Vanceva Color Studio
Gyro Creative Group

This was built simultaneously as a web site and a CD-ROM, and features Solutia's colored automotive glass products. I built a unique interactive component: "The Color Studio," which allows a user to experiment with the company's products. A user can:

• Choose a type of car body.
• Select a vehicle color with Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders.
• Select from the company's complete catalog of glass products, and individually mix and match them on the various windows.
• Create custom glass products that can be manufactured.
• View the car from front and back, or zoom in for a closer view.
• All settings can be saved for later editing.
• An image of the car can be saved to the user's computer.
• The created vehicle can be printed.
• A link to the Color Studio web site along with an attached picture can be emailed to a friend.

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra
2001-2002 Season
Gyro Creative Group

This CD-ROM is an interactive guide to the DSO's 2001-2002 season. This CD also includes standard audio tracks that can be played from any audio CD player. A main feature of this presentation is a timeline of classical music history, including links to information about specific events and shortcuts to different eras. I programmed the timeline mechanism and participated in other technical tasks for this project.

Dow Automotive "Strandfoam"
Gyro Creative Group

This is a 10 minute long voice-over driven presentation about Dow Automotive's Strandfoam product. I handled the technical aspects of building this presentation to work simultaneously as a kiosk, CD-ROM, and an online experience. A number of customizable features allow this presentation to be easily converted to work for each of these media. I also animated portions of the presentation.

Webasto
Gyro Creative Group

A CD-ROM that provides an overview of Webasto's automotive sunroof products and services. I was involved in programming and other technical assistance on this CD.

Michigan Jobs Commission

The Project: This CD-ROM presents information and aerial video clips of a few dozen vacant industrial sites around Michigan. This project was produced by Mort Crimm Communications and built by Butler Graphics Inc..

My Role: I handled all of the Director construction and programming.

ESRS Demonstration
Harbinger SupplyTech

The Project: This Windows CD provides an in-depth and extensive demonstration of commercial shipping software programmed and sold by Harbinger-SupplyTech of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Over 1500 copies of this demo have been manufactured and distributed to businesses across the country. This project, built by AKA Detroit Company in 1997, was created in both a CD version and a floppy disk version.

My Role: I did most of the Director construction and all of the programming. I also built condensed recreations of the dozens of screens and components that make up the ESRS software being demonstrated.

Of Technical Interest: This project includes very extensive animated demonstrations of the various features of the ESRS software. It would have taken countless thousands of score frames and weeks of work to animate the demonstration manually. Instead, I wrote some lingo code to automate things such as simulated button presses and the movement of the mouse around the interface. This saved many hours of work.

The Art of Stone
Ray Rogers and Associates

The Project:
This project was originally built as a sales presentation tool which demonstrated the services of Ray Rogers and Associates, a landscaping company specializing in the use of a variety of large rock. The presentation was both interactive and also worked in a self running linear mode. We later converted this project for use as a cross-platform CD-ROM. This project was built by Butler Graphics Inc..

My Role:
I was responsible for some construction and all Director programming. This included implementing a means for customizing parts of the presentation by adding or removing images from the program folder.

2002 United Way Email Campaign
Gyro Creative Group

Gyro Creative Group had previously put together an email-based campaign for United Way. The campaign involved having representatives at various corporations send out 5 day-by-day emails that provided links to online Flash activities.

For the 2002 campaign, I built a CD-ROM based tool that simplified and automated much of the process of creating these emails:

• An overview clearly explained the campaign.
• A button automatically copied each email's text to the clipboard for pasting into an email client.
• A logo graphic could be easily copied to the user's hard drive for attaching to the emails.
• Each day's Flash activity could be easily previewed online or from the CD-ROM.

Family Album Screen Saver
Biography Software Corporation

I programmed this screen saver to work either independently or integrated with BSC's products, such as the Personal Author program. A user can select either individual images or entire folders of images to be randomly displayed. Music and video media can be added, as well. This product works on both Mac's and PCs.

Sterling Trucking Corporation / CAT
"What's your SPQ?" quiz game
Butler Graphics, Inc.
Management & Marketing Services, Inc.

I built and programmed this employee training and assessment tool. It is presented in a game show format with lots of gags and sounds. The game can be saved or restored from any point, allowing employees to complete the game over several sessions. The game concludes with a printed out certificate that can be sent to Sterling's headquarters for approval.

Artserve Michigan - Artists Directory
Gyro Creative Group

This directory includes data about several hundred artists, and was built simultaneously for web and CD-ROM delivery. The artists can be searched by name, discipline, year, or location. Individual artist entries include samples of their work in a variety of media formats.

Because of the quantity of content in this directory, I programmed both the CD and web site to be dynamically generated. A database is processed and its content is sorted, indexed, and written into both Director cast files and HTML templates. Images of the artists' work are automatically sized, have thumbnails generated, and are copied into the proper locations to work with the CD or website.

CD-ROM version:

Online HTML version:

Content generator tool:

Magna Forming Solutions
Gyro Creative Group

This CD-ROM gives an overview of Magna's automotive industry services. I programmed navigational features for this project and was involved in other aspects of its construction.

General Motors Finance College
AKA Detroit Interactive Group

This CD-ROM is an overview of the GMU finance college and it's Socrates web site. I did most of the construction and programming for this.

Modern Engineering

The Project: This was an extensive sales support presentation intended for use on the laptop computers of the Modern Engineering sales representatives. The presentation is very customizable: a presenter can quickly navigate amongst 14 sales modules and use pop-up menus to jump amongst smaller segments of each module. The presentation can be advanced forward or backward on a bullet-by-bullet or slide-by-slide basis. This project was built by Butler Graphics, Inc..

My Role: I was responsible for some of the Director construction and all of the Director programming. As part of the programming, I created authoring tools to expedite the process of setting several hundred animated text bullets into place. (see below)

Of Technical Interest: This project required the display of hundreds of text bullets - each of which required a unique graphic to animate into place, followed by a line or two of text sliding into place. Normally, it would take endless hours of production work and thousands of frames of score to break up and place all of the appropriate text graphics, as well as place the bullet animations. Instead, I created some authoring tools which cleverly automated much of the tedious work that would have otherwise been necessary. The authoring mode can be enabled while the presentation is running and automatically saves all changes to the presentation. (See figures below.)

Rather than divide each slide of text into a separate component for each bullet, this tool allowed us to quickly select where the bullet divisions were to occur for a single text member. In presentation mode, masks and transitions were used to reveal each bullet one by one.

With this tool, we were able to select the bullet types and positions by dragging each one from the corner palette and dropping it into place. There were also three different methods that could be used to animate the bullets into place.

MacArthur Center
The Taubman Company

The Project: This CD-ROM presents a 7 minute digital video which describes the features of an upcoming mall development project. It has proved very successful as an inexpensive alternative to mailing out thousands of VHS video cassettes of the same material.

My Role: This project has existed in several versions. I did all of the Director construction and programming, as well as the video capture and compression used in the first version. Additional elements were added in a later version which I had nothing to do with.

Water Treatment Proposal
Westinghouse

The Project:
This was a speaker support presentation built by Butler Graphics Inc. in 1996. The presentation was a "rush job," and it was immense. Several people worked around the clock for about two days to build this very successful presentation, which was loaded with custom-built diagrams and animations. The presentation was built for use on two side-by-side projection screens.

My Role:
I was involved with a little bit of everything on this project. One of my roles was to implement the forward/backward navigation control, as well as a means of quickly jumping to any slide of the presentation. I also built much of the opening attention-getter to the presentation.

Gyro Design Group - Company Screen Saver

I built this for a client party, and was still in use on several of the computers a couple of years later. The screen saver presents a large collection of company photography, and includes some unique screen saver-ish randomly generated doodles.

A very cool feature of this screen saver is that its three main segments are synchronized with the computer's clock. All of the company's monitors switch to the same segments simultaneously - creating a very cool atmospheric effect!