Travels of Code Monkey

Travels of Code Monkey comprises 600 photos of a stuffed monkey, traveling across the world at 12 frames per second, to the tune of Jonathan Coulton‘s song, Code Monkey.

This project has been almost two years in the making, all starting with this forum comment from Colleenky:

OK, this might be a crazy idea. What if I mailed a stuffed monkey to one of you, and you mailed it to another JoCo fan, and so on, until it finally reached JoCo one year from now on JoCo Day 2008? We could set up a Picasa site for pictures of the monkey in every location.

Over the course of the project, Mr. Monkey visited JoCo fans all over the U.S., including Bon and myself in Pittsburgh, and even ventured across the pond to visit fans in Sweden and the U.K. The fans were good enough to document Mr. Monkey’s travels, and upload them to a shared Picasa album. I had the idea almost immediately to put together an animation where Mr. Monkey stays in one place, with a flickering background, à la “Paris Hilton’s Face Never Changes”. I pretty quickly realized though, that most of the pictures being uploaded did not feature Mr. Monkey in the same pose; the distance and viewing angle from the camera varied pretty drastically. This made the problem more difficult, but also much more interesting. Instead of just making a simple gimmick animation where Mr. Monkey stays in one place, I got to create a complex gimmick animation where Mr. Monkey is semi-smoothly animated monkeying his way around the screen!

Development details:

• Part 1: labeling
• Part 2: matching
• Part 3: animation [added 11/27/09]
• Part 4: final thoughts [added 1/9/10]

More updates to come. In particular, stay tuned for the release of the monkey animation software, which you can use to animate Mr. Monkey, or any other object you happen to have a lot of pictures of.

Get the code

The monkey animation software is now available on github: EepEepMotion. It’s not incredibly easy to use in its current form, but I’ll continue cleaning it up when time permits.