Recently Pam Bartha contacted me through my contact page, asking for help getting her site’s domain changed to SimpleStepsToWellness.com, and moving her existing content over to WordPress. She had purchased the excellent Thesis framework but didn’t really know how to use it. I was happy to lend a hand.

As we talked together about what she had in mind, and the various options for customizing the look and feel of the site, the ever-important issue of expense emerged as a top priority. Pam is just getting her business up and running and is wisely watching the bottom line.

Usually people come to us wanting a full-blown custom site design, (such as you can see here), or custom rich media content. But Pam thought it best to hold off on the custom design for a while, until her business was further along. Fair enough. Not a problem. We specialize in solutions that fit our customers.

I suggested that perhaps she consider one of the Thesis skins from ThesisThemes, for the time being, and upgrade to a fully custom site design at some point in the future. She liked the idea and chose the Easy Thesis skin. These skins represent an outstanding value and are quite well-done. This was the first time using ThesisThemes, but it won’t be the last.

I got everything setup and customized for her very quickly, including the custom forms she requested. We then spent some time setting up her new email accounts and walking her through using Windows Live Writer for creating and editing her site’s content. I personally prefer using WLW to the editor in the WordPress Dashboard.

Pam was a pleasure to work with and was very pleased with the results.

We can do the same for you. Let us know if you need help with your site. We aim to please!

This is a brand new web retrofit of the interactive building tour kiosk I originally created way back in 2001 for the Dallas Historical Society.

Amy Stewart and I came up with the interface, I did all the interactive programming and development, and Paul Everitt did the amazing 360 degree photography of all the rooms, murals, and statues. I also designed, engineered, and fabricated the kiosk cabinet, …but that’s another story.

The original app was developed in Macromedia Director and was never designed for deployment the web. So I re-wrote it from scratch in Flash, coding it all using object-oriented AS3. The app only loads up the interface initially, and each piece of content for the rooms is dynamically loaded when the user selects to explore it. The text is stored externally as well, so that it can be edited by the staff at DHS.

Check it out for yourself, here.

Here’s the latest Thesis/Wordpress site from Amy Stewart and I. It’s a fairly large site for the Winn Meat Company and contains company and product information, news, recipes, and video.

Amy did a great job on the design and site architecture and I did the build out and development.

I recently had the pleasure of creating the animated motion graphics for a music collaboration between my good friend Kieron James, and talented poet Shadi A.

Kieron sent me a link to an early version of a song he was working on called ‘Mass of Moments’ to get some feedback. I liked the track and left a comment on his website giving him an idea of the visuals that his melody had evoked in my mind’s eye. Shadi read the comment and got in touch with me through Kieron. Shadi asked if I would create a video for ‘Mass of Moments’ for her, and also some abstract animated visuals that could be projected onto a screen behind her when she launched the debut of her new CD “Messy Spaces” by performing it live at an event sponsored by the Goethe Institute. I was honored!

She allowed me total creative freedom with the piece. When I heard the final mastered version (mastering done by another good friend Tony Tewes of PureTone Mastering), and got the lyrics from Shadi I discovered that my original concept for the visuals didn’t totally fit her lyrics. That, and the song is six and a half minutes long which is a lot of time to fill. We had a very limited budget for this piece, so I couldn’t do everything I wanted and imagined, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out and I had a great time putting it together.

See it for yourself, below the jump.

I got to splice together segments from old videos from the Prelinger Archives and also some old silent film scenes from the 1913 version of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, (since the lyrics referenced characters from the play) from the British Film Institute.

So please enjoy, “Mass of Moments.”

Here are Shadi’s lyrics:

Mass of Moments

I’ve got nothing left but time, Ophelia,
in these late autumn nights,
I have come to measure
the density of darkness,
I have come to measure
the mass of moments,
the heavy sleepless hours in between…
I have come to measure
the speed of my lost
lovers madness.

-Remember him so much
that I am forgotten.
Remember him so much, Ophelia
that the rest has become a myth.

In a dream last night I saw
you running,
alongside fields of white poppies,
like someone suddenly born into color.
I saw sunflowers trying to reach the moon
and the colliding of two heavenly bodies above
-the willow growing aslant the brook.

At a predestined moment, Ophelia, I have come to be
that weeping brook, turning
the water wheel
with the flow of my tears

Remove the cork once more;
I have come to turn grapes into wine,
carry the autumn leaves
into the streams of a newborn spring.

-Euphoria blossom, Ophelia,
the speed of his madness,
my lost lover of leaving…
Remove the cork once more.

©Shadi A., selected lines from Molana Rumi, autumn 09

BenefitMall asked Amy Stewart and I to design and build a nice little sliding flash menu for their homepage. So we did.

You can see it running on the BenefitMall site by clicking here.

Another beautiful Thesis/Wordpress site that Amy Stewart and I created, this one done for Caribbean Dream BVI.

What a gorgeous yacht they have. I would love to spend a week or two sailing paradise on it. Check out the site and book yourself a trip I’m sure you’ll never forget.

You can see this story by clicking here.

This was another of the 170+ historical stories we did for the Old Red Museum. This one is cub reporter Tom Simmons’ story of how he got his first byline in the Dallas Morning News, by being sent to cover the ambush of the infamous Bonnie & Clyde.

You can see this story by clicking here.

This was another of the 170+ historical stories we did for the Old Red Museum. This one is taken from a newspaper report of the 1911 Dallas Aviation Meet and describes vividly the events of the day. Had fun with this on in After Effects. Susan Platt did a wonderful job with the voice acting.

You can see this story by clicking here.

This was another of the 170+ historical stories we did for the Old Red Museum. This one tells the story of Sarah Horton Cockrell, one of Dallas’ earliest entrepreneurs. When you watch the video, the reason that her husband’s eyes look strange is because this is the only photo of him and it was taken just after he died. He was a bit of a scoundrel and was shot in the street over a bad business deal. The photographer painted the eyes in, and they didn’t do a very convincing job. This was actually a fairly common practice, at the time. But the technology of photography was very new back then, so we’ll cut them some slack.

You can see this story by clicking here.

One of the biggest challenges for creating the AV stories for the Early Years Gallery in The Old Red Museum was the scarcity of related visual materials that were available from the mid 1800s. For this story all we originally had were the line drawings of William and Henry Miller and the story of Henry’s recollection. As a solution, I came up with the idea of creating scenes using 3D characters. Originally we were planning to tell the story using only still renders of the characters, since we had a very limited production budget.

But after my multi-talented wife and partner Darla showed me the beautiful and detailed characters she created and clothed in a 3D program called Poser, I just had to animate them a bit and bring them to life. Animation in version 6 of Poser was a challenge (I usually prefer Lightwave), but it was also a blast and I enjoyed it. I wish we’d had more time and budget, but we did the best we could with what we had.

Of the 170+ approximately 3 minute AV stories that we produced for the Old Red Museum, this is one of my very favorites. The fine voice work done by voice actor Dell Johnson was perfect for the piece. We were very fortunate to have a group of very talented voice actors, and they greatly improved the power and impact of all our stories.

During a meeting of the Old Red Museum’s Board of Directors, at which I’d been asked to take 15 minutes to show some of the AV content we’d been developing, I showed an early version of this story. The Board loved it, but was concerned that, at the end, I had left the mischievous Isam character unmoving after he hit the ‘ground’. There was concern that children viewing the story might think Isam was really dead. So I woke him up at the end to assuage that concern.

The Board originally gave me 15 minutes to show some of the stories; but they wound up keeping me for an hour and a half and then gave me a big round of applause when I was finished, which was totally unexpected but very gratifying. I love bringing historical stories to life!