Cool Tool: Ghost House

Ghost House is a free animation tool - you draw a start and an end drawing, and it interpolates between them. It's made by Ted Wiggin and it's in the perfect sweet spot of "artistic tool, made by one person, primarily for their use" but also "with thought for how it might work for others". I have, I admit, not played with it myself yet, but I have watched this charming video which demos it:

There really is something about a video where a softly spoken American man describes the various features of the very particular software they've been making and the inspirations behind them. It's the art of the demo, I guess - not necessarily going for the style where you're aiming to blow people's minds with a twist reveal, but instead outlining a philosophy, example by example.

I love the way the interface has everything present at once - which is actually not quite true, there are multiple windows and at different stages one might attend to different parts, it is thoughtful about allowing the drawings to be large upon a small screen. But, still, it is unafraid to leave the window where you would draw a one of a series of smaller stamps open throughout, it believes that three gradients is enough to select from at any one time, and that those should be present always, the brush parameters should be right there. It reminds me of a modular synthesizer - everything is out, everything is showing how it's working, but of course when one is operating it one will only be focusing on one or two modules - but human attention is a powerful tool, and it's best not to pre-empt it by deciding for the user how they should be moving their attention around. Or, maybe what it means is that the person constructing it decided what modules they cared about, and they're the user - if they decided they needed different modules, they'd rebuild it, they don't need configurability beyond that.

The thing where he's like... here's a grid of values for doing convolution. I can't really explain it, but just play around with the values. I've made that grid before! I also can't explain it, but have had fun with playing around with the values! (no grid in the public version, but try hitting the spacebar in time with some music on this webpage)

Also this bit is just perfect:

The name Ghost House comes from an aquarium toy for a type of electric eel I had as a pet when I was a kid. It's blind, but it uses electromagnetism to navigate, so the ghost house tricks it into thinking it's hidden when it's not. I chose the name because as I was building the software, it started to do things I didn't expect. If you see fit to play with it, I hope it surprises you as well.

Oh, and also! For fans of working notes, the page has his design notes from when he was building it. Such a fan of that - although the idea of doing this for one of my own projects fills me with fear. I'm just too messy - I always wish I had a design education which had beaten into me the discipline to make my process an output in itself.

Here's the link again: Ghost House. And thanks to Fer for sharing it with me.

Hey, this is a new, hopefully recurring, bit! I want to write more/think more about creative tools, so... here's a series where I can post about tools that I think are interesting to look at. Here's a thing, here's some thoughts, keep it loose. Seems like it might be nice?

Oh this post got a nice reception. Here's a few replies I wanna collect for later:

This is cool! I was wondering what it was made in, but clearly not deeply enough to actually find out. A good choice for something that can start off personally usable but gain more features over time.

Rotoshop! I tried to find some video of the interface but failed. I did find this, tho:

about which Wiley says:

also there's:

Fun that we've all been doing this long enough that there's this history of tools doing similar things, treading similar ground. Starting as experiments for one off things, and then they get adopted for something bigger and become infrastructure. Or not!