Videos: Design and Development

My name is Frank Coleman, and I created the first interactive music site on the Internet. Here, at long last, is proof.I've been searching for a long time for as much concrete proof as I could find to support this assertion. It was October 30, 1995, coinciding with the release of the 1st version of Shockwave that supported two layers of audio, and it was for my brilliant, visionary friends, The Young Gods. I was on the Macromedia beta team, so I had early access to the technology.I have my original handwritten notes from when I was working out the design, and screens from the wayback machine that go back to '96, but earlier archives are lost.At last, thanks to Valentin Schmidt of the still-running Direct-L mailing list, I now have the original source files up and running on my desktop! My code still compiles error-free after nearly 30 years, mammajammas. 😉 Anyway, I feel like Georges Melies in HUGO, when they play his movies for him that he thought were lost forever.If you want to skip ahead to where I actually start playing the thing, it's a little after 00:17:00, but the preceding context is important the first time around, at least. I've salvaged all the code and will be publishing it, along with a deeper dive video on that later.Adobe wiped out 30 years of civilization when they deplatformed Shockwave, and later Flash. Companies should make their orphaned software open source!Referenced:The home page of my website in 1996, from the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19961223175032/http://www.21ca.com/The Shockwave page that housed this when Shockwave was a thing. Now just an empty shell: https://web.archive.org/web/19961223175032/http://www.21ca.com/Macromedia Brings Multimedia To World Wide Web - October 30, 1995: https://web.archive.org/web/19990910043226/http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/1995/shockwave.htmlWired article from 1996: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/for-interactive-artist-its-lonely-on-the-edge/"Adobe Fandom" page on Shockwave: https://adobe.fandom.com/wiki/Adobe_Shockwave_PlayerShockwave end-of-life announcement: https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/shockwave-end-of-life-faq.htmlJohn Henry Thompson, the inventor of Lingo. http://www.johnhenrythompson.com/homeMore at https://frank-coleman.com . . . . #interactiveMusic #TheYoungGods #music #band #interactive #history #internet #first #industrial #Switzerland #Geneva #ivtv #21ca #21stCenturyArt #Macromedia #Director #Lingo #Adobe #rock #rockmusic #retro #90s #90stech #90sMultimedia #90sMusic #programming #Bryce #3D

Early 2014. Large scale LED video wall installation. Driven by four Spinetix HMP200s. My job: make it work.

Demo video showing the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative website overhaul, circa 2010.

I wrote my own program for my Roland V-Drums, using Macromedia Director and the Troikatronix MIDI extras, so that I could trigger and control images, videos and flash animations directly from the pads, with an interface that allowed me to easily map my musical performance to any visual accompaniment I wanted. I kept all the lookup tables and set lists in XML, so I could make changes on the fly with a text editor. Nowadays, this sort of thing comes in a can. Back then, everything had to be stitched together by hand. The demo says 2000, but it was really started around 1996.

From 2000: An ambitious web / television convergence project, based on the best-selling book of the same name. The first website nominated for an Emmy Award. Also won a BAFTA, an Apple Design Award and two Webby Awards.

From 2014. Multi-touch interactive library of all FDNY training documents at the FDNY FireZone in Rockefeller Center.

A blast from the past - a guided tour through my Code Library that I built for myself using Inspiration (http://inspiration.com), a deceptively simple visual organization program that maps well to the way my mind works. The code is Lingo (Macromedia / Adobe Director), circa 1996, (!) but the real point here is the way in which it's organized.