Frostapalooza Codepen Challenge!

TL;DR: You can submit your Codepen animations to be considered for display at Frostapalooza!

Holy smokes, Frostapalooza is happening next Saturday! We’re about to find out what happens when you give 40 musicians a whole year to plan one night of music. You should come! Get your tickets here!

We’re been hard at work putting the finishing touches on many aspects of the show, including the visual spectacle. (You should see my outfits!) What’s amazing is that 2 of the 40 talented musicians playing at the show also happen to be nerds who make cool and creative software. Jeff Robbins makes some really amazing music software called Visibox that helps bands easily create, manage, and run video projections at concerts.

And of course many people know that Chris Coyier helps make the amazing code/prototyping/creative web tool called Codepen.

I’ve been having so much fun integrating everyone’s amazing talents into the show, and so we’re naturally using Visibox to run projections to display visuals behind the amorphous Frostapalooza supergroup. And in order to create the visualizations, I’ve been having a lot of fun generating and refining animations in Codepen. Here are a few of them:

See the Pen Frostapalooza Viz – Floating Maslow’s Pyramid by Brad Frost (@bradfrost) on CodePen.

See the Pen Frostapalooza Viz – Circle Waves by Brad Frost (@bradfrost) on CodePen.

See the Pen Frostapalooza Viz – Waves by Brad Frost (@bradfrost) on CodePen.

See the Pen Frostapalooza Viz – Pyramids by Brad Frost (@bradfrost) on CodePen.

See the Pen Frostapalooza Viz – Cubez by Brad Frost (@bradfrost) on CodePen.

See the Pen Frostapalooza Viz – Bethan by Brad Frost (@bradfrost) on CodePen.

This show is about celebrating creativity and community, so as started tinkering with these animations I had the idea that a fun webby thing to do would be to get the community involved. It would be fun to give people the opportunity to participate in the show even if they can’t make it to Pittsburgh to be there in person.

So yeah! You can create/submit your Codepens to be used as visualizations behind the band at Frostapalooza! If your work is chosen, we’ll of course give you attribution. If not, hope you understand.

If that sounds fun and you’re interested in creating/submitting your funky Codepen animations, here are the instructions for making it happen.

Instructions

  1. Create a Codepen account if you don’t have one yet.
  2. Make a Codepen animation that would look cool as a background projection. The creative brief is quite simple: “make cool-looking stuff”. Feel free to take inspiration from the amazing Frostapalooza concert poster by Roberlan, and the website.
  3. Have fun, get crazy!
  4. Tag your Codepen with #frostapalooza.
  5. Let me know! You can contact me however you please. That’s it!

Playing around with code to make cool animations has been a ton of fun, and I love the idea of integrating the web into a live performance like this. Thanks to Jeff and Chris for making such cool and creative software to make stuff like this happen.

I hope you consider submitting your cool and creative animations, and I also hope to see you at Frostapalooza!