Balsa
Working lately with a Flash artist on the far side of the earth, at twelve hours time difference. We Skype to exchange files, chat, talk live.
ActionScript 3 is traumatic to her. Flash was whimsical until lately, and she would dash together her own ten-line script now and then, copying an example she found somewhere, and altering it by trial and error. Trial and error is right for an artist. Picture Renoir dabbing at his picture and stepping back to squint at it, over and over. That worked for her ActionScript as well, until now.
Now she has hundreds and sometimes thousands of lines of ActionScript inside her pages, automating her effects so she can vary them faster.
Vary more, not less? Wouldn’t ActionScript and its components make her pages more uniform, more alike?
Not necessarily. Much of her work has always been repetitious, a set up she does on every page before she calls in her artistry. Now script does the tedious routine and she jumps directly to the artistry unique to each.
She has mixed feelings. I don’t recognize myself lately, she tells me. I used to sing and dance while I worked.
Right, we can’t lose that. Only the artist knows (if anyone knows) what makes or breaks her kind of work.
For example, she recently had three ambitious components on a single page, and somehow they were fighting one another. I told her she would need two hats now. In her artist hat, she wants to lay out everything at once, to see everything together. In her scripting hat, she wants to add components one at a time, making sure of each combination before adding more.
But some days she just wants to shut down the computer and doodle on the wall instead. I know the feeling. That’s when I stop help my fourth-grader build a balsa villa like the one Michelle Pfeiffer built in One Fine Day; or she comes with me to trim tree branches around our Internet wires.