Yonder from Emilia on Vimeo.

My friend Al introduced me to a friend on his on Facebook (Scott) and so I did the obligatory digging around which led me to his blog, Destroy Your Computer. There I found an exquisite and inspiring piece on animation from a woman in Germany named Emelia Forstreuter. She uses Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema 4D and Flash to create some of the most inspired work I’ve seen in a very long time. I am stunned, hope you are too. Fullscreen it!

This was an amazing piece that I discovered while still working @ Creative Asylum overseeing the development and launch of the Peer Squared Project. While this is not a new find, it’s a piece of work that warrants a rediscovery as it’s still one of the more amazing projects I’ve seen in recent years.

Brambilla’s work, entitled “Civilization,” is a continuous HD video collage, “taking hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven” (500 clips in all) as an installation inside of an elevator in New York’s Standard Hotel.

The Video moves up and down depending on the direction of the elevator car, and passes through hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven and upper heaven/lower hell (which is where the video collage ultimately loops to create the continuum).

The total size of the piece is in itself daunting: 1920 x 7500 pixels played back on a 42″ plasma screen.

To view the entire piece, read the details of the project along with an interview with Brambilla, please CLICK HERE: it’s well worth the time. You’re welcome!

“Hello World” is what you are supposed to have your first program print out in pretty much every introductory (computer) programming class. Not particularly exciting, but I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere, and “Hello World” is apparently it…so this being my first post to this – my new website/blog –will (unimaginatively) be my first announcement to the world as well.

Prior to this incarnation, I had a previous websites living at this domain for quite a number of years, but it was static and unchanging, and frankly very “1995.” Considering that my work has – now for many years – been in web and interactive, it only seemed appropriate to update my personal website to one that was (at least marginally) reflective of the “new” web (as in 2.0), one that is dynamic and interactive. This is what invariably happens: you do a lot of great work for other people, that you can never seem to find the time to get up-to-speed on a build of your own. It’s like going to a website of a graphic designer and finding a site that is very poorly designed – not a good representation of that persons work and ability, and certainly not somebody you’d want to hire.

So, welcome to my new face lift. I work full-time, and already I’m finding that I will have to push myself to find the time to write new posts, but it’s important that I do, both in terms of maintaining a creative discipline in my life, but also in terms of the work that I do working with Web, marketing, social media and creative uses of new media on the Web and elsewhere.

This is a good transition, one of many over the last year, but I’ll save that for another post.