2 Weeks In

So, a lot of people are asking me, "So, how is it being on your own?" I have started to dread this question. Why? Because everything is good about being on my own and people start turning bright green when I start describing my new life:

BENEFITS
1. You may notice from the aerial photo that I am very comfortable - especially now that my armrests are (inventively, I might confess) covered in cotton socks. I highly recommend it.

2. Nap time. My iPhone has a great timer. When I feel a little sleepy, I just set my timer for 15 minutes and sit back in my nearby La-z-boy. No worrying about what the boss will think.

3. The view is great. My office has a nice big window that overlooks the Aspens in my yard and Utah Lake in the distance. I had actually forgotton that birds inhabit our surroundings and that clouds move.

4. The commute is now about 12 seconds (versus 45 minutes).

5. Work hours. I get up at 6am, work til I feel hungry, go downstairs and eat breakfast and spend time with Jami and do whatever I damn feel like until I feel like working again, work some more until I'm hungry again, eat lunch, work a little more and hang out with the rest of the kids when they get home from school, watch TV with Jami happily laying on my chest, then I eat dinner. When I feel like working again after the kids go to bed I work into the evening until I reach a stopping point and eyes start to glaze over.

6. Technology. I have the perfect setup. I have one computer. Everything works. If I need something I buy it.

7. No design by comittee. I am a team of one - plus client. No internal concensus building, no gossiping, no territories.

8. Almost the entire budget goes to creative. Less than 5% of my time goes to administrative tasks. No extra people using up the budget.

9. Hygeine optional (I know- this one's kind of gross)

10. No intercom

DOWNSIDES
1. ... ummm... hm... I have to pay now to enter award shows and to go to conferences! -I knew I could think of one!

Josh Argyle Photography

I just launched the first completed project done by my new company, Matt Maxwell Design Inc. A photographer from Santa Monica, CA noticed my thrillbilliestrailer.com site and followed the link in it to my portfolio site.

This is the first site created in Flash ActionScript 3. I had to completely rewrite my Flash 3D engine from the ground up. I haven't mastered AS3 yet, but I have crossed through the most intimidating initiation phase. It's quite different from the old versions of Flash, but now that I am into it, I could never go back. I am committed to only work in AS3 from this point on.

This site took about 4 working days to complete and is 100% dynamic. The photographer can edit and re-arrange the photos.

Going It Alone

Well, I have decided to leave Richter7 and open a Flash design company. I have number of great clients who will get much more of my time now. They have all now been promoted from "Freelance Clients" to "Clients". Thanks to everyone who inspired me and for giving me the support to make this difficult decision. I will miss everyone ar Richter7, but look forward to working at home. My doors open officially on May 19th.

Nitro Circus gets a National Addy Award!

Booyah! NitroCircus.com just scored a national Silver Addy! My 3D Flash engine and those late freelance hours paid off!

2008 Local Addys Honors

My Nitro Circus and Thrillbillies web sites got local Addys last night. ThrillbilliesTrailer.com got two golds and Nitro Circus got a silver. I was really proud of my design team. They received silver medals for The Dreaded Grove and The Golden Compass Invitation and we got a Gold for Edge Eyewear. Thats a total of 3 golds and 3 silvers!. Our small interactive design group at Richter7 is kickin'!

UPDATE: Nitro Circus, Thrillbillies, and Wolf Peak all got Golds at the District Addys! On to nationals!

Dial 60th Anniversary

Just finished a pretty cool Flash project. I did the Flash interaction design and programming for the main page of Dial60th.com. It uses my Flash 3d engine and I designed the sound with the help of the talented guys at Metropolis, which really makes the experience come alive. It's the first national project I have worked on.

BD Medical Perfect Day

This viral greeting was created for BD Medical to promote usage of one of their catheters. It was specifically targeted to nurses. I really enjoyed concepting, writing, designing, and programming this storybook. I got some help on the writing from David Rathbun and Nate Smith did some of the programming. The greeting was very successful.

AIPTEK A-HD 720P Digital Camcorder

I haven't blogged for a while, but leave it to technology to inspire me (I need to get a life). I was at Best Buy a few days ago looking for a replacement for my MiniDV camera and I was introduced to this device by a salesman. It is actually invelievable. This HD camcorder records to SD cards (a 2GB card can hold 60 minutes of high def footage, and 144 minutes of DVD resolution) and also is a sound recorder, a 5 mp camera with a Flash, and DVR. That's right, you can attach any analog RCA to it and it captures. It creates MOV, WAV, and JPG files that transfer neatly through USB 2.0. The best part? $150! Downside? No optical zoom, no shot-steady.

Wii

I had just about given up on finding a Wii when on a whim I stopped at a ShopKo (I never go there) and they actually had some. My kids spent the first evening making Mii's. I was amazed at sense of realism in driving a golf ball, hitting a baseball, and bowling. Nintendo did a great job. My 4-year-old found it totally intuitive. It is a fine piece of language agnostic user interface design.

Captain Sticky

Our Richter7 Halloween party was fun again this year. I decided to put a costume together 2 hours before. The costume? - at Richter7 we get a pink stickynote on our door every day that we dont fill out our timesheet on time. Captain sticky is an homage to all those who are slackers.

Halo 3 Awesome

The good: Just like the old Halos but high resolution and noticeably smarter and more numerous enemies. Really really awesome. Not that violent - should be T rated - my kids play it with me.

The bad: The menus are poorly designed - almost like they user tested the game really well, but nobody bothered to test the menus. Its pretty hard to figure out how to set up a local multiplayer game.

Flash Forward - Day 3

The first session by Seb Lee-Delisle was "particular"ly good. He showed some amazingly simple AS3 particle classes. He had the audience submit particle effects and he showed one of mine and had me come to the microphone and explain how I did it. This session was very valuable.

Next I attended the Papervision3d session. It was presented by Carlos Ulloa who was the creator of the engine. I met him the night before after he beat me in the awards competition and he was very gracious. His presentation was rather disappointing. Instead of showing how to get started with his engine, he instead gave a sales pitch on how great it was.

The next session was SEO for Flash which was pretty lame - he actually had the nerve to bash Flash in front of the all-Flash participants. Some of the info was ok, but mostly extremely biased against Flash. His name doesnt even merit mention.

The last session was given by Eric Natzke who loves to do art with Flash. His work is amazing, but I wish he would have showed less of it and more practical stuff. He did show us a little of his process which includes a few Flash physics prototypes which gradually become a working banner ad. One thing that was interesting was that his banners are designed in such a way that one Flash file can be used for any banner size no matter how it is scaled. He also had built-in hidden scrubbers to scrub through the animations.

All in all, a great conference. I had a number of meals with Curtis Morley, who is a collegue of mine. He taught me a lot about AS3. Thanks again Curtis. He blogged a lot about the conference here.

Flash Forward - Day 2 - Afternoon

Craig Swann gave a very interesting presentation where he hooked up a Wii controller to Flash. He also used a Momome and a homemade electronic pallette via USB to connect to Flash.

The next speaker was Samuel Rivello who spoke a lot about optimization in Flash. He showed how to get TONS of performance out of Flash using a technique called "Blitting" of "double buffering" which essentially paints stuff into a bitmap off stage then shows the bitmap. It was amazing and will help a lot with game performance. He will be doing an online seminar on Adobe.com on Nov. 6th.

In the evening we took the subway to Hard Rock Cafe. It was a lot of fun.

Flash Forward - Day 2 - Multi-user Multi-touch TableTop

Michelle Yaiser from MERL gave a visionary presentation using DiamondTouch which is a multi user, multifinger table and chairs that is multitouch. Sitting on special seats, your fingers complete the circuit. It comes with a Flash API that is very robust. I got to see into the future here.

Flash Forward - Day 2 - Morning Presentations

Still bummed about last night - lost to Papervision3D. But they treated all the Flash Film Festival finalists like rock stars. Afterwards I spoke to the guy in charge and he said that my Nitro Circus was chosen among 2000 applicants just in that category. I went to dinner with the guys at Red Interactive then came back to my room and watched Wild Hogs that I rented at Red Box - good movie. Also ate too many Blue Diamond almonds.

This morning I got some great Flash game optimization tips from Jay Laird. He had a lot of really clever techniques to really optimize Flash performance. His new site will be http://www.flashhatesyou.com/ (soon to launch). The site will be all about Flash optimization.

The next session was Mike Summers from http://www.kickapps.com/ . He spoke about the many dimensions of social media. His platform seems very useful. It is a way to add common widgets to a site (upload photo, video thumbnails, etc.). Looks very useful. He highly recommended watching the first Internet conference. He mentioned a very interesting concept called hyper-local which means neighborhood level web apps.

I ran into Curtis Morley and we are going to go to lunch. It was good to see him again.

Flash Forward - Day 1 - Afternoon Presentations

I attend three sessions this afternoon. The first was a bunch of lame Flash production magic tricks. I learned a few things, but it wasn't really the best session.

The next two sessions dealt with a new world that I never knew about -- hand-drawn animation in Flash. The first guy was a Disney Online animator named Sandro Corsaro. He presented a number of great animation principles: Persistence of vision (the human eye fills in the tweens), anticipation (which means you squat before a jump so the viewer knows it is about to happen), exaggeration is everywhere in animation, Dont overtween - very few flash tweens are used - its all about keyframing and onionskinning, and a lot more. It was fascinating to see him use his Wacom tablet to draw and clean up right in Flash - sort of takes the mystery out of Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends. He described drawing in Flash like pulling lines with clay. He dragged beziers around to shape them how he wanted them to look. He mentioned that the eyes are the most important element in a characters personality.

The next guy named Aaron Simpson gave a very similar presentation that was equally inspiring. Some key notes: "write what you know", "the web can waste a lot of time if you let it - be careful not to waste your time away in front of the web." He profiled a number of successful Flash animators. It makes me want to start drawing again. I am for sure going out to buy a Wacom.

Flash Forward - Day 1 - Intro to AS3

This is a day long to be remembered. I am no longer afraid of AS3 (okay, maybe still a little). Rich Shupe gave an EXCELLENT introduction to AS3. He went over all the fear points one at a time - sort of like a therapy session. AS3, while more verbose in almost every case, is a much better way to program. Now I just need some small projects to practice on. The Display List is still confusing to me. What really blew me away was the new Sound capabilities. He created an iTunes style visualizer with a very small amount of code. So I'm going to dive in. Boing, boing, boing, splash!

Flash Forward - Day 1 - Keynote

There are a ton of people here. The conference is sold out. Kevin Lynch from Adobe just gave the keynote. There was a free copy of Essentials of ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock on every chair plus a cd containing Adobe Air beta. Kevin covered: New features in Adobe Flash player (E4X was interesting), HBO Voyeur, a number of Adobe AIR apps, announced that the video codec H.264 will soon be in the Flash player, and showed how Adobe keeps making their player faster. A guy next to me from San Diego showed me how to take a picture with my iphone and send it to Flickr.

Boston Flash Forward Conference

I'm here. This is the view from my room and thats the Atlantic in the distance. I am right downtown at the Marriott Copley Place. Just found out that WolfPeak.net will be site of the week on Communication Arts home page. Wow - I was shocked. I'm starving - gonna go get food and get my registration packet.

Pixel Awards Nominee!

Nitro Circus has just won an nomination for the Pixel Awards! The competition is stiff but it is great to be in such good company.