Michael created an interactive "mini game" animation to represent the "Peace Process" in an interesting way. He bought a dance pad with a USB cable connection. The dance pad is three feet by three feet wide. He then designed a "cover" for the pad. His "cover" was also three feet by three, designed in Adobe Photoshop and created at full print quality: 300DPI. That is an extremely large file and it was very time consuming to work with but Michael believes in quality and flexibility so he did it anyway. He had the "cover" printed at FedEx Office on to vinyl paper. The then "stuck" the "cover" on top of the dance pad so that his "pictures" precisely covered the dance pad's contact points. In other words, a dancer stepping on his "pictures" would activate the "hotspots" beneath the "cover" and send a signal into the "mini game" he created. The "mini game" was made in Adobe Flash, and he used a small Mac OS X utlitity to interpret the dance pad's "buttons" to send keyboard keystrokes depending on which one was "stepped on" or "pressed." The keystrokes were then mapped, within Flash, to activate certain animation sequences. During his design process, it was told to Michael that moving within Flash from one "Scene" to another the way Michael wanted was impossible. Michael searched Google for three days and found the same claim. So what did he do? He guessed. Based on the "syntax" of ActionScript, Michael created an original code sequence and it worked! He still won't even share it! Because he wants to see if anyone else can figure it out. See his animation here. Fair Warning: His "Mini Game" was not made to be a full game. It was an animation that was supposed to "pretend to be an museume exhibit but then surprise a user who stepped on the nearby dance pad." So there are no instructions that popup. Simply click anywhere on the game's screen to make it start. You will have to figure it out, just like you'd have to figure out the "Peace Process" if you were a Diplomat. There are not manuals! Click here to see the artistic statment.
"Kinetic Type" is a type of animation with moving text. Movies that have opening sequences with elaborate movements, such as the Spiderman movies, where the camera moves around the web hopping from one text phrase to another, are using "Kinetic Type" or "moving text." Michael used Adobe After Effects to create this animation. But with this one, he also used his DJ-skill to "time" the animation to the audio in the attached sound file. An author read their famous passage from "Lenore," and Michael animated the entire portion. This is only a portion, as the project was split between Michael and others. This Michael's portion: Lenore Kinetic Type Animation.
After creating hollywood quality animations for this project, Michael received feedback that he only had to make very simply, slow-moving animations because the senior customers viewing the animations were likely only interested in that, instead of something too fancy. Michael created these to accomodate the Client's request. These are very easy to make and fun to make in various colors or to make various alternatives such as ones that play normally and ones that play on holidays with different animation that's festive. To make the Ads "aware" of the holiday, Michael uses PHP to detect the date and then swith the animation file to that holiday's version. Then it switches back when the holiday is over. See one of them here. NOTE: The animation is very slow!
