Yep, I seem to be getting out the “Best of” series later and later each year. Sorry gang. I think this whole economic downturn thingy had me a little frightened so I spent much of the first part of this year working – and when I wasn’t working, I was looking for more work. But as things slowed down a little bit the past few weeks, I made the time to put 2008 together. It’s much shorter than the previous ones, both by choice and by necessity – during the editing process I realized how little I was picking up the camera during the year. I’ll try and remedy that for 2009. Regardless, there were number of great memories, including two amazing pranks: one seen here and the other mentioned after the jump.
Music:
The Helio Sequence: “Keep Your Eyes Ahead”
Q-Tip: “Gettin Up”
I finally got around to making some business cards recently, to suppress the embarrassment I always felt when writing my contact info on a napkin or crumpled receipt. (more…)
While working for Nervo, I helped concept, design, and animate a number of interactive experiences for Viximo, a development company creating applications for the iPhone using their own proprietary creation engine, VixiML. It was quite a challenge to create a lush, emmersive experience with a variety of obstacles such as download limit (about 1 mb per flirt) and playback issues.
Check out the application in the iTunes store here. (more…)
For this project, I worked with JD Hooge of Gridplane to help bring to life a variety of design concepts for the XBOX 360 console menu system. Along with help from Martin Linde and Nando Costa, we developed a subtle but polished look for the animations to keep the UI as intuitive as possible.
In this whimsical web film that Nervo created for Premiere Global Services and their eMarketing division, Brian Merrell and I composited and animated together all of the illustrations and 3D renders based on the work of artist Betsy Walton. The main challenge was how to properly bring her paintings to life, without relying on a cliched stop-motion effect. (more…)
Bethel Woods, NY, home to the original Woodstock festival, is now the location for the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. In June 2008, a new museum dedicated to this historic festival and its significance in the transformative 60s was opened, containing a number of interactives created by Second Story. One of my last projects while working full time was creating an animated, birds-eye view of the 3-day event. (more…)
Last year while working at Second Story, I was tasked to design and animate two high-definition projections for the future, $103 million Gettysburg Museum visitor center. Using archival photographs and paintings, each seven minute video quickly highlights the major battles, troop movements, and the various military leaders involved before and after the battle of Gettysburg. (more…)
I finally wrapped up work on a broadcast spot for Nervo, featuring the TIMEX iControl Watch for the iPod. I helped animate a number of the elements, including building many of the particles from scratch and creating the waveform that travels through most of the piece, using a variety of expressions to allow the most amount of control over its look and movement. You can see the style frames and certain ‘behind-the-scenes’ shots at Nervo’s Flickr post. (more…)
I spent a few days helping out the guys over at Nervo on a series of online promos for Let Us Kiss. With this one, I was tasked to animate the feathers from a beautiful illustration done by Linn Olofsdotter, spending hours cutting out individual strands and writing expressions in AfterEffects to efficiently control the speed and fluidity of the animation.
Nervo has posted a few behind-the-scenes shots of this piece here.
After all the positive feedback from last year’s inaugural “Best of 2006″video, it was seemingly decided by all my friends that I had no other choice to make another one for 2007 (and on). This time, I added a small constraint that any music I used had to be released that year. I also changed cameras, getting a Panasonic Lumix around March, which was a double-edged sword – shooting better quality video than the Sanyo, but a heavy drop in audio quality. (more…)
UPDATED, August 26, 2008.After all the great feedback and general interest in the making of these flipbooks, I thought I’d answer some questions and present more detail with the process. The following is the original post with added details and other thoughts.
I can’t quite remember how I got the idea, but I thought it would be fun to create some flipbooks based off of video I had shot. The challenge was to be able to efficiently process the frames from a 3-5 second clip, have them printed by a photography shop, and assemble them as easily as possible. (more…)
Early in 2006, I decided it was time to upgrade to a new digital camera. I ended up with a Sanyo C5, with the intention I would shoot more video along with stills. After realizing it took horrible photos, I kept it in video mode all year long, ending up with hours of footage by the close of ‘06. As a fun project for myself, and for the friends who star in it, I cut the best clips to music, concluding with the simply titled “Best of 2006″.
One of two interactive tables at the Liberty Memorial Museum.
In 2006, Second Story created a number of interactives for the Liberty Memorial Museum in Kansas City, now officially the National World War I Museum, including all the content for two, 26 foot long interactive tables. These tables engage the viewer to learn about the technology and strategies used during the Great War. I designed and directed the production of eight table-wide video presentations, which play during a special group-mode interactive. (more…)
A fellow friend and musician Brede Rorstand came up with a conceptual project where he would write a 15 second long fragment for 15 separate songs. He then had an artist or designer create a video for each excerpt. This was my submission.
Course of Righteousness: Christian Bannister’s awesome (and evil) design
Holocene approached Second Story to design a hole for their annual Mini-Golf Invitational, where local designers and studios compete for most creative, or outlandish, hole. Of course, being a studio with experience in interactive installations, I pitched the idea of a “virtual hole”, in a very 80s arcade game style. (more…)
After several years of renovation, the Portland Armory opened to the public in 2006, an icon of Portland’s relatively young history transformed to a theater housing the local performance company Portland Center Stage. Within the lobby, Second Story produced a unique “peep show” cabinet to tell the Armory’s 100+ year history. (more…)
Second Story was asked to create an interactive kiosk to showcase life aboard the Lagoda, a 19th century whaling ship. After the interactive kiosk was almost completed for the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, I helped direct and create an attract animation to play when the kiosk was not in use. Using many of the same historical assets as the interactive, as well as the 3D model created in house, we composed a “movie trailer” for the Lagoda. (more…)
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