Animation and film remain intertwined with my design career. The highlights range from feature length documentaries to small personal films to envisioning projects that propose an inspirational future for big global changes.
Tending the Future
How do you get the global development community to fully understand the depth of your strategy to help the developing world's fight against poverty? Craft a story that integrates the systems, technologies, gender dynamics and safety nets required to support smallholder farmers in Africa. Seeing our protagonist navigate their farm, family and financial life assisted by inexpensive cloud-based services helps the audience understand that the future is not only possible but plausible.
This project combined current and emerging technologies with custom props and UX interfaces to tell this inspiring story.
Data is the main character in this story of surprising business connections for the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise team. See the videos and a more detailed case study here.
I had the absolute please of working with the Seattle Sounders and the VR streaming platform company, Pixvana, to create a VR experience for the fans. We crafted a virtual game day tour that begins with the "march to the match" and ends with a series of goals that ultimately led to a successful championship.
In another project for Microsoft, the goal was to show IT professionals in a more strategic role while much of the day to day maintenance work is monitored and facilitated by intelligent IT software systems. Because good IT is invisible IT, a visual language representing data connections, again, needed to become a character in the story.
When I first moved to Seattle, I had the great fortune to reconnect with Nan Avant, a composer I had worked with on a film in New York. She asked if I wanted to collaborate on a project called Origins: Life and the Universe. Nan and seven other musicians were creating orchestral pieces and films inspired by the cosmos. The final concert would be a screening of the films accompanied by a live orchestra at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. It only took one listen of Nan's piece for me to sign on to make the film. The work was inspired by nebulas all over the galaxy and I was inspired to make a film about a young girl's dreams of space. The film combined live action, NASA archives and animated stills to bring these beautiful nebulas to life. You can see the film here.
This feature length documentary tells the story of a woman who goes back to Afghanistan after 9/11 to reconnet with her father. He had stayed behind to fight the Russians while her and her sisters escaped with their mother to America. Additionally, the unravels the history of this war torn region with vintage 8mm footage in 1960's Kabul, current day footage and animated drawings from orphans of the war against the Taliban. As we learn how groovy and hip Afghanistan used to be, we realize the depths of war's reach. Postcards from Tora Bora premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007.
You can learn more about the film here and if you have a spare 87 minutes, you can watch the film here.
