What if every restaurant in the world cooked its dishes with the same ingredients, in the same amounts? The culinary experience would certainly be a lot more beige - sometimes, the sauce needs a bit more oregano. Similarly, a growing number of designers, animators and digital artists are looking to extend their creative palette beyond the confines of commercially-available software to create work that is that much closer to magic.

Enter an open-source programming language and software environment called Processing, developed by MIT Media Lab grads Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Frustrated by what they viewed as limitations of other more tricky languages such as C++, Java and Open GL, the duo designed the Java-based Processing to be accessible to students and pros alike - anyone who wants to program moving imagery, animation and interactive work.

With work beginning on the project in 2001, software for Processing 1.0 rolled out officially in 2005, and a user community quickly developed, as did the language itself. Users were encouraged to not only share the source code of their projects, but to create new features. As elements like audio and video responsiveness (animated imagery responding to and interacting with audio or video feeds) were introduced by coders, Processing's reputation grew amongst the global creative community, as did its use.

"Processing wants you to use it, and not be intimidated by it," says 635194Robert Hodgin635194, ECD and co-founder of The Barbarian Group. Hodgin has been working with Processing since 2004, impressed by its ease of use for coding novices, and its power compared to more established software such as Flash. He's used it extensively in groundbreaking interactive work from the Barbarians (including the "grass wall" installation promoting Saturn's line of hybrid vehicles, profiled in Boards' June/July '07 issue) as well as in-house R&D work, including a cool iTunes visualizer dubbed the Magnetosphere.

Hodgin likens the Processing interface to a "glorified text editor" that's as powerful as it is simple. "If you want to draw a line on the screen, you type in 'line', the 'from' position and the 'to' position and then you have your line after you hit 'run' [on the interface]," he explains.

Processing's ability to create digital art that interacts with audio or video signals has made it a natural hit in the interactive and experiential marketing scenes. But other forward-thinking animators, designers and directors have been working with the language for broadcast and filmed projects, most notably, Venice-based creative studio Motion Theory, Universal Everything's Matt Pyke and Karsten Schmidt (aka Toxi) from London- and Tokyo-based creative studio Moving Brands.

For Motion Theory, their experiments in using Processing for broadcast began with their 2003 promo for REM "Animal", in which they covered vocalist Michael Stipe in constellation-like, shimmering fields of energy that match his movements. In introducing Processing to the workflow, Motion Theory adapted the code to analyze film footage, so that it was, according to co-director 596843Mathew Cullen596843, "actually tracking the movement of pixels." The end result? An organic look that "we weren't able to achieve with any other software."

Recently, Motion Theory has incorporated Processing into the animation and visual VFX work for its highly-touted HP "Hands" campaign spots through Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco (including "Pharrell" and "Paulo Coelho"). The company also combined Processing with C++ for Budweiser Select spots through Cannonball, St. Louis starring Jay-Z and featuring a futuristic table football game, in which plays are executed in thin air with hand movements and voice cues. "It allows us to do things that are much more customized to the types of projects that we're working on and the ideas we have," says Cullen.

It's a sentiment shared by the London-based Schmidt. Processing's customizability served him well for interactive Moving Brands projects as well as a film collaboration with Universal Everything for the Audi TT and in creating the open for Channel 4's New Shoots, a program highlighting the films of disabled directors. Based on a series of generative logotypes that he created in Processing, Schmidt used the tool to build a "growing" logo composed of tiny 3D particles that magnetically attach themselves to the type outline. By the final frame of the animation, the particle count was a huge 4.36 million. Schmidt then used another open-source rendering tool, Sunflow, for ultra-realistic lighting and shading.

"With New Shoots, I was totally in charge of how those particles grew," Schmidt says when comparing using Processing to working with Maya and After Effects. "You can control all those parameters and it gives you so many variations and a level of detail that no generic tool can offer."

Still, Cullen says that with it being a generative language and "in its most practical form, an interactive tool", it can be "challenging to come up with the same result twice." But that can be part of the attraction when going for that never-before-seen look.

"When we've used it, we've been able to capture something, but you won't be able to replicate that exact movement," he says. "So at that point, the animation becomes a living thing." Hodgin likens using Processing to the concept of evolution. "Every now and then there's going to be an unexpected mutation that ends up working out really well for the environment, and then the mutation becomes the norm."

Given its open-source status, evolution is an apt metaphor. "It's growing on a daily or weekly basis, and you don't really have that with a proprietary product," enthuses Schmidt. And with all the major design colleges in the world adopting Processing as a teaching tool, "there will be a whole new generation of designers and artists who will use a totally different tool chain than we did five years ago."

The Barbarian Group http://www.thebarbariangroup.com
Flight 404/635194Robert Hodgin635194 http://www.flight404.com
Motion Theory http://www.motiontheory.com
Moving Brands http://www.movingbrands.com
Processing http://www.processing.org
Karsten Schmidt http://www.toxi.co.uk