Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Sony releases Reader app for Android 2.2.  There appears to be a demand for other versions, as in this blog post from the Sony eReader Journal.  I’m working on a similar app for other platforms.

Congratulations to Career Element getting written up in Time magazine.

Funny what turns up on the Internet.  Today I decided to change my Facebook profile picture to Gumby, so I ran a search for “Gumby” using Google’s Image search engine.  On the first page, three of my own images appeared!

See the image above; I captured the screen and marked my images with a yellow asterisk.  You can double click on the image to see it in full size, or better yet, go to Google and run the search yourself!

The images appear in my website’s section about working on an early 3D model of Gumby at New York Institute of Technology, back in the “old school” days of 3D animation development.  I subsequently met Art Clokey, the original Gumby creator and claymation animator.  See the rest of the story and the images here.

Exciting times ahead for CareerElement, a website I took an active role in the visual design and product development beginning April 2009.  They will be hosting their first high-tech career fair Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 4:30pm at the Stanford Park Hotel 100 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, CA.

CareerElement is led by CEO Paul Campbell a UC Berkeley Engineering graduate, and finishing his Masters at Stanford.  He assembled a strong team of software engineers who required User Experience and visual design help from Gregg Boot of west11.com design firm and me.

As part of the design team we had to start from scratch, brainstorming the name and identity of their new job hunting, social networking website, flow charting and wire framing the layout of the entire site.

There is much more in the works at CareerElement, so stay tuned and sign up for the career fair to learn more.

Update: CareerElement has temporarily gone offline for a redesigned, improved business direction.

Shrek reaches the end of the line with the current Shrek the Fourth 3D movie release.  Let out an obligatory, exhausted, “Whoo-hoo!”

Have the screenwriters reached the end of their own creative lines?  So, why can’t Shrek lose his kingdom to a Ponzi scheme, become an alcoholic junkie in a back alley, team up with the Green Goblin to combat the Green Hornet and Green Lantern, barf out some green super slime that cleans up a giant oil spill?  Whatever happens, Shrek is really Tracy Morgan, and he will continue on just fine.

Too much brandy?

Over the last three weeks I’ve been back at it with a whole new batch of “human conditions” illustrations for my good friends at Superstock.  To justify paying for the recent Poser 2010 upgrade, I’ve been using it to set up the character poses and then outputting the files to .obj format to import into Maya (ew, geeky, gory file format details!).  Once in Maya, I set up a number of cameras in 3D space, create a few props for realism, add my favorite X-ray, flesh and bone shaders, test render, and then render my 8K images in layers.  The layers then need color correction and polygon touch up in Photoshop as part of the final compositing process.  (Spell check still doesn’t like compositing, haha.)

Below are a few of my favorites.  I’ll have done over 100 of these after another week or so.  Endless good times. (Click thumbnails to see the big pictures.)

Life is complicated.  There are many choices, paths and decisions for us to make in search of our destiny.  There are paths we follow regularly that we are not even conscious of, such as the metabolic pathways keeping us alive in our immune systems.

I had little understanding of these paths, until I began these illustrations for Epitomics, a biotech company that manufactures over 1,000 different antibodies from rabbits.  According the Wikipedia, “Antibodies are gamma globulin proteins that are found in blood or other bodily fluids of vertebrates, and are used by the immune system to identify and neutralize foreign objects, such as bacteria and viruses.”

The maps are being carefully constructed in Adobe Illustrator from Epitomics diagrams and then imported into Flash to add linkage to their many unique antibody products.  Click here to see the current Flash Pathway maps, and there are more in the pipeline, and more data to be linked using XML.

Obviously, it is important to faithfully construct the pathway maps with scientific accuracy.  The spherical antibody nodes remind me of paintings I’ve made of beach stones, whose arrangements are pretty much random and meaningless.  I’ve been thinking about picking up the paint brushes again, and working on a few more of “the rock paintings.”  To make the stones more interesting, and their arrangements perhaps more meaningful, I plan on using image processing techniques, Photoshop filters and 3D rendering before projecting the design onto blank canvas.  I’m thinking about painting layers of imagery, similar to constellation star maps and the work of Julie Mehretu.  It’s a pathway I’ll have to decide to go ahead on, while my antibodies are still doing their quiet work to keep me in good health.

To see the artwork of Julie Mehretu, please visit her page on Artsey.net. (Update July 18, 2015)

My friends at elementalLED, a green business selling LED lighting products, commissioned me to create an online marketing video.  They wanted something fun and edgy, with the potential to catch on as a viral animation, passed from friend to friend, business to business.  Some of the examples they showed me were really wild, almost South Park crazy, so I knew I could let the dogs out and run with this.  As we brainstormed, we discussed the virtue of LED lighting’s low heat emission from the intense light source.  Animals, such as moths, attracted to the light would not be burned.  The idea stuck, and I was off and running, writing, storyboarding and animating the old fashioned way in Flash.

The journey of The History of Lighting According To Moths took me back to my high school days of Mad magazine and Fractured Fairy Tales on the beloved Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.  It was a lot of fun, and James Goode’s sound track worked wonders to bring the animation to life, and support my corny narration.  Next, maybe I can figure out a migrating bird friendly wind turbine promo.