Layer Tennis How It All Went DownTo say that Joshua Davis merely "put on a show" would be the understatement of the season. In perhaps the most animated match to date (well, except for the actually animated matches, of course), Joshua turns on his webcam and streamed the entirety of his side of the match against seasoned Tennis player Brendan Dawes. Mix that energy with stellar output from both in each subsequent volley and you have a battle for the books. Here's a chat with Davis, after everything had concluded Friday afternoon.
LYT: Now that you've likely spent the last day and a half sleeping off all that Red Bull and expended energy, what did you think of the match?
JD: Crap I was supposed to be winding down and sleeping?
I was amped...I had prepared an idea and drew some new artwork to help support that idea...being MATT HAUGHEY'S open text, "Kings. Veterans. Knights. Titans. Experts. Moguls. Rulers. Icons." I thought, ok I need to prepare my vector army for battle. So I drew some coat of arms, eagles, swords, skulls, etc. After I had finished the Skulls, I thought it's "Dawes of the Dead," a play on Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. So I built up some very bright colors that would lend itself to the bright colors in the Mexican Day of the Dead festivals and "Dawes of the Dead" would be a play towards Mr. Dawes's love of film and the film projects he has done.
Now that I had all the visual assets drawn, I knew that Mr. Dawes and myself we're going to use generative practices in Flash CS5 and ActionScipt 3 to render out compositions. So I took all of my assets and rocked them into a few files that would generate kaleidoscopes and patterned grid layouts. Hoping that all this pre-game work was going to work its way into the layer battle.
LYT: Before we get into an individual layer, we should talk about your live, streaming broadcast during the match. There was skating while Brendan worked, lots of singing/dancing, and the delivery of jar full of ants. You made watching a person sitting in a room working on a computer both strangely captivating and entertaining. Why did you decide to do the live feed? And are you always that energetic?
JD: Ok some back story: In April of this year, I got stuck in Germany,
because of the Icelandic Volcano eruption. What's interesting is WHO I
got stuck with: Grant and Jerry from Influxis, whom I had met and
partied with on countless other occasions. Well, when you get trapped
for a week with people, uncertain of your future of getting home, some
fun discussion comes about. 
I told them I couldn't wait to get home
because I was building a skateboard halfpipe in my backyard. Since
Influxis is in the business of streaming media, the discussion came
about, would I be interested in being sponsored by Influxis. Hooked
with an account and services, so that I could spend the week, streaming
the construction of my skate ramp. Which is exactly what happened.
So if I have anything fun happening, I turn on my live stream, post to Twitter and let people watch whatever is happening. I've had a live drawing request session with Jon Burgerman, I stream skate sessions when people come over to visit the studio, I've streamed spinning 80's industrial records on my turntable, I've streamed my HP wide-format printer printing out artwork. The collaboration with Influxis lets me provide a window into anybody who would like to be voyeuristic and a want to have a dialog with people in the chat, who maybe have not had a chance to sit and chat with me at a conference.
I thought that Layer Tennis would be a great opportunity to make the passing of 15 minutes more interesting. You could smack talk live, have an over the shoulder view of the screen so you could see what was happening. Some lags meant I could take the viewers outside to my ramp for a quick session. Tt meant singing, dancing, surprise ants, commentary from astronaut Jesus, etc. The response was so overwhelming that my max limit of 200 viewers needed to be expanding and we had at one time almost 500 viewers watching me overdose on Red Bull.
Yes I'm always like this. Thank god we're not dating, right?
My hope is that Influxis and Layer Tennis can find a way to bring this live streaming to all future battles. I know I'd tune in.
LYT: During the feed, you also had a running soundtrack playing in the background. Any particular favorites that best helped push you along through those quick 15 minute volleys?
JD: In no particular order: Danzig, The Black Keys, Buckethead, Die Antwoord, Major Lazer, Dillinger Escape Plan, the Refused, Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, House of Pain, Cyprus Hill, Harry Belafonte, Gilberto Gil, Hunab Ku, John Frusciante, Lovage, Faith no More, The Mars Volta, the Melvins, Slick Rick, and Michael Jackson - with a soundtrack like that rocking, you can almost smell the victory in the air.
LYT: Okay, on to a specific layer. I wanted to talk about your 7th volley in particular. Matt Haughey, the match's commentator, was talking about your process of using code to generate elements throughout the rounds, which makes sense given how amazingly complex your volleys were. Stripping it down to layman's terms, can you tell us how you built #7?
JD: #7 was lovely. I was pretty happy with that volley. Brenden used this text "back from the dead," but we we're having some technical issues. Brenden couldn't open my layered files on his machine (yes, they are that bananas in terms of the amount of vector data) and Mr. Dawes wasn't ripping his Flash files out to layers, like I was. So the best I could do was simply put my work on top of his and hope that enough of his work was represented so that it stayed true to being a mash up.
So, because of these issues, I thought, well, he may be back from the dead...but he's still drowning. So I had a drawing of some crashing waves and I tore them into 4 individual assets and had them randomly generate a linear composition. That composition was ripped out of Flash via PostScript and sat as an independent design on my desktop. I did the same with some glowing circles to represent bubbles. I did the same with some random X's, numbers, and "pill" shapes. Simple to create some texture.
Now all of this is done using the HYPE Framework, a collaboration started by Branden Hall and myself to make generative processes and visualization easier in AS3. Finally I used the Swarm Class to create the swirling lines (a metaphor for the tangle I had Mr. Dawes trapped in) and then I used the Grid Layout class to create the patchwork of X's.
Now these we're all separate assets ripped via PostScript and I could pull them each into Illustrator CS5 and begin to arrange the compositions to work together into one cohesive layout. Using code and generative processes has allowed me to create elaborately constructed volleys like #7 in fifteen minutes. Hooray for technology.
LYT: Before the match began, I think a lot of people saw that the two of you were both longtime Flash pros and expected the volleys to be animated or interactive, thinking those are the only functions of the program. How do you use Flash outside of what the casual observer knows about it?
JD: I love Flash, don't get me wrong, but I'd like to think of myself as a creative person with IDEAS and Flash is just a TOOL to help execute those ideas. So because of this, I was willing to use whatever technologies best supported the volleys within the 15 minute timeframe.
So, Mr. Dawes and myself chatted in e-mail about a week before the matchup, wondering if we could do a HYPE match and keep everything in Flash and volley classes back and forth that made visuals. However Mr. Dawes wasn't that familiar with HYPE and working in code would take much longer to volley in 15 minutes. So I fired up the tools and processes that I would use to help best support my content creation, Flash only being a piece of that puzzle.
LYT: What other tools were you using along the way?
JD: I couldn't have battled without the following: Red Bull, iTunes, Apple Hardware, tons-o-ram, Nvidia, Quadro FX 5600 (it helps you move a ton of vectors on screen Mr. Dawes), Wacom Cintiq 21UX, the HYPE Framework, Flash CS5, Illustrator CS5, Photoshop CS5, PostScript, Influxis for the stream and chat, Ants in a Jar, Astronaut Jesus, and finally I'd like to thank Gold.
LYT: From Volleys 1 to 7, there was some obvious continuity, at least within the color palette. Then it seemed like Brendan made a big shift in his Layer 8. What did you think about his response?
JD: I don't totally agree. I think we were coming into the final stretch and he pulled the teals from my first volley. I think we both knew that we we're going to try to bring the loop back around to the first. This was totally solidified with Mr. Dawes ending with "Davis of the Dead," which was a play on my opening text, "Dawes of the Dead."
LYT: Any final thoughts about the match?
JD: First Time as a player. Super Super FUN.
In the Spirit of OPEN LAYER REMIXING, please find all my source material, Final and Dev here for download (284.9 Megs). PLEASE read the README.txt file for usage and lets keep our love TIGHT.
Please check out the HYPE Framework. Branden Hall and myself would love to see what you can make and remix.
I also hope "multi-cam" / "screen-casting" from Influxis finds its ways into future match-ups and if you can get Red Bull to Sponsor. You can guarantee the good times! You can't have Astronaut Jesus though. He only bestows his powers to me.
LYT: Thanks for coming out to play, Joshua. From the video feed, seems like you had a good time.
JD: Thanks again. I fear now, that people might now know my connection with "Reality" is a bit slippery.
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