The AlphaNumerizer

Here's another Flash application for young kids - The AlphaNumerizer. I tried to find a simple tool for my son Nico. He's a year and a half old and he loves letters and numbers - seeing them and hearing them pronounced makes him very happy (in fact, he's playing with my wife's alphabet cookie cutters as I write this).

Every letter/number game I found online was more complex than what I was looking for - most commercial educational sites clutter the screen with lots of links to additional content and branding elements, and many of their tools and games have animations and other images that supplement each letter as it's typed. That's fine (and probably better suited to kids older than Nico), but I didn't want those kinds of visual distractions - I tried a couple with Nico and I actually had to point to show him where the letters were on the screen.

So I built The AlphaNumerizer. It was a very quick Flash build - about four hours of work total. The audio was recorded on my new Blue Mikey external microphone for the iPhone. It's an excellent quality mic - you can hear the clarity on the samples. I gave the audio very little compression when exporting from Flash - so it's a fairly large file for such a simple application (about 500k ) but it's worth it for me in terms of the quality.

I used typical color scheme, though a bit desaturated - I don't like the kind of overblown colors that you usually find in websites and games for kids. I went with VAG Rounded for the typeface - it really represents the letters and numbers in a nice, traditional typographic style but with rounded ends, which keeps things looking kid-friendly. We wouldn't want kids to get hurt on sharp-cornered letters or - heaven forbid - serifs.

Nico likes when I use the aggressive, excited voice I wound up using for the AlphaNumerizer - we have foam letters that he plays with in the bathtub, and the way I pronounce those letters when I hold them up for him is the same way I voiced them in this application. I exaggerated the pronunciations while still keeping them as clear as possible.

I put the featured letter on a colored card and animated it so it would fly in quickly, slowing to a gentle stop. I also added a timer so it would fade out after a few seconds, essentially clearing the slate.

After I got the basic functionality working (I spent an hour wondering why only certain keys worked while I was testing in Flash before I found out the Flash test environment was "stealing" my key presses - I had to disable the keyboard shortcuts to fix that), I thought about tracking which keys had been pressed. It seemed like that would be a helpful feature, so I added a little strip of letters and numbers at the bottom that fade out as each key is pressed. I kept them small so as not to distract from the main huge letter, and added in another function that fades them back in when the mouse rolls over them.

And besides a title bar and an About section, that's the whole thing. Some early testers have suggested adding a other features, like detecting when certain words are typed. I'm not sure I'd go that route, but if I did, I'd still keep this version as it is. There's something nice about a full screen devoted to one primary element to focus your attention on. Now if I could only find a way to prevent Nico from hitting keys that get him out of the browser window...

Check out The AlphaNumerizer.

Premium Music Solutions - Interactive City

The Premium Music Solutions home page - an interactive city with each building representing a different genre of music being promoted. Click to launch website.

After about four months of development, www.PremiumMusicSolutions.com has launched. I'm excited. It's been some time since I did the first proof of concept of the Christmas village at the center of the city, with its blinking lights and falling snow. The rest of the city was finalized months ago, but the client decided to hold off on the site going live until the second phase - building the interiors of each venue, which house the full song information - so everything would go live at once.


One of the six venue interiors - this is Club T, featuring disco, club, and other dance-friendly music. Click to launch website.

The song data is all XML-driven so they client can make changes and updates on their own, without my intervention. As always, the handshake between Flash and XML - making the information flexible enough to accomodate, say, multiple pages of of songs - is always the most difficult technical piece, but it pays off in the end. Now the client can maintain all of their own content - an efficiency and cost-savings.

Another minor technical feat: the interiors of the venues all use one Flash file. Each venue has its own HTML page with a single FlashVar, "venue", passing down a value of 1 through 6 to the .swf file. The .swf then goes to the appropriate background image for the venue, and pulls in the appropriate XML file based on that value, which then propagates all the song data. This is also an efficiency issue - I only have one file to maintain - and also helps the site load quickly, since once the first interior is loaded, all subsequent interiors load near-instantly, as they're really just opening the same .swf.

One other "trick" I tried, which I've seen before but hadn't attempted - actually a trick in two parts: The interiors of each venue show large text buttons for the other five venues, but not a link for the venue you're currently in. A small thing, perhaps, but it's nice to only present the user with the options other than the one they're seeing. And part two - instead of having an off/over state for those buttons (they all seemed to important to keep "dimmed" when they're off), instead, when the user rolls over one of them, the other five temporarily dim.

Now go check out the traffic lights and cars on the home page. Yes, they really work. Now it's time to add in some pedestrians.

Bond Opening Parody

Oh yeah - this project. Another one that I forgot about, for the most part, until I found it in my hard drive.

This animation was created for a large corporate client who does a lot of fun internal projects like this. I don't think I ever got the full story, but they had an executive who they wanted to mock (always a good thing) and there was some connection between "Agent 007" and "Agent 88.00" (some kind of nickname for the guy), so they wanted to James Bond-ize him, and asked me to help.

It wasn't a complex project, which was good because the turnaround time was either two or three days from when they called me - the animation was to be shown at a large departmental meeting. The client sent me a photo of the executive, and I was happy to see that his expression was nice and grim - it really fit the Bond mood, especially when I stuck his head on a tuxedoed body holding a gun in Photoshop.

I studied a few openings from different Bond films on YouTube. They were all similar, with some minor variations between them. I boiled it down to the basic elements, created them in Freehand, and animated them in Flash - adding a classic version of the song. I think the only change the client requested upon seeing the first version was that I add an actual bullet flying at the viewer. I don't know how well that registers, but it's in there for a few frames.

I finished just in time for the deadline, and the client was happy. I'm not sure how the executive who was the subject of this lampooning took it, but hopefully he had a good sense of humor about it. It's not like we made him into Austin Powers or anything. James Bond is always cool.


Click the "Play Movie" button above to view the animation.


Watch the first 30 seconds of the clip above for a comparison.

Simmer Down

Simmer Down with Sharon. Click for the full animation.

Another half-completed idea. I created this in 2004, not long after meeting Sharon, turning her real-life career as a pastry chef into an animated mockery. Not really. But it was a fun little experiment in creating an animated version of the woman who would become... my wife (I tried to make that sound dramatic)


Umberto, the irrepressible spatula with the overdone Italian accent.
I did the voice, and I'm 100% Italian, so it's okay - I cannot get in trouble
for the ethnic stereotyping.

And yet, it's really more of a rough idea awaiting completion, which will hopefully happen someday. The lip synching for Sharon is rough - I just created some semi-random movement and never got around to finalizing it. In fact, the sound is a clipped, giving it a static quality when the sound peaks. Blech. The theme song was done in Easy Beat, a program I used for music recording pre-GarageBand, so it's pretty weak. And Phillipé the Whisk is only shown in the intro - the scene ends abruptly and he's not even shown. Poor Phillipé.

I did enjoy voicing Umberto, brief as his lines were, and his interactions with Sharon seemed pretty funny. And I like the way the kitchen "set" turned out. So I'll consider this post a kick in the butt to revisit this project someday and at least get one episode done. Then Phillipé can finally have his moment in the spotlight.

The Darjeeling Limited

Click to view the site in a new window. Some functions have been
disabled. Don't be too sad.

I was enlisted to develop the Flash website for the film The Darjeeling Limited by the same agency who'd asked me to created the Deviated Discharge game for The Heartbreak Kid. They're in L.A. and they're very specialized - they only do movie websites. Must be nice, eh?

Because of the tight deadline (about three weeks), the number of people involved in the project (including Wes Anderson himself), and the scope of the site itself, this project wound up being the most complex website I've developed - by far.

This was first movie website I developed, and I was told by the lead agency that it's very uncommon for the director to be so heavily involved in its development - but that was exactly the case with this project. Besides getting input from the studio (Fox Searchlight) and the lead agency I was working for, Wes Anderson had already contracted his favorite design studio (he apparently uses them on all his films) to develop the overall look of all the film's promo pieces, both print and online. There was also a third agency involved, developing just one section of the site ("Explore TDL"). And I was the set of hands putting it all together in Flash... and dealing with lots of questions and problems along the way. Par for the course.

I never communicated directly with Wes Anderson, but at a few key milestones in the site's development he'd go to his agent's office in New York, review the site's progress, and compose notes. His agent would forward his e-mail to the lead agency, who would then forward it to me - stripping out Wes's original e-mail address before they hit "send". I guess to prevent me from forming any direct communication with the guy. Maybe they were scared I'd add him to my famous Tuesday morning knock-knock joke distribution list. Maybe.

The website was a pretty messy affair - integrating elements provided by so many different sources, in a tight timeframe, is never going to be pretty. Working on the little music player, for example, required hours of testing and modification - especially programming it to fade out quickly when the user views the trailer, so the sounds don't overlap. I listened to the beginnings of those songs so many times that when I eventually saw the finished film, I had some strange Pavlovian reactions each time a tune began, quickly visualizing myself in front of my computer at 2 a.m. trying to debug some ActionScript. It made it kind of hard to enjoy the performances of Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, et. al.

Eventually the Flash site was completed and integrated into Fox Searchlight's main site, which contained their global navigation and some additional, changeable elements below the Flash piece, like news, contests, and other press pieces about the film. The site went live a couple weeks before the movie opened, and no, I know what you're wondering - I was not invited to the premiere. I'm not bitter, though.

I almost designed another movie website for this agency a few months aftering finishing this one. They asked me if I had time to develop a simple website for what they described as a "little indie with Jason Bateman". The timeframe was initially to be two week so I agreed to take it on, but then they cut it down to one week. I had to pass on the project - that's too quick for my blood. I need to sleep a little between projects. And of course, that little indie turned out to be: Juno - a much more well-received film than The Darjeeling Limited. Grrrr.

Mistha Bleedsworthy - Storyboards

I did my first set of storyboards when I was in college. I was part of a screenwriting group, and our teacher was planning to head off to Germany to shoot a short film he'd written. Somehow it made sense for him to plan the project remotely, locating cast and crew (pre-Internet) by telephone, newspaper and letter-writing, and then fly to another continent to actually shoot the film - a fifteen-minute black and white art piece, with only two non-language-specific words spoken. But hey, it's not my place to say whether or not this was logical - not then, anyway. Maybe the movie was just a ruse for him to sample some fine Teutonic beer.

Because I was a Graphic Design/Illustration major, this teacher asked me to develop storyboards for the film. I agreed - possibly because the film was titled "Watchman", one letter away from my favorite literary work, but also because it seemed like it would be a good experience - and it was. I still have the final pieces - I'll have to photograph them sometime. I say "photograph" because my teacher, the writer/director, insisted the storyboards be rendered on humongo 30x40" boards. He wanted the cast and crew to easily be able to reference the images while they were on set. Not a bad idea. I have a VHS copy of the final film - it was a moody, arty piece, kind of like Wings of Desire, but much more entertaining because it wasn't a pretentious piece of crap (uh oh).

The other interesting fact about those storyboards is that my teacher insisted that I draw them while he was present, so he could essentially direct me as I was working. That was pretty challenging. He requested very finished-looking renderings, so it was an especially long process with me going to his house in Philly for several weekends, drawing out multiple rough versions of each panel on a small sketchpad. Once he was happy with one of those roughs, I'd redraw the panel on the board using charcoals. Sometimes we only got through a few panels in one six or so hour day. Good thing it was a short film. I think he paid me $50 for the whole project - what was I thinking?! I didn't even get any of that beer...

Anyway, those movie storyboards are not the subject of this post, but the there's a very roundabout connection. When I joined that screenwriting group, I convinced another friend of mine (also a Graphic Design/Illustration major) to join with me. My friend Allen was and still is, the most creative person I know - and I know many creative people, trust me - but it just oozes out of this guy. While our teacher was enduring my in-progress screenplay about an assassinated American ninja who's brought back to life in the future (only to fight, of course, the ninja who killed him), Allen was presenting a concept for a screenplay called Mishta Bleedsworthy which our teacher absolutely fawned over. It was a well-deserved fawning.

Mishta Bleedsworthy was Allen's concept not just for a movie, but for an entire world. The story's titular (hee hee) character was a member of The Epitomes of Stuff - an unseen group of entities in a parallel universe composed of offices sitting on interconnected tiny planetoids. The Epitomes rule over different aspects of our world using their powers, all while working through their own dense bureaucratic system.




Exterior and interior shots of the Realm of the Epitomes of Stuff.

Willoughby Bleedsworthy (referred to as "Mistha" by his four-foot Chinese Cowboy assistant Neddy, who has a serious lisp) is the "Epitome of Doors, Gateways, Various Entrances and Exits, Holes, Paths, Bridges and Links, Both Tangible and Intrinsic" (Allen's description - pretty wild, eh?). He's part Willy Wonka, part Baron Munchausen with a bunch of other fictional characters thrown in. Besides Bleedsworthy and Neddy, the cast was filled out with Kishwa (Bleedsworthy's friendly anthropomorphic tie), the Epitomes' long-suffering Headmaster Szogfn, the identically-cloned Bettys who conduct communications in the Epitomes' realm (each using their own method - semaphor, finger painting, interpretive dance), and the tyrranical Epitome E.G. Wadsworth, who hatches plans to thwart Bleedsworthy and Neddy from beneath the fish bowl in which his head is imprisoned. Yes, the story was epic - so epic that it took over fifteen years for Allen to complete the screenplay (I believe he's working on a sequel now). The final document had a Monty Phython-like irreverence and was a blast of messy fun.

In the late 90's, while he was still working on the Bleedsworthy script, Allen surprised me by joining the U.S. Army - he's still enlisted. Right around that time, I was taking a traditional animation class. I asked Allen if I could take the Bleedsworthy concept and create a television series proposal from it, to use as a class project. He agreed, which was quite generous of him - this was his passion project. And besides being a writer, and a musician (I saw him learn to play the drums right in front of me once, over the course of a few minutes - it was like that scene from Close Encounters where we Earthlings learn to communicate with the aliens through music), Allen is an excellent cartoonist - he'd already rendered most of the Bleedsworthy characters on his own. I was a little nervous for him to see my renditions, which you can see here:




Character rotation, model sheet and prop sheet for Mistha Bleedsworthy.
His tie sticks out like that because it's alive!

He gave me permission to work up my own versions of the characters and environment, which I did over the course of about six months. I created model sheets, prop sheets, backgrounds, storyboards, a sample episode script, season overview and other materials. To my relief, Allen liked what I did with his project - I sent him drawings and other documents while he worked his way through basic training.

I then put together a package and sent it out to about fifteen production companies, who all responded by saying: no. Actually most of them didn't respond at all, or just gave their answer by sending my material back unopened with a form letter. I didn't cry, though - the idea of someone with no history in television or animation creating a full series, based on an original concept with no commercial tie-ins (comic book, novel, children's book) is beyond a long shot. But it was a great exercise - by the time I had everything completed, I had much more respect for anyone who's ever got a cartoon on the air.

So here are my Mishta Bleedsworthy storyboards for a couple interconnected scenes. You can click the image below to view them as one large image (sans dialogue or description), or view one panel at a time by clicking the interactive piece at the bottom of this post. Or don't click either - after all, I'll never know.


Click the image above for full storyboards in a new window... or click
below to view one panel at a time.

Flying Spaghetti Monster - The Game

Click to play in a new window.

If you haven't heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster internet meme, then you're fine. No, really - it was a big thing in 2005, but now it's pretty much run its course. I won't bother explaining the deeper workings of this pseudo-religion (really "parody-religion") - a guy named Bobby Henderson created it as a goof, and it took off all over the Internet. "Pastafarianism", as it came to be known, is centered around a diety made of spaghetti and meatballs. Pirates are also part of the mythos. There's even a version of Heaven containing a beer volcano and stripper factory (don't be mad at me - I didn't make this stuff up) - pretty silly stuff.

When the Flying Spaghetti Monster thing was still taking off, I contaced Bobby to see if it would be okay for me to create the official FSM game. I even worked up a sample conceptual image for Him to review. He was very enthused and gave me the go-ahead immediately, and I got to work.

Within three weeks, the game was complete, Bobby posted it on his site, and people began playing. I posted it on a couple online gaming sites, and pretty soon people began stealing the source Flash file and distributing it to gaming portals everywhere (yes, without my permission - good thing I developed it as a self-promotion, for no charge). I get dozens if not hundreds of hits to my site every day from people clicking the link embedded into the game. Web analytics are fun.

I've never created anything with as wide a reach as this thing - before or since - so it took some time to get used to all the feedback the game generated - much of it negative. I made the gameplay fairly simple - you, as the Flying Spaghetti Monster himself, float above a scenic landscape, pressing the mouse button to fire one of your "noodly appendages" down to the ground. If the tip of the appendage hits one of the 25 people roaming the land, they are converted to a pirate. Convert all 25, and you win the game. There's a timer, a couple bonuses, and evil darkly-clad administrators roaming amidst the people - points are deducted if you hit them.

And that's it. But for some reason, the game play stumps the majority of people who play it - at least initially. See, you move the mouse left and right and the Flying Spaghetti Monster moves across the screen - the screen scrolls as well. But if you move up and down, your character also moves up and down - and your position in the sky determines where vertically on the ground the tip of your appendage will strike, which in turn determines whether or not it actually hits the people on the ground.

Most people who play for the first time don't consider this vertical positioning (your shadow moves with you, as an additional targeting tool. People get very frustrated with this, often posting comments like, "This game is IMPOSSIBLE!" and "I can't convert ANYBODY!!! HELP!!!" until some nice person (not me) comes along and advises them to consider their up and down movement when they're playing. It would have been way too simple a game if you only had to move left and right, align yourself with the people below and press the button - but for whatever reason, that doesn't occur to people. Maybe I should hold a press conference or something. Ah, too late for that.

And speaking of player feedback, the comments the game has generated (currently at 558 on the official Flying Spaghetti Monster site) have ranged from really positive...

"I love this game, and enjoy the challenge of converting the non-believers while simultaneously attempting to improve my score and skills" (sounds like it was written as a school assignment)

"Bravo on the game. I thoroughly enjoyed it."

"This is heaven on earth! Thank tou (sic) FSM for giving us the wisdom and knowledge to create this wonderful game!" (hmmm... I didn't know "we" created it)

...to the moderate...

"Quite amusing and decently challenging without being impossible. I just wish there were more levels or the game was longer."

"Great game, but it needs more levels. It`s great fun, and really improves your eye-hand-coordination. " (okay, so I probably should have made more levels - quite a few people mentioned that - of course, many more were happy the game was short and able to be completed)

"i thought it was a little hard. then again, i suck at video games so who knows?"

...to very, very negative...

"This game sucks!!!! While the rest of the site aint bad the game needs improvement. I will sodomize the monster" (that seems a little unnecessary)

"IT DOSNT (sic) WORK FOR ME THIS GAME SUCKS!!!!!!" (read the instructions, bud)

"wtf that is the most retarded thing i have seen in my life who ever made this should kell (sic) themshelfs (sic)" (I'll take it under consideration... mmm, no - not gonna do it)

I even got this private message sent to my Newgrounds account, where I also have the game hosted:

"Your addiction to the so-called oh-so-glorius (sic) Flying Spaghetti Monster, or FSM for short, plain disgusts me. Sure, you're allowed to make up your own religion [wasn't me, bud], sure you're allowed to follow this twisted immage (sic) of a wannabe god, sure I can't stop you... And so on and so forth. [he got a little lazy there]

FSM is a lie. If you think different, please prove his existance, (sic) the reason of the religion, some stories behind the creation of life... Stuff like that. I'm waiting, Steve. Waiting in excitement.

~Dottorius Sigma, mouthpiece of Ender."

For the record, the opening of this piece seems lifted from the Star Wars quote about "your sad devotion to that ancient religion...". I took it as a joke, but I still held off on responding.

Ever since the game came out, I've been receiving screenshots and even videos of people completing the game and getting into "Heaven". That's pretty fun - reminds me of my own youthful video game fascination (some people even send me screenshots and videos of them not winning, which is a little harder to get excited about).

The game was featured on an episode of Attack of the Show, though I never got to see it. From what I heard, they got a good laugh out of it and talked about the game for a good fifteen seconds - but I'm not complaining. Oliva Munn wound up contacting me to develop a Flash game for her. Okay, not really. That would have been pretty awesome, though. But that show, and some online publicity the game received, helped me get a few paid Flash game projects. So you see? It was all worth the abuse.

And the only nearly unanimous feedback I received was on the game's music, which I composed in GarageBand early one Saturday morning. Even people who hated the game loved its theme song. That softened the impact of some of the harsher feedback and death threats. People asked for an .mp3 file and I obliged, making the song available publicly to appease the Pastafarians who hungered for it. It's not as satisfying as a good marinara sauce, but then again, you can't dance to sauce.

I Am All These Things And More

This piece started out as a client project that just didn't pan out. Once of the agencies I work with wanted to rebrand themselves, or really to create a secondary site that they could show to people in the video game industry that they were trying to woo as clients - a site that would be much more fun and irreverent than their existing site, which was traditional-looking and catered to their more conservative clients.

The agency described their plant to me, and I began working on the piece without any kind of formal agreement, which was not smart. It was a handshake kind of deal - "Here's what we'd like to do - an Otaku-influenced site - do you have anything you can show us in this style?" I didn't, but just thinking about it inspired me, so I started drawing in my favorite vector program, FreeHand. Within half an hour, I had a ninja, and I liked that ninja. I kept building from there.

I was working on my It Must Be Me book illustrations during this same period, and I enjoyed the challenge of working in that style - conveying the different characters in simple geometric shapes. Sometimes I feel almost guilty, creating pieces like this with so little detail - but whatever speed comes from the lack of complexity is often made up for in the time required to get the shapes that are there just right. I kept these colors desaturated as well, and I gave each of them a radial gradient in one or two places, to give their forms a sense of dimension. Background strips were added, each a little thinner than the characters' widths, so the six dudes could pop forward a bit.

And then nothing happened. The agency absolutely loved the images, which originally didn't have their descriptions beneath them. Each of the six characters were meant to be animated, and when clicked the backgrounds were to expand, bringing up one of six different areas of this new website. But the agency wasn't ready to commit to launching the new site (and as far as I know, three years later, they never did), and though I was disappointed, it was my fault - they were so enthused to get started, that I let myself get sucked in, moving forward without good reason. My bad.

A year or so later, I started putting up my Zazzle store, and revisited the image. I thought it would make a fun t-shirt idea, and since no one had paid for or used the piece, it was mine to use however I wished. I came up with the title "I Am All These Things And More" to tie the six characters together, added the descriptions below, and posted it for sale. I think I sold my first shirt in an hour. I should have known - people like ninjas, people like pirates, but combining those two characters with the other four seemed to be a winning combination. Lesson learned. It's now one of my top selling items. I've even sold one to someone named Esmaeil in Falun, Sweden. I hope he/she is wearing it - maybe even right now - and feeling like a Pirate, Clown, Viking, Robot, Ninja and Monster, all at once.


I Am All These Things And More on Zazzle

Jabloo - An Introduction

Jabloo is the biggest project I've ever undertaken, and for that reason, I'll be breaking it down into a bunch of different entries, each focusing on different aspects of the project (which is still far from fully launching).

I had the idea for the then-unnamed project in 2006, after reading Seth Godin's Free Prize Inside (more on that book later). I started thinking, in a purely analytical way, that I'd benefit from creating a project that exploited what I believe to be my strongest skills - vector character design, animation and Flash programming.

A lot of graphic designers don't have strong Flash skills, and even if they do their programming abilities are often limited. Something about the freedom of art, and the unforgiving nature of code, don't seem to mix often or well. But I was a Commodore 64 programmer in middle and high school (a badge of honor forever, even though I never got past BASIC back then) and entered college as a Computer Science major, with the plan to develop my own video games. Not a good idea, as I quickly realized the video game industry had already begun moving away from the lone programmer/graphics/animator/music guys I admired from the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 realms, and each separate discipline was being broken down to different people with different (very different) skills. I found myself sitting in classes with high-functioning science and math guys with an understanding of the deeper aspects of computing that I knew I'd never approach (I'm still not clear on stacks and heaps), so I moved on over to the Graphic Design major, which was a much better fit. Still, though, I had the foundation of programming in me, and it only took another ten years to actually be able to use that skill set again - in Flash.

Back to 2006: I started to think about the different things that were inspiring me at that time. I'd recently read an interview with the Homestar Runner guys, detailing how their fun little project had moved from a diversion they worked on in their spare time to a full-time business that sustained them and a couple employees, all based on the products from their growing product line. That's very impressive in the online world - unprecedented, maybe, at least in this area (an original animated series). They even turned down opportunities for a Homestar Runner television series because they didn't feel they'd have the ability to control the quality of the website's content and a TV series at the same time. I'd have loved to see a Homestar show, and I admired their integrity, but I was especially impressed that they had the focus to foresee where their primary efforts should go - into their online presence, which they could completely control. They really were truly living off their creation - which is about as silly as it gets, by the way. Awesome.

And as this nebulous idea for some kind of interactive, animation-centered project continued forming, I thought of the things that inspired me from childhood as well. My wife Sharon had recently bought me a Captain Zoom CD because I'd told her about the Captain Zoom flexi-disc I had as a kid. These cheaply-made records contained the same fun little song that was made special by the fact that the fictional Captain would sing your name several times throughout the tune. That personalized quality was impressive - they had a library of hundreds of names, and in pre-digital days, that must have been an incredibly labor-intensive process. But the benefit was, kids got to hear their very own name in their birthday song, and they loved it (check out some of the fond memories this site has collected). So that was swirling around now, too - "individual name spoken by a character". Remember that.

I also kept thinking about a personalized children's book my aunt had ordered for me when I was about six or seven. The way it worked was, you ordered this book and sent in your child's first name, age, and a few other facts about them, and in a month or two, you had (from what I recall) a fairly nicely printed, bound book, with the child's name inserted throughout. The story also contained other facts ("Steve went into the jungle with his favorite toy - his Pet Rock!"). I know the book my aunt choose for me featured me, Steve, following my new friend "Evets" through a jungle environment, to get to a birthday party. Get it? They flipped the name around. But that means, I would guess, some kind of primitive computer was involved.

As a pre-teen (the last time I can remember still having that book), I decided they must have printed the pages blank, with no text, first - the final text had an almost typewriter quality. The text was clear, but left very slight indentations in the page. I'm sure that's the best they could do in that decade. The problem with these "personalized" books, though, was the fact that they could never show you, the actual kid, in the illustrations. You were always a hand or leg peeking out from behind a bush or rock or something - colored a brownish-peach (they didn't want to betray race by showing a specific skin color), not looking fat, thin, feminine, masculine, toddlerish, older or anything else specific. So the fun was limited. I don't even remember if they had a variable for the gender - I think the book may have avoided personal pronouns completely - "Steve ate Steve's favorite food in Steve's back yard!" - or maybe not. Either way, you really had to use your imagination in the 70's. I began looking around online for some of these bits of 70's ephemera, but I was never able to find one of those original books (though there are, of course, plenty of modern versions). Still, that concept was swirling too - another instance of "child's name in the story", like the Captain Zoom song.

Another favorite memory from childhood was the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. If you're not familiar with them, they were very popular Young Adult books that had stories whose plots you could vary by making a choice at the end of each section. You'd read about how you, maybe as a knight or space explorer or just a regular kid in way over your head in some nutty situation, were stuck in some situation, and then at the bottom of the page would be at least two options: "If you want to betray your friends and run into the cave, go to page 31. If you'd rather not be such a jerk, go to page 37." Not really like that, but hey - you had options.

Before I'd even played Zork or any other text or graphical adventure on a computer, I loved the story possibilities the Choose Your Own Adventure books gave you. In fact, the only thing I ever "stole" (from a library, though) was one of these books. Shame. It's not that I just wanted to have the book - I wanted to possess the story possibilities it contained (if that makes sense). So that added one more swirling childhood memory as I worked on my "big idea" - it's nothing new in the online world these days, but the idea of a story that a child could control, and explore, making each visit slightly different - I wanted that to be part of whatever it is I was planning.

In the midst of all this thinking, Sharon and I went to Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. It wasn't my first trip there, or even the first time we went together, but being in this creatively-inspiring place - specifically, hanging out in their water garden on a cool summer day, being spritzed from a fountain when the wind pushed a little harder, let my brain really open up, locking in on the overall tone I wanted for my project - that warm childhood feeling of friendship, adventure, exploring, creativity - and having unbounded fun.

And I'll leave it there for now. Lots of ideas swirling, looking for a home - a home which would eventually have a very silly name: Jabloo (rhymes with "canoe", by the way).

Stage Sweeper Game from The Family Values Tour

Stage Sweeper was developed to promote the 2006 Family Values tour. The lead agency developed the basic concept for the game (which tied into the tour's website and other promotional efforts), and contacted me to do the actual Flash development.


Click to play in a new window (some functions have been disabled).

On a project like this, where the main elements are already created and approved by the client before I'm even involved, my creative input is fairly limited. The agency provides the static layouts, individual elements (like the animations of the player himself - one of their employees, if I'm remembering correctly) and ideas on the game play - though that tends to evolve over the course of the project. Then it's my job to take those pieces and put them together, structuring and programming the game in Flash. My right brain takes a bit of a rest for these kinds of projects.

The game is pretty simple: the player must jump over obstacles on stage without being tripped up, collect bonus items, and perform tricks using the arrow keys while diving off the edge (some lower-scoring examples are provided in the instructions). There was (though it's been disabled) a high score function which tied into a database to collect player information for a contest the agency created. It was a nicely integrated campaign.

It would have been nice to include visual representations of each band during their respective level, but you'll only see a few shadowy figures holding instruments (and not even animated) in the background. Creating animated versions of each member of five different bands would have been as much if not more work than the developing the game itself, and it may have even been a distraction to see them right behind the player - but still, that would have been pretty sweet.

Figuring out the scoring system was, as expected, the most tedious part of the project. I created a complex formula, based on the level (1 through 5), the player's speed, and the jump angle (which determines the final jump). Then that number gets multiplied by another factor and becomes the "Jump Quality Bonus" - which is then added to a "Passes Left Bonus" (the number of lives remaining) and a "Jump Style Bonus" (the final trick, based on the key combination). Lots of testing on that one - by me and the agency.

And to this day, Stage Sweeper remains the only project I've worked on that allowed me to include the term "Smacked Ass" (it appears when your player burns to cinders after failing to jump over a flashpot). The agency and client loved that one. I've got to find ways to use it more often.

Deviated Discharge Game From "The Heartbreak Kid"

The agency that was putting together the website for the Ben Stiller movie "The Heartbreak Kid" needed a little help with one of the pieces for the site - a game concept they'd sold the studio on called Deviated Discharge. If you haven't seen the film, Malin Akerman's character Lila reveals that she once had a problem with the nose candy, and as a result she developed a deviated septum, from which she inadvertently shoots a beverage while Ben's character looks on in horror. It's a funny scene. I laughed when I saw it in the movie, even though I'd seen it in the preview dozens of times already. That's humor.

And based on that scene, the lead agency created the concept for the game and asked me to develop it into an interactive Flash piece as a fun addition to the movie's website. It was a fairly straightforward project, but I was only given a couple weeks from when the project was assigned until it needed to launch - pretty short timeframe, but most of the graphics had already been supplied by the studio, so that sped things up.

Click above to play Deviated Discharge.

The client didn't have a solid concept of how they wanted the actual game to work - that was for me to figure out, of course. On my first pass, the player merely clicked on the objects at the bottom of the screen and they'd launch directly from Lila's nose. That wound up being too easy, though, so the Art Director asked me to change it to a two-phase load/launch system - click to load the object into her nose, then press the space ar to launch it. Allowing the user to only load one object at a time, plus speeding up Lila's head rotation and the targets characters' movements as the time progressed made the game a bit more challenging.

I think the game wound up more funny than fun - the gameplay is pretty limited, but to be honest, these tie-in games aren't meant to provide hundreds of hours of play. They tend to be simple novelties, more notable for their concept and the way they pull elements from the original movie than long-term diversions themselves. What I'm saying is, if you wanted to play more than two or three games, I'd be surprised. It takes a lot longer than a few weeks to make a deeply addictive video game.

I also got to do research for the different status lines at the end of the game. Based on your score, your septum can be rated "dense", "stiff", "perforated" or several other medical terms related to that particular body part, ultimately ranking you "deviated"... if you can meet the challenge (I got it twice!)

My claim to fame, and I'll forever be proud of this, is one of the sound effects. I supplied all the sounds, some created from scratch, but there needed to be a sniffle sound for Lila to make when she shoots the objects from her shnoz. So I did some rehearsing, created a bunch of options, selected the one that worked best and pitched it up a bit, to (I guess) make it more feminine. If I ever meet Malin Akerman, I'm telling her that we essentially collaborated on one of her roles. Hey, it's kind of true, isn't it?!

"Wars We Need To See" Animated Video

I play drums in a rock band. Or at least I did, before we all started having kids and went on a lengthy hiatus. But from '99 to the mid-2000's, we rocked the Philly area hard. Someday we will make our triumphant return (Nico should be heading off to college in 2025).

Phil, our guitar player, wrote the song "Wars We Need To See", and he'd be the first to admit the lyrics are pretty bizzaro. I offered to do a Flash-animated video for one of our songs, and I wound up picking this one because: it's the shortest. Only a minute and forty-four seconds. And it still took about 120 hours of work to create over the course of three months. Yikes! You know I was single and kid-free back then - I don't have a spare ten hours a week now to work on non-client pieces these days.

I stole the characters of the band members from our website (which I'd rendered them for a couple years earlier), but there were a lot of supplemental graphics to create. I contemplated developing graphics for each "scene" described in the lyrics - "The far far right versus the far far left", "High fashion implanted chick versus liposucked gym boy", "Conspicuous consumer versus organic minimalist'", "Subsidized plaintiff versus overfunded defendant"... but creating all those characters and backgrounds, and animating them, for what would be less than a few seconds onscreen for each scene just wasn't practical. If only I had a crew of animators working for me...

The final animation consists of "performance" scenes (the band playing) with the bridge (about 2/3rds of the way through the song) containing more conceptual work, based on the lyrics:




Fun Fact: When this video came out in 2004, I noticed multple visits to our website from the Department of Defense for a week or so. I guess the title aroused their suspicions, but I have to assume the strange but un-terrorist-like lyrics alleviated their fears. I told my bandmates about this, but I don't think they actually believed me. For a week, we were Persons of Interest.

I probably heard this song (often in pieces) a few hundred times while I was working on the video - not to mention all the times you hear a song when you're recording (and mixing and mastering), and we rehearsed and performed it many more times. It took me a couple years to cleanse my palette, but I do admit that I enjoy listening to it again. A friend described it as "proto-punk", a description which I think suits it well.

Once it was complete, it was a satisfying project, and the final piece got us some press and lots of hits to our website, though we didn't have quite the increase in people purchasing our music as I'd hoped. Oh well. Infamy is better than fame and money any day. We did have a few people come to our shows randomly, after seeing the video - and someone once recognized two of us before we went on stage, based on seeing us in animated form. You can't beat that. Not even with a drum stick.

"Wars We Need To See" Animated Video

Please don't ask me what the song means. I don't know. I am only the humble drummer.

Chumby Face Maker Widget

Because I "knew somebody who knew somebody", I was one of 100 developers to receive a Chumby a few years ago, before they hit the market. "What is a Chumby?", you may be asking? It's this thing:


Chumby is a soft handheld electronic device that connects to the Internet wirelessly (but must remain tethered to an electrical connection, unfortunately) and displays a series of widgets that you can view, listen to, or interact with. The widgets are selected by modifying your Chumby's online channel, and they include games, utilities, media viewers, and all sorts of other cool stuff.

The "price" of receiving one of these Alpha units was developing a widget, so the Chumby folks could have a collection of offerings to give value to their soon-to-be-released product. My first widget was Face Maker, which you can play with below:


(click it - it won't bite)

I decided to create this widget so that users could literally personalize their Chumbies, giving the opportunity to create the face that best suits their new toy. I also figured that once the product was out, this would be a natural widget to choose for publicity photos of the product, which might create some automatic marketing for me. That's called strategy, son. It didn't really work, though - I have found a few photos of Chumbies with my widget on their screens, it didn't become the bonanza I'd hoped/fantasized about. Oh well.

Chumbies have a fairly small touch screen (320x240 pixels), but they also have an accelerometer inside, which means they can sense movement like the iPhone and the Wii. This means you can create a widget that reacts to the user's motion. In the case of Face Maker (though you can't see it above - please don't try tilting your laptop or monitor) the pupils of the eyes could be moved around by rotating the Chumby. Pretty neat. The device also has a squeeze sensor, but that's only used to bring up the main system menu. Initially a light sensor was also planned, but from what I hear that was scrapped before the Alpha units were released.

The frame rate of the Chumby is (or was, at least, in its Alpha state) pretty low, so the interactivity was somewhat clunky. Because the screen was small, buttons had to be fairly generous in size. Also, file sizes need to be pretty small (I compressed the sound file for that little click down to within an inch of its life), because none of the widgets are stored on the Chumby - the units pull each widget down via their Wifi connections every time the user (or the unit's timer) advances to the next one. The price of limited memory, I suppose.

But these are small compromises for such an innovative little device. I went on to develop two more widgets for the Chumby (a Whack-a-Mole style game featuring random faces stolen from Face Maker and a top-down space shooter that I still haven't released), but once the product was available to the public for a period of time, they shut down the Alpha units' ability to be on the Chumby network, and my little friend went dim. I've considered buying another one (we early developers were offered a price of $180 - the product retails for $199) but haven't done so yet. They're really fun, but the (understandable) necessity of the power cord, combined with my more convenient and always present iPhone, may have taken the steam out of that purchase. Someday, Chumby, we'll be friends once again.

Not long after I started creating products for my Zazzle store, I pulled elements from Face Maker and created three faces for a kid's shirt. uncleverly named "Three Monster Faces". I probably could have pushed harder on that one.

Three Monster Faces on Zazzle

Interactive Cityscape

This is kind of a proof of concept for an interactive city I'm creating for a client's website, which I'm designing as well. The city (really just a section) is a metaphor for five different product offerings, each building representing a different product line.



Roll over the image for a snowy effect.

I use Flash so much, I'm able to think in ActionScript. It took about two hours to render the building itself, but much of that work will pay off on the remainder of the project - a lot of those isometric shapes (the 3/4 view - think Zaxxon) can be reused and modified for the other buildings and city elements. But the snow came very quickly - it's programmatic, not animated, which means each flake's duration, fall speed, size, and horizontal movement is randomized. I programmed the snow in less than twenty minutes, which made the pleasure of the final effect very satisfying. I love it when a Flash project comes together (that sounds awkward - sorry, A Team).

The original approved sketch took some research, and lots of rough sketching to make all the elements fit in the longish rectangle area. I had to show all or most of the five main buildings, but if I expanded the view too much, I'd be forced to create buildings that weren't interactive, which would be confusing to the viewer. Here's the end result:


The sketch was done in my typical style, but with many simple, blocky iterations coming first. Then I did a moderately tight pencil sketch by hand, pulled it into Photoshop and added some simple tone using my Wacom Intuous tablet. I try to let it be rough at this stage - line, tone and layout is enough for a client to see for approval - I find that anything more finished isn't a good use of my time or the client's at this point.

I'm still not sure if the buildings should dim when they're "off" (as in the Flash piece above) - it gives a nice added effect, but that would mean the five buildings are all dark until a visitor rolls over one of them - and even then, only one building will be "on". Might not look too good, but we'll see. Perhaps just the snow (and whatever other animation effects the four remaining buildings will get) will be enough.

The Requisite First Post

I can't bring myself to say "Welcome to my blog!" Nope. Can't do it. I'm sure many people feel this way, but this blog really should have been created five years ago. Maybe six. But unfortunately, time travel hasn't been invented yet (or maybe it has, but in the future...? conundrum!).

Oh well - no regrets. What can you expect from this generically-named blog? Posts on all my creative endeavors - design, illustration, animation, music, writing and filmmaking projects galore. Some random thoughts on life in general will likely be thrown in as well.

I'll promise not to overthink the structure and content if you'll promise not to care. Deal?