Let the updates begin! First off, I’ve done some fairly intensive under-the-hood changes to the website, the biggest one being ditching my old Lightbox variant for Shadowbox, a truly fantastic image viewer that included a variety of new features and fixed some lingering functionality problems that had been bothering me for a while. I’ve spent quite a while tweaking it to get it to look and function how I want, so if you can’t notice the difference, I’ve succeeded!

Unfortunately, there is one tiny glitch that is now more apparent: Mac users viewing the site in Firefox might notice a weird 1 pixel jog when Shadowbox overlaps other Flash content. This is a known Mac Firefox bug dealing with swfobject and is out of my control. But there’s an easy fix! Just resize your Firefox browser by 1 pixel (wider or skinnier, either works) and that pixel shift will disappear. Ah, the joys of developing for different browsers.

I’ll be adding a wide variety of new work to the site in the coming weeks, but for starters here is the animated intro to the Behind Bars show I posted about a while back:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

The showrunners gave me free reign to concept, illustrate, and execute this animation, which was a lot of fun to do. I decided to tell, visually, the premise of the show: the host travels to various college campuses and their local bars to learn each bar’s history and special drinks. The music is a snippet from my good friends Like Science’s Alchemy album. Unfortunately a lot of the detail, like the cool overlay texture effect, is lost with this lo-res web version — the HD version looks even better!

My animation background is in Flash, but since the show was being shot in full HD I had to learn After Effects on the fly for this gig. I think it turned out pretty well for my first AE project! Since then I’ve been using the program a lot more — expect to see some more animations on the site in the months ahead.

That’s it for now — more work coming next week!
Bp