THE WORK OF CHARLIE WHITNEY

Inspired by the original Yule Log TV show from New York station WPIX, artist Dan Savage reached out to 65 artists and illustrators and designers to create their own unique takes on the classic.

I was lucky enough to be one of them, and decided it was only right to create mine entirely from code. Everything from animating to rendering was done in Cinder, an opensource C++ creative coding framework.

The original log was created to bring warmth to small apartments in New York City that didn't have a fireplace, and I wanted to bring some of that same coziness in a goofier way. Through various failed iterations I landed on an aesthetic borrowing heavily from Japanese music videos which I was overly enamored with at the time. I loved their playfulness, and thought that those colors and a smile would translate really well to bring those same feelings through a screen. An added bonus in choosing to use code was that I was able to tightly control my effects to repeat after 20 seconds, making the final step of looping a breeze.

The whole project lives on at http://watchyulelog.com in case of cold days or quick smiles.

YULE LOG 2.0

Warm yourself by the monitor

Credits:

Personal Project

Charlie Whitney