admin January 2nd, 2010

A few years back I decided to try my hand at putting together a video for a song I made with my friend Aaron Nielsen. At the time I was working on Windows PC and so I put together the video using Windows Movie Maker.

It didn’t take long to learn the ropes and after 2 or 3 days of working obsessively on the project, I exported the movie and uploaded it to YouTube. For a first attempt I was very pleased with the results. Actually, this wasn’t exactly my first time working with video. Back in high-school I went on a field trip to York where I used a VHS Camcorder to capture footage of the trip, which we watched as a group on return to school. There was no editing involved – so the emphasis was on capturing the footage, but still, it was a nice introduction and gave me a taste for working with video.

A few years later, while in College/University I helped a friend record and edit footage from a trip to Europe. It was sometime between 1992 and 1993, and by that time camcorders were already smaller than they were 4 years earlier in high-school – now using compact Hi-8 tapes in favour of the much larger VHS format. As for editing the footage, it was all done using tape-to-tape with a console like the one below for controlling the source and destination reels.

It was quite some before I had the chance to film/edit again – my Mom bought me a Sony Handycam which I used on several occasions, although nothing ever made it to “production” since I had no way to edit the footage at the time. My Intel 486 computer could just about handle email and Instant Messaging, not much more.

Back (or forward) to 2007 and I was at it again, this time using Windows Movie Maker and a large selection of video clips I had been recording for the past year or so since I got a Sony Cybershot (again from my Mom) which output in digital MPEG format. How things have changed!

Shortly after I produced the echotel – Not Easy video Microsoft launched Windows Vista and with it, a new version of Movie Maker. I made a few more movies, some of which are on YouTube, some of which are in the vaults along with those old Hi- tapes and so much other material I’ve yet to revisit.

As far as the rest of it goes, well I’m starting off the new year with a new blog-category: Adventures in Videoland. This post, appropriately titled the same, is the first of what I hope will be an interesting and engaging record of what I discover and learn as I go from Windows to Mac, Movie Maker to iMovie, to Final Cut Express and perhaps beyond. At this point I’ve been using iMovie HD for a little while and have quite a few things to say about the switch from iMovie HD to iMovie 08 and why I’m currently looking for a trial version of Final Cut Express as a move forward.

For now I’ll leave it at that because I have to go back to clearing space on my storage drive and trying to find that trial version of FCE. Apple appears to be either hiding it or there just isn’t one, which might be a sneaky way of getting me to simply put out the cash to buy it. “Go on! You know you want to!”

To round off this post, I’m including 2 videos I made recently in iMovie HD.

• Adventures in Videoland , Captain's Log , Miscellaneous , Music Videos , echotel
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admin December 5th, 2009

I got around to setting up my tumblr feed today and got it connected with Facebook and Twitter. Opened a Vimeo account and uploaded a video I took a couple of weeks back of the Toronto Skyline and North West of the city from a bridge near Dundas and Scarlett. Posted that and a couple of other things to my tumblog, updated the sidebar on this site to include latest Tweet and other links, joined ember, did some good ol’ R&D, now I’m off to work on some music/video which I’ll be posting on echotel.ca soon.

• Captain's Log , Miscellaneous
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admin December 1st, 2009

Just updated the header with a new background image and changed the color/style of the font in CSS. Here’s before (top) and after (bottom):

• echotel
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admin November 30th, 2009

Sometime in 2006 my friend Aaron Nielsen and I started recording some music in the basement of the house I owned at the time. Aaron had brought his drum kit and a couple of synths/keyboards over and we set up a makeshift studio. We’d acquired a Fostex VF80ex without an instruction manual, but we quickly figured out how to record tracks onto it and were soon experimenting with a sound that fused analog synth, bass, guitar, drums and vocals into an electronic “new-wave” pop/rock sound reminiscent of the late 1970s. We called it echotel.

It wasn’t long before we successfully recorded and mixed down our first demo – Not Easy. We didn’t have a proper set of studio monitors, or enough cables either, so we mixed it using the headphone-out to my home stereo speakers. The sound quality definitely wouldn’t have won an award for production value, but we were pretty chuffed with the result.

By the end of 2006 we had recorded quite a number of pieces, many of which remain works in progress. I selected 3 songs – Not Easy, Like to Know and I Don’t Wanna Know – and burned them onto a CD which was duplicated and given to a few friends. Feedback was positive.

Over the next three years we continued to record material and put out another demo CD – Satellite 07, which contained two of the 3 songs from the first CD plus another two – Satellite and Games. After some time we discussed releasing the 4-song EP Games with a scrabble board on the cover spelling out the name of the songs. This idea remains, well, an idea, as we never got past the Satellite 07 cover with the purple and green dudes on it.

Today Aaron is in Texas and I’m in Toronto so we don’t get to hang out too often. The basement studio is gone too, but I’m still recording tracks at home using a MacBook Pro and Garageband. We haven’t played any shows yet, but it will happen at some point. Until then I’ll keep working through the material, the goal being to release an album/DVD by summer 2010.

Until then, stay tuned!

• Captain's Log , Music
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admin November 29th, 2009

I left the security of my full time job for the unknown and returned to being an independent contractor. I’m back on the freelance train, not knowing when the next one arrives or departs. Funny how that seems to work better for me.

Among other things I’m still working in the field of Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience Design (UX) and now that I have a little more time to decide what to do with I’ll be updating this site more often with examples of current work as well as some links to cool finds around the interwebs. I’m also going to be adding a lot more diverse content, from music videos I’m creating to papers I’m writing, songs I’m recording, sketchbooks I’m scribbling in, thoughts I’m getting lost in, things that I’m finding inspiration in, and vice-versa, so stay tuned.

Talking of tuning in, check out my other project echotel – some kind of post-modern electronic new-wave group. A couple of friends and myself have been working on this material for about 3 or 4 years now. Currently working on developing the website and uploading some of our music/video tracks, to be eventually included in an album/DVD release. Here’s a sneak peak.

• Captain's Log , Music Videos
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admin July 24th, 2009

I’m all for streamlining work flow and I just learned about this neat tool today which rolls site-mapping and wire-framing with auto-generated interactive prototypes and technical specifications into one application. Seems like a great idea and I’m surprised Adobe hasn’t jumped all over it. Unfortunately it’s only available on Windows but if anyone plans to develop a version for Mac, I’d be happy to try it.

Check out Axure

• Miscellaneous
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admin July 22nd, 2009

On the surface any user interface relies on “scenery” and “props” the same way a stage does, or the same way any “real” space does when it’s being staged. Coats of paint and layers of wallpaper along with pictures, soft and hard furnishings, lighting effects, gadgets, devices and other types of objects define the spaces in which we live and function in the same way layers of shape and color, images, objects and devices are used to define a user interface. Structures and Frameworks are also words that are common to both physical places and online spaces, and Circuits, Switches and other types of hardware ultimately facilitate the construction of both “real” and “virtual” worlds.

User Experience Design is about understanding the needs of an individual or group of individuals who intend to use and connect with your product/service in whatever form it exists. Whether we’re talking about the audience of a stage show, consumers of a product, subscribers of a service, buyers of property, observers of an event, listeners of a message or broadcast, users of a website or other type of graphical user interface, we’re dealing with the same thing – people interacting and connecting with your product, service, device, object, message, identity, or whatever you like to call it.

Going behind the scenes involves not only looking at what drives the “back-end” of your User Interface and understanding the functionality and methods that enable what’s “in there” to operate, but also going “out there” and discovering what lies “behind the scenes” of your users. Think of the interface as a point at which two individual realities meet. Actually it’s way more than two, but in any one instance there is a two-way communication between what’s on your side of the interface and what’s on the user’s side. It’s a little bit like Alice Through the Looking Glass.

On your side you have your content, your infrastructure, your processes, your platforms, delivery methods, and so on. Organizing and structuring information should be done independent of specific user preferences and align with a more general understanding of best practices. Use logical categorizations and store content in a relational database that can be cross referenced with tags and keywords. Develop back-end systems that are built on scalable architectures and which utilize sturdy frameworks that can be implemented quickly and reused independent of the specific requirements. Design interfaces that are Web Standards compliant and build them to run on any platform. These, and many other requirements are part of going behind the scenes from your side of the interface. Understanding the variables that determine what content is being displayed in what template at what time and with what kind of message are all factors of going behind the scenes of the stage which lies on the other side of the interface – the other side of the looking glass.

• Information Architecture , User Experience Design
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admin July 21st, 2009

I made myself a business card. Based the design on the look and feel of the site. It took about two or three days of playing around in Illustrator to come up with something I like and I think will serve the purpose. I still have to adjust kerning/tracking and all that and I’m not totally sold on the font yet, just because it’s the first thing selected in the font menu in Illustrator. Looks pretty good but I might try some more variations.

If you or anyone else might be interested I live in Toronto and am available for contract/freelance/maybe even full time work in the field of Interaction Design and User Experience.

• Miscellaneous
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admin July 17th, 2009

I just created a new blog category – Music Videos. It has nothing to do with User Experience Design, well at least not directly. But anyway this is brilliant. Watch at 0:47 when the camera pans off and follows the girl. I’ve played it back at least 20 times just setting up the scene in my head. I imagine the rest of them hanging around for a few seconds, running around in circles maybe, keeping the trafic stopped before she comes out of the cornfield and joins them. What a great idea and well executed.

• Music Videos
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admin July 17th, 2009

I was just reading this interesting article about UX Design-Planning by Holger Maasen which provides some rather deep insights into the subject. In this article Holger addresses the need for a better understanding of UXD/UXP. He asks the question “do we need more UX planning teams?” and goes on to explain some of his own techniques and approaches, using some really great diagrams (who would have thought?) to compliment the writing. I don’t know Holger Maasen at all but I’ve seen his comments on Boxes and Arrows a number of times. It seems he works for ArgonautenG2 – a company in Germany that is part of the WPP network of companies. Did I mention my last contract job was at Y&R Toronto? That reminds me, I need to work on my Linked-In profile.

• Information Architecture , User Experience Design
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