I have a neighbour called Marc, he’s from Barcelona and he’s a photographer who has lived in London for most part of his adulthood. Like me he relocated to New York two months ago in the search of the new, and seems to be really getting into the swing of things here. We live two floors away from each other, so elevator trips to and from his and my place are becoming frequent, sometimes transporting goods such as sandwiches, wine and cakes to fuel our hard-working ethos.

He needed a new website, so I whipped out the old Flash and knocked this up: marcregas.com

As video is becoming more and more prominent in my portfolio, I can’t help but feel more and more detached from Flash. So having something like this in my portfolio makes me feel a bit better about betraying my geeky roots. I really hope to spend more time on Flash as it would be a shame to let it all go after how hard I pushed to study it years ago; but I fear that time is going to be difficult to find and that maybe outsourcing work to new talented kids would be a possibility if a company structure were put in place! This company is actually in the pipeline and logistics are being discussed during these weeks, so maybe I’ll have some news in the near future about this.

Back to Skunk Anansie, the website for the return of this 90s rock band has been all over my schedule for almost a year now, and finally having it out of the way is a relief to say the least! I worked remotely with Casper Franken from Shotopop to make it all happen. He too care of Art Direction and Design while I fiddled around with things that fall under Development and Interaction.

skunkanansie.net

Once again I’m sitting around waiting for a video render to finish: I’m working on the second part of Damian Lazarus’ visuals, which will be played in full for the first time this thursday in Stockholm. I consider this to be the second beginning of his world tour, as so far he has only been performing half of his set.

Anyway, I’ve been staring at the render progress bar for far too long, so I decided to upload a little Flash toy I made to be used in Damian’s visuals, the “Random Shape Generator”.

…it does exactly that! open it up

During my incredibly busy times working on video-based projects for Damian Lazarus I managed to squeeze in a nice little web project for Skin, who I’ve got to know through Smokin Jo. While talks of a website for her Format 3 project are still being made, Skin also asked me to build a brand new website for the return of Skunk Anansie.

I remember telling a few people in LA about this fairly big news piece, but to my surprise they had never heard of the band. Is that just an LA thing? I found it quite intriguing.

Anyway, I don’t know how much I can say about what’s happening exactly with the band (apart from the fact that they’ll be playing at the Water Rats tonight and tomorrow), so I’ll just stick to explaining my side of things briefly: I brought in talented designer Casper Franken from Shotopop to art direct the whole project, and I’ll be taking care of the “creative development” (that is my job title, after all).

The holding page is up right now, and the full site should be live towards the beginning of May, so take a look: skunkanansie.net.

The photo above is by James Mountford.

A few weeks ago I attended Contakt, a yearly event hosted by the people from Minus. I came out feeling completely blown away, and the memories of the event flashed obsessively through my head for many days after. But apart from the musical side of things I was most taken by the visuals, the work of Ali M. Demirel and Burak Arikan. In a similar way to Minus’ sound, these visuals were MINIMAL, but had a catastrophic impact that was jaw-dropping.

Here’s an interview that might give you an idea of how Ali plugs into the Minus team.

One of the setups they made was based on a grid of dots, each with their own small square-shaped boundaries, watch it in action here, made by Burak. This is one of many other ideas based on a single concept called Meta Control: “Collection of visual/kinetic performative artifacts. These software pieces have a single organizing principle: their control mechanisms are not hidden and often exposed.”

The grid idea in particular has been stuck in my mind since I first saw it, probably because it was one of the few that I managed to figure out, so yesterday I tried to re-build it in Flash.

Stupidly, before I started building it I didn’t look for a video to refresh my memory, in fact I’ve just realized by watching this video that he didn’t actually use any vertical/horizontal lines to connect the dots, which is how I built mine.

Anyway, you can check out my first version, which I’ve creatively named MinusGrid here. Maybe I’ll upgrade it one day.

I also made a mac screensaver: download

Screensavers with style are extremely difficult to find: I wanted to find a nice slick one for my newly fixed computer, but after years of occasionally google-ing “slick screensaver mac” and finding myself in very scary websites, I didn’t even go near google. Instead I made my own, based on a clock.

There’s an interface that lets you choose which style to use. You can preview it by clicking on the image below, which will load one of the 4 styles randomly each time it’s opened.

Click here to download (Mac only). Just unzip the file, and open up “The Clock.saver”. It will automatically add The Clock to your list of screensavers.

I’m looking for name ideas, so any suggestions are very welcome. “The Clock” is a bit too Apple, I’d like it to sound as slick as [i think] it looks. Suggestions? “SLOCK”? “CLICK”? huh?