The annual Design Week Portland Festival for 2017 has just wrapped and Helios has again made its mark on it. This year’s Open House was all about Flow, our first seasonal study at Helios Interactive. All of our developers were challenged to create a scene that reacted to a simple data stream containing a color, a whole number, and a date & time. In the exhibition, this data became colored particles flowing through a canyon, a breakdancer, a collection of Rick Astley heads, a cosmic bicycle race, a fireworks display, and much more. For our guests we had 12 projects on display. Some projects were interactive while others were simply amazing to watch.
Helios-DWP-2017 from Helios Interactive on Vimeo.
Download & Experience the Flow Study
Explanatory Videos: A Mini Film Festival
Immediately following our Open House, I had to run to downtown Portland to the UO Agora Journalism Center, where I was one of a panel of six animators and video artists who presented and discussed explainer videos with an emphasis on journalism and storytelling.
It was great getting to show some past work, share stories, and answers questions from the curious audience. We discussed work methods, animation techniques, and the creative challenges of telling short animated and edited stories.
It’s amazing how important and vital a tool animation has become for journalism and storytelling. Tomorrow’s journalists not only need to know how to write, they also need to know how to keyframe. For a list of the speakers and more info about the event, click here.
DRAEMS & Reel Review 2017
My side project is running AEPDX, an Adobe User group here in Portland for local motion designers and animators. The group collaborates through meetups, networking, and “show & tell” events, but once a year for Design Week I put on a big showcase of the amazing talent here in Portland on a huge screen. This year that event was DRAEMS.
With the theme of “dreams”, I gave my participants a list of 24 dream symbols from which they had to use at least two within their animated piece somehow. Within two months, I had 22 original short creations to share with a sold out crowd of almost 200 people. After the show the audience chose their favorites and the winners got great software prizes like a free year of Adobe Creative Cloud and credit with the online creative plugins store Toolfarm.