Steampunk Wallpaper and Screensavers

In my ongoing fascination with the Neo-Victorian "steampunk" art movement, I have started to become aware of the shear volume of interest there is surrounding the idea. The internet is full of interested individuals, there are a number of newer movies being made that borrow from the same inspirational pool, and a few RPG, COSPLAY, and LARP games that have sprung up in the past few years. Yet, despite this, there is a surprisingly small quantity of "steampunk" styled desktop wallpapers (www.steampunkwallpaper.com seems to have the largest collection I've seen so far). Even fewer still are the number of steampunk cell phone wallpapers (I still haven't found a decent source), and steampunk screen savers are all but nonexistent. This got me thinking. Instead of crawling the internet looking for the previously mentioned graphic imagery, why not create my own?
So the next question became, "Where do I start?" I spent a few hours looking at pictures of watch escapements and clock movements. A few more were spent actually looking at things that were made of brass to get an idea of how the metal reflected light. After this, I began laying out a few designs in Adobe Illustrator CS3. I debated working up 3D gears in Blender, but (since my 3D modeling skills are still a bit lacking) knew that it would take me a supremely long time to model the gears and even longer to wait for the render. After working up some stills, I began to attempt to foolishly animate them in Illustrator as a series of JPEGs that I would then combine into an animated GIF in Adobe Fireworks (big mistake). I figured, "Heck, I've seen a few steampunk wallpapers, but I've never seen an animated steampunk wallpaper. Why not give it a try?"
It was good in theory, but very bad in practice. The file sizes were through the roof (an average of 2MB per still image) and I would need at least 100 frames for the design I was testing to get a continuous loop. It also took my computer (a Dual Core processor and 2GB of RAM) about 5 minutes to save each image after running the processes for all the drop shadows, gaussian blurs, and textures (which meant I'd be looking at 8 hours and 20 minutes of saving plus time to animate the images and compile them together). Needless to say, it would take a long time. None of these things are conducive to an animated GIF that can be shown on anything less than a supercomputer. Who wants to have their desktop wallpaper eat up all their processing power to run itself? I wasn't going to let it stop me though.
I remembered that since Adobe had bought out Macromedia and took over the Flash program, you could pull Adobe Illustrator images into Adobe Flash and manipulate them (since they are both vector based programs). Two hundred and forty frames later (so much for 100), I had a full loop. Adobe Flash is able to publish animations as animated GIFs, so I tried it out. Unfortunately, I hadn't accounted for the extremely limited number of colors that an animated gif is capable of, so all my time trying to get gradients and textures right was lost to a pixelated animation reminiscent of a time when computers could only handle 256 colors. I was going for a "vintage" look, but not that kind of vintage. The file also weighed in at an astounding 6.5MB and ran pretty choppy on my computer. So much for the animated gif idea for now.
So I had a few stills that I saved at various dimensions for computers and smaller versions for common cell phone resolutions and an animation. This is where I realized just how few steampunk screen savers exist. I found one... and you have to pay to use it. Why not turn my animation into a screen saver? With a little looking, I stumbled upon a website(www.flashsaver.org) that allows you to turn SWF files into screen savers for free (which is much better than all the software programs that cost anywhere from $20 to $40 dollars to use). After testing the site out, I now had my first steampunk screen saver complete with matching non-animated wallpaper. I went ahead and began working on a second that would also have a matching non-animated wallpaper. Unfortunately I messed up when I designed it and realized half way through animating, that it would take at least 400-600 frames to get a full loop. So I changed the gears around and worked up a version that only took a little over 100 frames to get a loop. Much better.
So here is the fruit of my labor. Feel free to download and use them on your computer. The files are being hosted at www.mediafire.com, so clicking the links will redirect you to the appropriate page.

Steam Powered

Desktop wallpaper: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x 800, 1280x1024, 1400x1050
Cell Phone wallpaper*: 96x65, 101x80, 128x128, 160x128, 174x132, 220x176, 320x240, 400x400

Atom Clock

Desktop wallpaper: 800x600, 1024x768, 1400x1050
Cell Phone wallpaper*: 96x65, 101x80, 128x128, 160x128, 174x132, 220x176, 320x240, 400x400
Screen Saver: exe installation file (will resize to your screen size)

Gearworks

Desktop wallpaper: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x800, 1400x1050
Cell Phone wallpaper*: 96x65, 101x80, 128x128, 160x128, 174x132, 220x176, 320x240, 400x400
Screen Saver: exe installation file (will resize to your screen size)
*To use these, you'll need to download them to your computer and transfer them to your phone via a data cable or MicroSD card or whatever method you use to transfer files from your computer to your phone. I don't know where to begin to set them up to download straight to your phone. Sorry.
If you would like a screen resolution different than the ones I've provided feel free to let me know. All comments are welcome.

If you'd like to get an idea of what the screen savers look like, I uploaded a video copy of the Atom Clock Screen Saver to YouTube.com.





As well as a video copy of the Gearworks Screen Saver. The video compression on this one caused a large number of digital artifacts that aren't present in the screen saver itself.