2009 Personal Retrospective

As per my annual habit, I’m providing a rundown of significant events and reflections for the past year, organized by category. Like always, this is more of a log for my own reflections and milestones, but is publicly available as I believe it a a good representation of my work and achievements for the year.

University of Denver

Things have been quite busy in my position as Senior Multimedia Application Developer for the University of Denver. We’ve had a number of huge roll-outs with existing projects this year along with a number of new applications, as well.

The most significant application we’ve worked on this past year has been DU CourseMedia™ (formerly DUVAGA). Not only did the application received a drastic change of branding, but a ton of new tools were introduced which garnered the attention of Adobe and other organizations. Almost all of my presentations for the year were based upon this system.

The DU Portfolio system also received quite an upgrade (and slight branding adjustment) in the form of user-customizable options.

Overall, I do find myself with solid employment in a job that provides me with a flexible work schedule, open development practices, and the freedom to experiment with new technologies. A person with interests such as my own cannot ask for much more.

Adjunct Teaching

It almost seems as though with every year that goes by, I do less teaching. 2009 was no exception to this. In 2008, I started doing most of my courses online in a distance-only format. This year, they’ve all been online- I no longer do location-based, traditional classes. I think the main factor behind this change is an increased involvement with other areas of professional involvement (specifically the Flash Platform community and my Adobe Higher Education leader duties) but most of all the need to balance family life with the rest of my work. It’s good- I’m happy with the amount of teaching that I’m currently assigned and quite glad that I’m able to perform at a distance in this manner.

Adobe Higher Education Leader Program

I’ve been participating in a lot more community events since joining the Adobe Education Leader program last year. Participation in this program continues to be one of my favorite activities and I dearly hope that I’ll be able to continue my involvement for years to come.

Here’s a sampling of presentations and activities from 2009:

• Educause 2009: Streaming Video for Education
• Adobe DevNet: Q & A with Joseph Labrecque
• FITC: Custom Event Reporting from Flash to Google Analytics
• MAX 2009: Customizing the University Experience with a Rich Media Delivery System
• Adobe Seminar: Video Use Cases in Higher Education: Expand your audience through video
• Adobe Seminar: From Concept to Distribution: Products that will help you capture, edit, and distribute your video online
• Adobe Seminar: Making it all happen: A discussion of how to implement a video solution at your institution
• Adobe Summer Institute: Leveraging the Flash Platform to Deliver Dynamic Media Across Campus

I received the following certifications at the Adobe Education Leader Summer Institute:

• Rich Media Communication using Adobe Flash CS4
• Web Communication using Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
• Visual Communication using Adobe Photoshop CS4

I’m also involved in a ton of NDA stuff that I obviously can’t talk about here… wish I could though- exciting stuff!

Fractured Vision Media

FVM picked up a number of new clients with pretty large projects this year. We also continue to support many of our legacy clientele, as well. The economy certainly has brought a lot of company budgets to a grinding halt… not so much for Flash and AIR development, it would seem.

An Early Morning Letter, Displaced had a great year! The track “Condemnation” from the album A Prison of Oneself received a nomination from the JPF 2009 awards in the best ambient song category. While it didn’t win, being nominated out of over a half million songs is a pretty big deal.

Later in the year, the most recent album, Shudderflowers, was released. The new album has gotten some really nice comments such as this one from Numina’s Jesse Sola: “The new album is amazing. Excellent job and I look forward to several more listens.” Not bad.

FVM also released digital-only versions of both August and Through Darkened Eyes, making the entire catalog available through CDBaby, Amazon, iTunes, and others.

Personal Items

The biggest piece of personal news is that my wife and I are expecting our second child in February. This means that I’ll be taking a big chunk of time off from my normal routine as paternal leave. Unfortunately, I may not be able to do as much traveling and presenting in 2010. Still working out the details as there are a few events I absolutely would love to find some way to get to!

Plans for 2010

Looking forward to 2010, I have a lot of hope in the mobile Flash Platform. Hoping that Adobe’s strategy in this area pays off and opens up a whole other realm of development for my university projects. Along with Flash Player 10.1 on mobile, I’d love to see native compilers for more platforms that just iPhone. Android native compiler- c’mon, Adobe!

• Develop tools for mobile!
• Learn Git commands and use it for all new projects.
• Get into unit testing with Flex projects.
• Force time for more photography.
• More ‘creative’ Flash and video work!
• New project Strangling Strangers! [note: Just not going to happen at this time. I'm stretched too thin as things stand, already.]

Closing Remarks

This weblog has seen a steady increase in traffic as it normally does from year to year. I try to balance the posts here between both announcements and the more technical code examples. This seems to work quite well, although the code samples do tend to attract the most traffic! It’s increasingly difficult to update things regularly as Twitter takes a lot of the smaller things from this forum. As a result, articles here tend to be longer and more thought out than they have been in previous years. I see this continuing in this way without issue.

Creative Moments / ‘Pistachio’

It’s really interesting to me how creative impulses can arrive in little, concentrated spurts. This is how ideas usually manifest themselves to me, and when they do, I like to grab ahold and just go with it.

The past few days I was feeling kinda dry, creatively. Happens every once in awhile and to be honest- provides me with some dark moments. The good thing is that when I experience a period like this, it often means that my inspiration will pick up in a day or so. If I time things right, I can get some really good stuff out of this cycle of mine.

This is exactly the case with ‘Pistachio’, a 30 second piece inspired by a contest held at http://www.getcrackin.com/. I just read about this in passing via Twitter, and immediately some ideas shot through my head like lightening. I absolutely love moments like this. Luckily, I had a few hours to devote to it and below is the result:

Edited down in Premiere Pro CS4 from about a minute of footage in two takes captured ‘live’ from a Canon SD video camera. Compositing done in After Effects CS4 with sound recorded through Soundbooth. Was a great experience messing around with After Effects after a very long time.

Now, I knew from the get go that this would never be accepted by the judges. No way. But that isn’t the point with this sort of thing, is it?

Creativity and Inspiration, Removed from Oneself, Finding Balance

I’ve always been the sort of person who tries to create in a vacuum. I prefer isolation and solitude when working on creative projects and have normally shied away from the involvement of others. This is very different, of course, from many of the development projects I work on with a team, and is one of the main differences for me between personal, creative projects and for-hire consulting jobs or my regular employment. I’m beginning to question the wisdom of this, however.

Every once in awhile, a person needs some outside inspiration. Aside from some Divine Muse delivered directly from the Ether, this inspiration can come from the natural world itself, or from the creative works of others. I have, in the past, personally gathered a good deal of inspiration from films, music, paintings, and photographs. Much good can be gathered and internalized from these sorts of distilled and completed works. Even these tasks though, are often isolated events in that there is no dialogue.

Recently, at the university, we did a preview of some new functionality for a group of heavy users to solicit feedback. I’ve only read some of the comments received but a lot of them make good sense. There are small adjustments I never would have considered working alone. There are larger adjustments that will take some real work to achieve, but these too will be worth the effort. The project will succeed because of the feedback of others. Ideas even came to me regarding other, unrelated projects because of this. Lynch says that “ideas are like fish“. No kidding.

One of the best experiences I had was in 2003, working on some remix material from Martin Bowes legendary ATTRITION. Working with another’s material was eye-opening in a number of interesting ways. Having a look into someone else’s structure and process. Getting insight into methodology or arrangement that is foreign to your personal habits. Very enlightening. This sort of thing is very different from the sort of one-way inspiration that a completed film or painting can give you.

Just as the body needs constant refreshment and evacuation of poisons, so does the mind. Working in isolation can be dangerous as one’s mind becomes poisoned by it’s own thoughts. Stagnation can occur- like a pool of still water. I’m going to attempt to devise some small exercises to assist myself with this.

Shudderflowers

An Early Morning Letter, Displaced is proud to announce that the new collection of work in progress will be titled “Shudderflowers”. A number of interesting titles were candidates before this one and the decision to finalize a name is not taken lightly.

Shudderflowers revolves around themes of fervent self-destruction and the fragility of the female mind. Interested in having a listen? Demo material has been uploaded to MySpace Music and Facebook.

Cover art is absolutely temporary.

Current Track Titles:

• Fever-Drenched and Burning
• Beneath White Stones
• Fearless
• Alice (the bones)
• Waning Flower
• Drowning Past the Sky

Obligatory Year-End Analysis

I’m really not one for posting random thoughts all over the place- but it is interesting to think over some of my activities while on parental leave one year ago and contrast that with what life is like now- how things stand and where things are going.

Work at DU is good. It’s been very busy and that is a major concern. We should be hiring someone soon to take some of the load off. There is no shortage of interesting projects. I get to work with Flash, Flex, AIR and the rest- a really nice environment to use my skills. It’s difficult to see myself working in a more corporate structure at this point.

I’ve also been very active with teaching- way too active. It’s a nice source of extra income but if I take on too much it becomes a burden rather than a pleasure.

My work through Fractured Vision Media has really blossomed this year. I’ve partnered with ZStream Media Services on a rather large project building an interactive media delivery system for Blockbuster, La Quinta Inns, and potentially a number of other clients. The framework we’ve created is pretty extensible and the initial development will hopefully wrap us soon as we are seeing a nationwide release beginning this week.

Personal projects have been sparse. Just no real time with all the other stuff I have going on. One item that I am very pleased with is the completion of a new audio collection “A Prison of Oneself” which I am releasing through FVM. I’ve worked on material for this release off and on since 2003(!) and have put in far too much work to let it rot in my archives. I sold a number of copies of “August” back in 2000 and with much better distribution through the internet, I believe I can recoup the small amount of money I’ve put into this project fairly easily. I set up a crappy MySpace Music account to help advertise and network with artists I’ve worked with when I was more active with this stuff. The album should be available for purchase within the next week or so.

All in all, it has been a pretty successful year. If I can look back next year with the same amount of optimism- I will be thrilled!

My wishes for the new year involve the following:

1. Become more introspective and considerate of personal time, personal projects, and the inner-life.
2. Continue growing Fractured Vision Media as a multimedia services entity.
3. Become more fluent in ActionScript 3.0 and related technologies while expanding focus once again to design aspects of my many projects.
4. Generally become a better father, husband, and human being…

Happy New Year!