as yet unplanned – release. I’ve been spending a good deal of time on refactoring with an eye to improving runtime performance and the architecture. I found a set of bugs where components were slow to initialize or put themselves away, and discovered they’re caused by some object disposal code implemented recently by another developer to try and staunch memory leaks. But his approach is really heavy and creates more problems than it solves. So now I have to rip the whole thing out and do it right. Ah, what fun.

Friday night I went to an open mic. I hadn’t seen my friend Erik in a while and he showed up too, which made it fun. I played Making Miles and Get On Back 2 U. Somewhere along the line my singing just sort of came together and I don’t really have to worry about that anymore. Also I’m getting used the feel of the piano there. Making Miles was written by Martin, but at this point I have my own version of it. The song is not hard to play and it went over well. It always makes me miss him though. GOB2U is one of mine and I know it well, but it’s full of altered jazz chords and prog meter changes, and has a big solo section in the middle. My songs often seem to have a passage where the left hand does some advanced thing, and if I find myself consciously thinking about it it’s too much to handle. So there was a moment when I had to let the left had go for a bar or so, but no one seemed to notice. And then at the big ending I somehow landed on the wrong chord. It fit with the key and I was able to improvise my out of it. So at least I’m getting better at covering my mistakes smoothly.

Saturday I had the time for a nice long piano practice, and actually got to work on some things in depth. Taking apart and reanalyzing some of my songs, and starting to learn a few new songs. In keeping with my policy of trying to perform a new original song every time, next I’m work up It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Day, which as harmonically pretty straight forward (just a few sharp 4’s in there) but is largely in 5/8 time. I’ve also stared looking at the classifieds to see if I can either acquire a rhythm section or join a group that would be into playing my material.

Saturday night was the school’s annual father-daughter dance. This year I took both girls. It was a lot of fun. I know more of the dads and kids than I did last year, and some of the dads brought beer. My friend Mike, who was the piano player for last year’s Cabaret show, told me he’s now doing a lounge piano gig at a neighborhood restaurant/bar on Saturday nights, and what a challenge it is getting together an evening’s worth of standards. I’ll have to go check it out. While the dads hung around and talked the kids had a great time dancing up a storm.

Today I did an origami special session at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Had to get up early with the clock change. I taught my Squid and my Cuttlefish. This British kid from my class is ten years old and already an amazing folder and designer. He brought a box of his own models that looked great. I encouraged him to put together an exhibit for the convention in June. After the class I did a quick cruise thru my favorite parts of the museum – the giant halls of dinosaurs, animals and sea creatures – and then went for a walk around Central Park. It was really warm this weekend and most of the snow has already melted. You can really feel spring is coming soon!

When I got home this afternoon I did the final bit of video for my book, the introduction. For this I’m talking into the camera rather than show closeups of paper on a light stand. It was the perfect day for it, since the kitchen was filled with sunlight.

This evening I worked on Lou’s record. His songs are nice and easy to play. I’m on track to have all the rhythm instruments, plus a midi guide track for the lead vocal done by Easter. Last week I laid down the bass parts and today it was rhythm guitar. (I did the drums and piano a few weeks back.) I’m getting a good sound with a combination of direct inject and mic about 2 or 3 feet in front of the guitar. I got two and a half songs out for done before my fingertips started to get sore. I’ll finish the rest one night this week.

Origami Videos

I’ve been jamming on the videos to go along with my book. I few weeks back I perfected the setup with the lighting and camera, and did a few tests to get up to speed. Now I have eighteen of twenty-two models in the can. Of course the four remaining include three of the hardest in the book. My publisher pointed out that I tend to pick the model up of the table sometimes, when executing complicated 3-D steps, and this makes it hard to see what’s going on. So I may go back and shoot some extra footage to cover these spots. I’m already shooting most models in several parts. I’m thinking I might go ahead and edit together the parts with crossfades, and while I’m at it tighten up the pacing, so I know it’ll come out the way I like it. I’d also like the improve the audio with some dynamic compression and a noise gate.

My problem now is the only video editor I have is iMovie and Quickitme, both of which kind of suck. I used to have Premier and After Effects, but that was years ago, and I don’t want to shell out thousands of bucks for a new video editor. I’m wondering if there’s a decent quality video editor out there for free, like Audacity is for audio. So far nothing has turned up.

A fun side effect of doing this video is that Michelle has been watching me, as she likes to take an interest in most of my studio things. Now she’s inspired to get back into origami, and has folded the Octopus and the Narhwal from my book. She wants to do one of my models for OBC this year.

Origami Site Update

Here’s part two of this winter’s updates to my web site. I’ve added two new links to my origami section to view Models By Subject and Models By Year. All the models templates have been updated to fit in with the look I’m using for the rest of the site. I’ve also added five new models and pics of a bunch of others. Some of these pics I took, and some were by Bob Plotkin as part of the photo shoots for my upcoming book.

I haven’t removed to old views yet, because I have yet to update the main origami page. So it’ll remain in a bit of a hybrid state for the time being. There’s other stuff to do too, so there’ll be a second update sometime soonish. I want to update my model templates so show multiple images, and create something like a gallery viewer for the full size images. I also want to create a publications section.

But that will have to wait. I’ve been working hard since new year, and coping with the darkness and the cold. It’s time to take a break and spend some time away from the computer.

New Origami Tessellations

I’ve be working on my origami site, adding new photos, new models, and updating the site templates to create new and improved layouts and to provide new ways to access the models by subject and chronologically. This isn’t done yet but should be along pretty soon.

I took new pictures of many of my tessellations. This is part of my getting-to-know-your-camera-better campaign, and while I was at it I shot some more test video for my book. I think I have a setup worked out now. One important change is I moved from my kitchen down to my studio to avoid having to break down every time it’s time to eat. The reason I was in the kitchen in the first place is that it gets lots of beautiful natural light. But this time of year I’m never even home in the limited daylight hours, so it’s a bit moot.

So now, down in the studio I have the camera on a tripod on the table, pointed straight down, and I have a sheet of light grey marble Wyndstone under the work. This is a nice, clear look. The thing that amazes me is how much light you really need. I opened of the f-stop, lengthened the exposure, and went to a higher (virtual) film speed, but my shots were still coming out dark. I turned on all the lights in the room, and ended up bringing in three 250-watt lights. One was from my living room, so I think I may go out and get a couple studio lamps going forward. Even so, this did the trick and I was able to capture clear, sharp video and stills.

One more thing I have to master with this camera is color balance. I left this on auto and it seemed to skew toward the warm side, as if it thought it was shooting in daylight. Another interesting side effect can be seen in the images here. The background is a neutral grey, but the camera skews it to be a weak complimentary color to the subject, which in this case happen to be strong, single colors. Very interesting.

Update Update

Been working on a bunch of things. Settling into the long winter and trying to be productive. Starting in or continuing on project that will take a while.

First off, my open mic the other night went pretty well. People told me I sounded good at least, and they like my songs. Before I’d played in a duo with Erik, but this was my first time as a completely solo artist. It’s not easy keeping both hands going and singing while no one is backing you up. Plus there’s always things on the stand the you don’t necessarily think about but you have to adjust to ont he spot: the sound and feel of the piano, the placement of the mic, the lighting. And there’s no sound check or warmup, you just go for it. Anyway I think I did pretty well.

I played two originals, Checker Cab and Get On Back 2 U. I’m trying to do one new song (as far as me performing it live is concerned) per show, and Checker Cab was it this time. On Checker Cab the left hand art in the chorus was a bit off one time thru, and I decided to skip the instrumental section in the middle for the safety of the groove. Still the vocals were strong on the groove was swinging the whole time. Get On Back 2 U went fine, no particular problems. I’m more comfortable with it, and maybe I should have opened with it but, ah too late now. When I debuted GoB2U live it was a bit shaky too, but now it’s solid and can focus on delivering a performance rather than worrying about messing up.

I can’t go to the open mic next month cuz of the kids’ school musical, but for the one after that the plan is to debut my version of Making Miles. Also gonna start looking for other open mics and try and find a rhythm section soon.

It looks like I’m mainly over the hump as far as moving into my new computer goes. It’s a Mac workstation with a great big screen, to replace my older mac workstation with a more moderately sized screen. Of course this means have to update all my software and everything. I really only use this computer for two things. One is software development on the days I work from home, and the other is music production on ProTools. The ProTools in particular took a while to migrate because of driver updates, and having to re-register all my plugins. But that seems to have all worked, and I can see lots and lots of channels in the mixer on the new screen. The last big thing remaining is to migrate my old windows partition to my new machine via VMWare. In fact I even started working on music on the new rig, add click tracks and stretching the chords on Lou’s songs. Soon hope to lay in the rhythms sections.

I’ve also been experimenting with recording video for my book. The idea is to demo folding the models. I’ve been learning more about my camera because I can use to shoot video in HD, so I want to try and use that rather than my miniDV camcorder. I’ve hooked it up to the computer and can see the viewfinder image on my monitor. I’ve also left the safety of fully automatic mode and am learning how to independently control the ISO, F-stop, exposure and focus, and started coming up with setups that work. It’s a bit tricky, because I need to be zoomed in pretty tight by still have a large depth of field. Adding more light helps. The next I’m gonna do is change my setup around so that the camera is looking down over my shoulder. For my first go I had the camera opposite me, but this made it harder to explain clearly because the audience POV was opposite my own. Also have to make sure I’m capturing good audio. I might add an external mic.

So look forward to progress on all of that and more in future updates.