I spent a little over a month working freelance for Blue Diesel, a company that makes sales applications for Tablet PCs. Sales reps would then take the program out to doctors’ offices and use it to convince them to prescribe lots and lots of that given product.

Because of confidentiality and legal issues I can’t use the actual brands, so I created a fictional product, Fictionex© and made this simplified version as a sample of the type of work I’ve been doing.

I’m a big fan of creating tools to make tools. The widget at left is one such tool.

The most time-consuming (and therefore expensive) part of animation is syncing up a character’s mouth with their speech. I figured that if you partially automated this, you could speed things up considerably, so I built this talking dog as a proof-of-concept.

He’s built as a Flash component so you can drag-and-drop him into any Flash time line (along with the control widgets). The head automatically tracks the orange and purple circles so you just have to keyframe animate them (and make them 100% transparent) to change where he looks. You get scripted animation without having to write line one of code.

By moving the other two circles you can simulate talking and a limited range of expression. While it can’t do everything, on a big enough project (or series thereof) it could save hundreds of hours or labor.

inVision is a non-profit group for helping teens develop creativity. Part of each meeting is set aside to discuss issues that affect the kids’ lives, as those are the things that can inspire or impair creativity. Each session would begin with a showing of one of these cartoons, which are intended to spark discussion.

Naturally, this means delving into controversial areas and topics that might make some uncomfortable, so I tried to present situations without seeming to pass judgment or espouse a given viewpoint.

In designing the characters I was aiming for non-specific ethnicity, which along with the speed they needed to be completed, was a major factor in deciding to go with black and white. I wanted the characters to be unpretentious with the kind of uncertainty and awkwardness I remembered having. Teens can always spot a phony, so I concentrated on just making four “real,” average kids rather than try to go with some sort of social archetype (like “the jock” or “the goth kid”) that would become dated in 2 months.

Alas, you need to have sound to know hear the dialog. I considered including word balloons, but decided that it would detract from the desired simplicity.

Marvel™ Amazing Math

Sadly, this box was never produced. Somebody had the idea of that they could save development costs by repackaging a 10 year old math game. I knew that there was no way the product would sell on it’s own merits, so I really went all-out trying to make the box look good.

Everyone was gung-ho for the project… until they saw my box design. The quality contrast between the box and the actual game screenshots made it pretty much undeniable that the game was hopelessly dated. The graphics were good… for 1995. They just don’t hold up in today’s world of 3-D rendering engines.

I show this piece to demonstrate that I always try to make each piece my best work — even if I know its for a doomed project.
]]> http://www.planandrew.com/boxes/amazing-math/feed/ http://www.planandrew.com/uncategorized/amazing-math3/ http://www.planandrew.com/uncategorized/amazing-math3/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:06:15 +0000 admin http://www.planandrew.com/uncategorized/amazing-math3/

Click above to see the front of the box.