flash+music
I’m not sure what to call these things. Since I’m not an animator (this should be clear) I guess they were excuses to write and produce short musical soundtracks. And thanks to the long lost tools of Flash, developing for sound and movement was doable, back in the day, in Camelot. The small and reasonably sized vector animations that these once were have now been replaced by bloated videos that feed the owners of all the clouds in the world. When once I worked on 1.44MB floppy discs, I now buy multiple hard drives by the terabyte. I don’t say this very often about my own work (everything can always be better), but I really like these.
HINT: On a mobile device try pinch-zooming on a movie as it plays. It should open fullscreen. (These were designed to be quite small. Viewing them fullscreen on a larger monitor will look awful.)
Here Comes Xmas was written years ago in the wake of my mother’s death. She was a woman with mixed feelings about the holiday, to say the least, and was heard to utter the immortal line (at 6:30am on Christmas morn, from under a table), “Will this day never end?” Sound on.
Goin’ Away was an early musical work in what became Rock River Bridge, (in its unfinished entirety here). An American tale and therefore an immigrant’s tale, it’s a cycle of program music, words and occasional animation that explores the very different world of our pioneer ancestors. The influences of this piece are both obvious and obscure. To create it I was fortunate to employ an application I could truly love: Flash. We all know how that turned out. Sound on.
Louisa was my first tone poem-like deal. I thought it packed a bit of an emotional punch, but maybe that’s just because Lou was my great-grandmother Hart, who moved from the Ozarks to Arizona in an attempt to save her consumptive daughter Ofe (my grandmother). When that attempt sadly failed, Lou and aunts raised my mother from a baby. Louisa led directly (albeit slowly) to more works of this nature: words and simple animation synched up to music. Sound on.
Bike With Bill, a bike consultancy, commissioned this ditty. The business unfortunately folded before we could buy radio spots (haw), so you can’t see the first Squarespace website I ever designed. Tagline by the client, the rest of the words (you can’t call them lyrics, can you?) are mine, all mine. The originals were small because Flash was vector based and frugal with file size. These files are pixellated and relatively huge because they are videos. All things end. Sound on.
Los Angeles Toy, Doll & Amusements Museum. Sometimes you do things not knowing where they’ll end up. One day, a LATDA founder remarked how much she liked the E-Toys theme. (That's how old this video is!) The resulting Flash animation was LATDA's attempt at capturing childhood nostalgia. It's instructive to note that nostalgia was never a goal of LATDA. Nevertheless, I think it carries a little emotional charge. Introducing Jocko, the LATDA mascot, because who doesn’t love monkeys? Sound on.
Jacko at Le Club Momolu I have mined not only my own genealogy, I have also looked into that of LATDA’s mascot Jocko. Here is his grandfather, JACKO, performing the act which encouraged his people to rise up and cast off the bonds of organ grinder tyranny. Sound on.
The Moon in the Trees I hesitated to include this because of the saccharine factor. On the other hand, I think the work is fairly well realized, or perhaps it won a long, hard battle and I don’t know it. From Rock River Bridge again, pounding home the general theme of movement and temporality. Many of the works in that larger work were scored for chamber instruments, since I figured there might be a better chance of getting them performed (haw) by a cello, viola and piano. But over the years I got intoxicated by better tools and real samples (midi instruments no longer) and went rather hog wild with fuller orchestral instrumentation that, to me, sounded plausible but were even harder to finesse. It took me a few years just to find (and afford) a cello patch that suited. I have always tried to keep a balance between the high and the low. Sound on.