Summer has been kind to us once again this year. Business is booming and we are excited to share with you our latest work and our plans for the future.
In the web and interactive department last month Alpha Organic completed the flash work for SMART Technologies new micro site Love of Learning. This was a long intense project that we are proud to be a part of. Recently we have also completed flash work on a new Sears micro site that will be launched with an up coming campaign. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more.
In the music department we are happy to see our track now airing regularly on MenTV for Positive Livings new tech show, Gadget Girlz. You can watch it with the video here or visit the show case section on our home page.
In other news, Tak left early this week to Berlin, Germany for six weeks meaning things will be a little slower for the next month and a half while half the company gets some well deserved R&R with family.
In the mean time I will be doing some photo shoots, completing some additional web/interactive contracts still in the works, and with my free time take some courses at University as I am currently debating whether or not I should continue my pursuit for a PhD. If you are interested in this topic you can follow me on my personal and losely written blog Adgezaza’s Posterous…who cares and twitter @Adgezaza.
Adrian.
Wednesday we attended Hogtown Homos, one of the events at this years LGBT film festival Inside Out to watch After directed by Mark Pariselli, a film that we had the privilege to compose the score for. As you can see from the pictures the event was a sold out hit and after the show we headed down to “Buddy’s”, a local LGBT bar.
I have to say I walked out of that bar with a higher self-esteem then when I walked in but I also walked out with a broken heart for the the guitar player of the all girl band [that I wish I could remember the name of] that played the same night at the bar. She really knew how to play the guitar and had such awesome energy and I found myself “in a lovers trance”. However, she was likely gay (or maybe I am assuming to much?). “Who cares”.
I apologize for the quality of the pictures. All I had was my point-and-shoot and my phone to take photography.
I was getting tired of the old layout for this blog so I decided to spend the afternoon looking for new themes. I am a big fan of the minimalist themes and from when I first started using Wordpress I couldn’t find many good ones to start with. That was two years ago.
Today all I had to do was type in “minimalist wordpress theme” into Google and right away I found, 20 beautiful minimilast themes! I think I downloaded half of them before I decided that the structure theme will be the starting point for AO’s next blog skin. It only took a couple hours in photoshop and dreamweaver to create new logos and modify the php to get the theme looking like what you see now.
I’ve been planning on creating a personal blog for myself (Adrian Maurer) and now, with all these themes at my fingertips, I am even more inspired to do so. But first I have to get cracking on V. Maybe I will use the Wordpress framework for V? This is definitely something to consider. I really like the spectrum theme from WooThemes. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Alright, in my previous post I taked about CodeIgniter which is a powerful open source PHP framework and how much it has helped me up to now in making a website for V. I think now I’ve done as much as I can now with this framework, at least for my needs at the moment. Later I plan to optimize my PHP and take better advantage of CodeIgniter however, my skill level is not at that level yet and I don’t want to over kill this site right now.
The next step than was to figure out my navigation methods and what language will best help me to do it. Fernando, who I also mentioned in my previous post suggested that I use Mootools library. I was all for it until Vladimir Drizhepolov aka Vovko aka “Voldemort” reminded my of the jquery library. It didn’t take much thought to realize that jquery is more popular and will likely have more references on the internets to aid me in my programming – it also helped that it is open source and so I can blog about it on PlanetCDOT!
Now, rather than learning SQL and something called Rational Rose (bleh!) I began writing my javascript to load my pages into my content div’s and animating transitions with Vlad’s assistance.
Here is how it turned out:
V – May 21, 2010 (screen cast)
Here is the code that helped me do it:
myscript (javascript that uses the jquery library)
Adrian.
Nicholas and I today shot the first interview for project V with local Canadian illustrator, Sabrina Scott of sabrinascott.ca.
In as little words possible not to spoil the interview I would describe the process as, “fun times” and with that said I would also like to thank Sabrina Scott for being a great host and interviewee. I’m excited for the next interview where we will be featuring a group of graffiti artist.
Check out the image below for a glimpse of the interview.
Adrian.
Recently a good friend and colleague of mine, Nicholas Collister of Lightshack and Fur approached me to take on a new project with him.
The project has been given the codename “V” and will be in it’s infancy a quarterly video magazine consisting of interviews with local artists of all types. Furthermore, we will be including tutorials, reviews and editorials where we will demonstrate things like the making of and more.
V will be free to the citizens of the ‘internets’ and will be distributed to your browsers first and then one day ported to your phones and tablets.
V has no financiers so we will be hosting fundraisers in the future when things get rolling so I will keep you posted with updates. First shoot is this monday!
Adrian.
This is the official video that Tak and I at Alpha Organic created during the Christmas holidays to accompany the launch of the band duo, Betanik Movement’s new album “Happening at Betanik” which can now be found on ITunes and Amazon.
This video was shot hand held on a 7D, at 60fps, 1080p, and was designed to resemble a “chilling” night in the city. And in this case that city is Toronto.
The bokeh and blur shots give a nice painting feel to the video.
This particular version was rendered down to a file size of 500MB and 720p to meet the requirements of vimeo.
Feel free to check out the bands myspace: myspace.com/betanikmovement
Enjoy.
Betanik Movement – Just Chillin (official) from Alpha Organic on Vimeo.
This winter season we launched Alpha Organic Interactive, a games and application division of our little Toronto based company.
Today I am pleased to announce the release of “Composers Friend”, a flash based strategy shooter. I hope you will enjoy this first release. We have plans to launch a new game every month as well we are working with some iphone application concepts for later this year.
This is really exciting for us.
We just launched V.1.0 of our website. http://www.alphaorganicmedia.com/v1/html/
We are nearing the end of the basic HTML and CSS tutorials. So, instead of moving on to a different topic I have decided to give you the reader, a choice.
And remember, we are always looking for authors to write their own tutorials!
Cheers,
Adrian.
