When Adobe acquired Macromedia, a lot of people thought that’d be the end of Director. After all, Director and Flash have had increasingly overlapping capabilities for some time, and Director seemed like something people used years ago. Think again: talk to people doing interactive design, and Director — for better or worse — lives on.

With the Director 11 update announced this week, that’s unlikely to change any time soon. New in this release:

• Vista support on Windows, Intel support on Mac
• Bitmap filters (a la the bitmap API in Flash 8/9, I’m assuming)
• Full JavaScript support and Code Snippets
• Enhanced Flash support with CS3 and Flash Video support
• Built-in physics via AGEIA PhysX
• Native DirectX 9 3D support

Now, anyone for a Voyager interactive CD-ROM (as pictured right, from the Director heyday)?

Physics and 3D? Impressive stuff. So I should be excited, right?

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

People can argue and theorize about digital art as a medium all they want. The answer is as simple as a simple word:

Iterate.

Do it over and over and over again in little bits developing techniques. Start small, add small, but keep adding over and over and over again. Iterate.

flight404 does that about as well as anyone in the Processing community, and it shows. His latest visualization of a Goldfrapp tune, now with lyrics, is stunning. And the addition of lyrics shows that these kind of techniques aren’t just eye candy — they can convey information, and do it elegantly and expressively.

Robert’s techniques are typically far from real-time, so part of why I enjoy them so much is they’re a challenge to those of us on the performance end to figure out how to do more interesting things live.

The other interesting thing here is the beat detection. Eventually, he wound up adding the beats manually, as detailed in the post linked here. That in itself is telling to me — as a composer, having worked on scoring and how things line up creatively, I’ve always found indirect relationships compelling. So this speaks to me of the importance of creating some imperfect algorithms, algorithms that don’t always line up so they challenge our ear and eye to make the connection.

Oh, and I love the fact that “Frankenstein” appears in the end, like a cameo by Alfred Hitchcock.

Solar, with lyrics [ Flight 404 ]

(It’s a long weekend in the US, so I figured we could handle double the inspiration.)

Adrien Mondot has posted a preview of his latest creation for OS X - eMotion. eMotion is an physically modeled, OpenGL powered particle engine enabled app that is Quartz Composer friendly, has an incredible text engine, and has Wii remote, wacom tablet, OSC and sudden motion sensor inputs to drive parameters. Watch the video to see for yourself, the text effects are quite amazing.

Unfortunately no public beta is currently available. You can check out Adriens other Quartz Composer and OpenGL related projects (with downloads and source) on his blog. Be sure to check out the “Simple Time Remap” application, it seems like the smoothest video scratching tool Ive come across.

eMotion looks to be an incredibly powerful and smooth addition to any VJ setup, especially with its Quartz Composer integration and text-savvy nature. This is one to keep an eye on. We’ll try and get you more details on eMotion, but for now you can lust after its mysterious ways and watch that video.