UCSC: Art 22: Intro to Electronics for intermedia

Art22 at UC Santa Cruz was taught in the Art Department and included a foray into the wonderful world of electronics with a focus on creating works of art. Students worked with a variety of electronic circuits, including hacking electronic toys and Arduino microprocessor projects. I devleoped the syllabus and cirruculum based on the orignal work of Elliot Anderson, Assistant Professor, theory/studio, Electronic Media.

CSUEB: Art3870: Art for the web

Art For The Web (now Web Authoring) was one of the first courses I taught after leaving the corporate world of Design. The site was built around the Art Department's look and feel, and uses early CSS styling and layouts controled by tables — something rarely used nowadays (thank goodness).

Flash Clock With Lunar Phases

A clock built in Adobe Flash using ActionScript 2.0 to accurately portray the current time and the correct phase of the moon in a web browser.

The 3D Cafe

The 3D Cafe was developed to demonstrate some basic concepts of 3D modeling as it was done in MacroMind's Three-D product. It was created a couple of years before the era of CD ROM player ubiquity and is rendered in 4 bit gray-scale (16 shades of gray) instead of the usual (at the time) 8bit color (256 colors) to keep the size smaller, since it was shipped on multiple 3.5 inch floppy disks.

Blue Funk & Paul Is Dead

Blue Funk and Paul Is Dead were web entertainment prototypes from House of La Fong. La Fong was the production company for David Sanborn, well known video artist. He did two pro­to­type web sites for Comedy Central for which I built some of the Shockwave movies. Blue Funk eventually became a single season TV show for Comedy Central.

The Blue Funk project included some Shockwave animations that highlighted the humor of Frank's indecisiveness about choosing a mate, and his potential mates choosing a man.

Paul Is Dead was a prototype for an on-line episodic mystery. Paul has mysteriously drowned, and this title animation uses images of his body in the swimming pool.

Macromedia Annual Report

Before Macromedia used Flash exclusively for multimedia on their web site, they used Director Shockwave. This 1996 annual report piece was associated with the printed annual report, and mimicked a 1950s pulp novel.

The biggest challenge with this piece was to keep it very small in file size, including sound, since the web at that time was mostly accessed by dial-up modems.

Primus: Tales from the Punchbowl

An Enhanced-CD, which combines regular CD Audio with computer data to create an interactive music experience. The big challenge was to animate a 7 minute song in 1 megabyte or less of memory space, since the CD’s laser head can't go back for more computer data once the song has started. I art directed the look and feel, built the “bridge” of the tugboat which was used to navigate around the songs, and animated several of the songs. (Like Mrs. Baileen)

Show Me Movies

As Multimedia Producer for Macromedia’s Instructional Media Development Group (IMD) I art directed and produced over 30 “Show Me” movies that demonstrated the functionality of both the Flash and Director product lines. They were also designed to demonstrate best-practices in creating multimedia with Macromedia’s tools. Click the following links to launch the Flash Show Me’s or Director Show Me’s.

Speaker Support

Technical Forum on Coexistence Strategies

This was support for an international seminar on strategies for Information Technology departments to migrate from “Big Iron” mainframes to networked personal computers with the Oracle 6 database system.

Client/Server for the Enterprise

This was a 2 hour seminar with the ability to be tailored by the presenter to their target au­di­ence. It helped significantly in explaining the conceptual complexities of Client/Server arch­itec­ture and Sybase's product positioning.

Team SAT

The International Interactive Communications Society Summit Award winning piece was done for Gray Matter and Zelos. It used a soft jersey cloth looking user interface, and many elaborate animations with voice-overs to explain the different tips and tricks for improving your SAT scores.