Fascinating...
Unconventional...
Breaking all preconceptions...
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Think you’ve seen the best of the Mac’s creative capabilities? You ain’t seen nothing yet. From funkified sneakers to landmark video journalism to mind-blowing new musical instruments, amazing people are creating amazing things on their Macs. Behold the edge of creativity and invention.
Image Credits: Drills: Michael DiTullo - Auomobile: Spencer Nugent - Shoe: Steve McDonlad
if the people and projects profiled in the pages that follow have one thing in common, it’s a relationship with their computers that’s unique to Mac fans. It’s almost as if the computer becomes an extension of its owner’s mind, whether it’s a means of capturing product ideas and sketches, a catalyst for covering stories that the mainstream media won’t touch, or the source of the technological firepower needed to process hundreds of audio signals or breathe life into a 3D illustration.
We scoured the Mac creative community for people making amazing art, music, video, and industrial design—and then we went beyond that first layer of community to find the even cooler stuff. Intrigued? You won’t be disappointed.
Who: Adam Benton
What: 3D illustration and Concept Drawings
Why: To breathe life into imaginary forms and worlds in print and onscreen
We couldn’t show you the outer limits of Mac-based creativity without stopping first at the studio of Adam Benton, the UK-based digital artist who’s modeled and rendered numerous Mac|Life’s “fauxtotypes,” including those in last month’s cover story (“What’s Next for Apple?”) and the iCar you see here.
Benton designed a prototype Apple iCar for Mac|Life’s January 2008 cover story, “What Comes Next?”
Benton first used a computer for illustration in 1985, when his tool of the trade was a Mac Classic. Twenty-three years later, he’s graduated to a machine with a wee bit more power: a first-gen 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro with 7GB of RAM, a top-end graphics card, and two 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays. But it was actually in the late ’90s when Benton first combined his interests in industrial design, 3D modeling, and sci-fi. That was when he began his stint as—get this—a greeting card designer.
“It was the best step I could take at the time, as the company was self-contained with all its designers, photography studio, and print floor all under one roof,” Benton says. “I was involved in introducing the first 3D tools, Bryce 3D and Poser 4, into the card studio pipeline, and I started doing as many of the cards as we could with a mixture of the 3D tools and the usual 2D ones, like Photoshop. I was hooked from then on.”
Hooked, indeed. And prodigious too. Benton has done work for such corporatocracies as Visa, MGM, Disney, and Coca-Cola, but it was an independent Star Wars fan film, Star Wars: Revelations, that opened up a world of 3D graphics that he’d never explored before.
This race car–inspired spaceship is the result of a tutorial Benton wrote for ImagineFX magazine.
“I worked on the production of this 50-minute film for the three years in my ‘spare’ time,” Benton says. “CG for film-motion is quite a different discipline. I designed, modeled, and animated spaceships, and created entire CG environments and digital planet mattes for use with green-screened character footage and fully CG-animated sequences. It was very rewarding, but I could have happily quit, due to the enormous pressure it put on me. I had a second PowerMac G4 rendering short animation sequences for days at a time to get finished, quality shots.”
The film broke new ground by proving it was possible to combine the efforts of dozens of CG artists spread throughout the world, Benton says, and it also went on to win awards and generate enough publicity to garner 3 million downloads in only the first few weeks after its release. (You can download it yourself from panicstruckpro.com/revelations.)
Thus the beginning of snowballing success. After his work on Revelations, Benton went on to work on a second Star Wars fan film that earned kudos from George Lucas himself. And of course his stationary 3D objects are well know to readers of Mac|Life and its sister magazines Maximum PC and T3. Armed with his workhorse Mac Pro and the Maxon Cinema 4D software suite, Benton continues to produce the some of the most sublime 3D illustrations we have ever seen. To browse his portfolio, see www.kromekat.com.
Who: Adrian Freed, Research Director
In the small performance space on the building’s main floor, Freed slides back the curtain on a closet built into the wall to reveal a spherical loudspeaker—technically an icosahedron—that houses 120 separate speaker arrays and, when plugged into a MacBook Pro with a USB cable, registers as an audio device with 120 separate channels in OS X’s Sound System Preferences pane.
This “spherical” speaker is really an icosahedron. Click to enbiggen image
Trying to convey the magic of the spherical speaker, which was developed with funding from speaker maker Meyer Sound, “doesn’t make sense in words—you have to be there,” Freed says. But he can’t resist describing it anyway: “It will beam sounds around, like a lighthouse or a laser beam beams light. Most people have never experienced that because most sound sources spread sound from the source evenly outward in all directions. The spherical speaker lets you do all sorts of interesting things, including beam-forming narrow beams, multiple beams, moving the beams around in space, and so on.” Part of the motivation for developing the spherical speaker was to make electronic music sound as natural and “with presence” as live acoustic music, especially when the two are played together, Freed says.
“My boss has been traveling around, performing interactive computer music” in as portable a way as possible, Freed says of CNMAT codirector David Wessel, “but he notices when he plays in ensembles with acoustic instruments that he’s kind of a second-class citizen because his sound from a conventional loudspeaker doesn’t interact as well as the acoustic instruments. There’s a kind of physical presence that the acoustic instruments have that electronic instruments don’t. It’s because there’s only one loudspeaker, and loudspeakers totally smudge sound out evenly, whereas acoustic instruments send sound out in different frequencies and different directions.”
Freed recently finished a project in which he built a stringless cello out of acrylic for world-famous cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, who, after pioneering the simultaneous use of two bows to coax more and different sounds out of her traditional cello, turned to CNMAT to help her uncover still more ways to experiment with her instrument. “It’s played like a cello but doesn’t have strings,” says Freed of the cello he built for her. “It plugs in through the USB port to a Macintosh laptop, and the laptop makes all the sound. It was all made of acrylic and you bow brass rods instead of bowing strings, and then you touch multitouch sensors with one hand and press position- and pressure-sensing strips with the other.”
Adrian Freed shows how the stringless acrylic cello he built for acclaimed cellist Frances-Marie Uitti works. Click to enbiggen image Photo by: Mark Madeo
Much the way Kobe Bryant worked directly with Steve McDonald (see p28) of the Nike Innovation Kitchen to develop his eponymous line of basketball shoes, Uitti, who lives in Amsterdam, came to Berkeley and spent three weeks on the lower floors of the CNMAT facility to help perfect the acrylic cello, which she wanted to fit precisely between her knees. Seeking the right curve shape for the acrylic body of the instrument, Uitti discovered serendipitously that the diameter of a 10-gallon plastic water jug (the kind that sits atop Alhambra water coolers across the country) matched perfectly. So she and Freed took such a jug to the plastic-bending room at TechShop in Silicon Valley, where they laser-cut, etched, and heated the acrylic, then formed it around the jug.
“One of the kinds of things we do is take the existing ways people play instruments, and we take the bit that makes sound away from it, just leaving the bit that involves people’s gestures,” says Freed. “Then we capture as much of the gesture as we can, and we do the synthesis on the Macintosh so that people have more sounds than what the instrument makes.”
New sounds were exactly what Uitti was after, and what spurred her to pioneer the use of two bows at once on her cello.
“This line of research has a whole resonance with consumers these days because of games like Guitar Hero, and the Wii controller,” says Freed, who has six kids of his own. “The idea of a controller wasn’t in consumers’ consciousness. Musicians have been using them for a while, ever since MIDI keyboard controllers came out. But we’ve been trying to make controllers for the other instruments for decades now. The Guitar Hero controller is awful from any guitarist’s standpoint, but it’s certainly raised the consumer consciousness of that way of controlling things.”
Both Freed and Wessel have developed percussion controllers that plug into MacBook Pros. Freed has an odd-looking one he calls a Tablo, which is shaped like a flying saucer and fashioned from a circular embroidery frame, the round wooden base of a potter’s wheel, a central sensor he clearly built himself with electronic components, LEDs, and gobs of electrician’s tape—all covered with stretchy fabric that’s got a silver coating on it so that it can send signals to the sensor about the way the fabric is draped at a given moment. “It senses the amount of drape in the fabric, so your hand touches the fabric and changes the drape in the fabric,” Freed says. The Tablo was built to control hand drum sounds. “It works great with steel drum sounds, too,” he adds.
As far as developing products and ideas that might appear on the market commercially, Freed says, one piece of software CNMAT is known for is called Open Sound Control, or OSC.
“It’s the way we represent the information to the controller,” Freed says. “It’s won this battle of how to send gestural control information to computer programs doing sound, image, and motion synthesis. OSC replaces MIDI for a lot of people.”
The folks who contribute to the chaotic-but-organized-in-its-own-way research efforts at CNMAT are not all studying music, and there aren’t even as many tech geeks as you might expect.
Or perhaps we should rephrase: They don’t look like your typical tech geeks. But the more you hear about the serious work and the fun stuff that goes on at CNMAT, the more you start to see why Macs are the hardware of choice for CNMAT researchers.
“We use OS X for everything we can,” Freed says.
Who: Steve McDonald
The Kobe Bryant Hyperdunk was a top seller in late 2008.
Within the Innovation Kitchen, Tinker Hatfield—the architect-cum-shoe designer who designed most of the acclaimed Air Jordan basketball shoes, as well as the first pair of Nike Air cross-trainers—heads up a group within the Innovation Kitchen known as “The Pantry,” for which freelance designer Steve McDonald works full-time, usually from his home office near Park City, Utah. He also works every other week or so at Nike’s Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters, and makes regular trips to Asia to meet with people at the factories that make Nike shoes and apparel he designs.
The Pantry’s directive “is basically to break the mold and completely look at things in new ways,” says McDonald, “like new ways of making shoes, completely new technologies. Basically the general way shoes have been made hasn’t changed in 25 to 40 years. We’re trying to break that mold.” That includes streamlining the process from both a man-hour and environmental-toll perspective, McDonald says. “Very few people understand that as many as 200 people actually hold and do something to a shoe before you get it. We don’t think that’s necessary.”
The ACG Free Deschutz sandal is an update to McDonald’s original Air Deschutz from the early ’90s that started the boom in performance sport sandals.
”Designers in the Pantry—who all use some type of Mac-based setup and avail themselves of the usual cadre of Adobe design apps, including Photoshop and Illustrator—often get the chance to work directly with the high-profile athletes whose names will appear on certain shoes and athletic gear.
McDonald says Kobe Bryant was fairly hands-on in the development process for the Kobe Zoom III, for example, a basketball shoe with a unique take on the Air concept. “When we did the Zoom III, Kobe was very into black mamba snakes,” McDonald says. “The design was modeled around how the mamba skin expands and contracts, allowing free and precise movement.
“There’s a way of making a textile where you have fabric on the top surface, a 5-millimeter gap, another piece of textile, and they weave them together, so the fabric looks like a little truss,” McDonald says. “What we did was laminate this plastic to both sides of the textile and fill it with air. Normally if you fill a balloon with air, it always wants to become a sphere. If you want it flat, then you have to have some way of making that work. So basically we created this fabric that turns into a truss, and it keeps it from expanding into a sphere, so you can have a 5- to 6-millimeter airbag that’s very thin but still very cushiony.”
McDonald designed the Kobe Zoom III’s unique mesh-patterned exterior on his Mac, in Illustrator CS3. Then, his design was brought to life with rapid prototyping. “We used a process where polyurethane is injected in a grid pattern onto the surface of a textile,” McDonald says.
The Zoom Kobe III, Black Mamba edition was inspired by Kobe Bryant’s interest in black mamba snakes. Click to enbiggen image
McDonald’s Mac setup is centered around a Mac Pro, and he takes a MacBook Pro with him on the road.
Hatfield, the Pantry’s leader, does a lot of his design work the old-fashioned way: pencil to paper—and by working closely with the athletes and other stakeholders on a given product. As for the Pantry itself, the recently remodeled area that the onsite team works from—full of Macs and widescreen Apple Cinema Displays—is sure to turn any creative pro envy green.
One of McDonald’s pet causes in the Pantry is trying to lessen the environmental impact of every pair of shoes he designs. “Say a shoe is made from 50 different materials. If I can reduce that to one or two, then all the transportation involved with each of those materials [is reduced]; so I made the entire process more efficient, and overall it’s just a better process.”
The Nike Dunk Jamaica was produced as a Considered shoe, so it had a smaller carbon footprint.
This goal aligns nicely with shoes that McDonald and other Pantry designers have produced as part of Nike’s Considered program, which doesn’t even technically bring shoes to market. Instead, McDonald says, “they measure everything, approve every bit of material that we use, make sure we’re being as clean as possible.” There’s a whole list of environmentally preferred materials, for example, that the Considered team developed and approved. “They constantly measure everything, so we can limit the waste we’re creating.”
Having worked for Frog Design back in the day on the first Mac keyboard, McDonald is a veteran industrial designer, but he keeps his ear to the sidewalk as much as possible. “I look around at different technologies,” he says, “what kids are doing, even outside of footwear—cultural, events, and trends—and try to make sure Nike’s always in tune with where things are headed.
Who: Travis Mathews
Mathews has a bachelor’s degree in media and film studies from Ohio State and a master’s in counseling from the California Institute of Integral Studies, but he was drawn into video journalism and documentary filmmaking largely because video-editing software, such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro, made it possible for him to be a one- man show.
“I’ve always had an interest in both filmmaking and social justice–oriented issues, but it was not until the advent of Final Cut Pro that I really realized that—and at the same time, digital video cameras were coming down in price but increasing in sophistication,” Mathews says.
A San Mateo boy jumps up so cooking smoke will get in his hair and kill the flies, from Mathews’ documentary Health of Belize Community Hangs in the Balance.
“For the last seven to eight years, I’ve been getting more and more involved in video. I did a documentary in 2005 called Do I Look Fat? about gay men and body-image issues” (see www .doilookfatthemovie.com.) It was featured at film festivals and all—but probably, more importantly, it went to different college campuses. I got to travel with the film, and I got the bite from the success of that, realizing video was an enormously effective way to reach people and to generate change.”
Kelly Cochran performs with the Phat Fly Girls in Mathews’ video piece, Fat Activism Goes Big.
As a documentary filmmaker, Mathews is largely self-taught. “I knew I had the skills, I knew I had the eye, and the ability to pitch good stories that aren’t being told, so I just started to do it, without a real clear idea of what my outlet was going to be,” he says. “I first started doing it for myself, and then I started sending things I was doing to different people, friends, organizations, and professional people to see their reception and just to get feedback. I started to hone what I was doing and quickly got involved with Current TV. I’ve had a really good kind of freelance partnership with them, where either they’ll commission me to do a piece, or I’ve pitched something to them and it ends up airing both online and then on their subscriber cable channel.”
As far as following a set career path, Mathews says there really is no such thing in his field. “It’s a whole new world out there, what people are doing with video journalism, so it’s a little bit uncharted,” he says.
Mathews stays off camera at all times in his pieces, but his work is not always as straightforward as being commissioned to produce video stories that he films, edits, submits, and then never looks at again.
In San Francisco, for example, when the city attorney and a nonprofit group staffed mostly by ex-gang members called HOMEY (homeysf.org) were at loggerheads over a gang injunction that instituted a system of “safety zones” intended to combat gang violence, Mathews helped broker a meeting between the parties so they could sit down and discuss points of contention. As part of the deal, Mathews was granted permission to film the meeting.
“What was good about it was that it wasn’t just that I was putting the city attorney in a position where he was on tape and he would have to put his money where his mouth is,” Mathews says, “it was also that I was showing these guys from HOMEY working and actually having a constructive conversation with the city attorney. Because on the streets, and even within HOMEY, the people at the head of the organization, there’s a lot of bitterness and resentment—all these negative feelings toward City Hall.”
The piece was set to air on Current TV in late 2008, having been delayed because Current was focusing on last fall’s presidential election. On the very day in late November that we interviewed Mathews for this article, the San Francisco city attorney had agreed to meet with HOMEY representatives in the affected neighborhoods to “walk the street and hear concerns of the people who are being directly impacted by the gang injunction,” Mathews says. “Because [some community members and groups like HOMEY] have complained that since safety zones have come into play, police are patrolling the safety zones, they’re racial profiling—they are intimidating people that previously hadn’t been getting that type of attention.”
Students at the Holy Anglican School on Ambergris Caye in Belize.
An earlier piece aired on Current TV that Mathews filmed in Belize drew attention to the economic situation of the people from a village called San Mateo on Ambergris Caye Island and the life-altering school opened by missionaries there in 2006. “It’s the same island Madonna sang about in ‘La Isla Bonita,’” Mathews says. “It’s like a quarter of a mile between a million-dollar resort and these people living in total squalor. It’s probably the same story that’s echoed in many coastal, warm-climate resort areas, where just behind the shadows there’s a poverty-stricken community.”
“So what’s interesting particularly about this was that the conscience of the school started to thrive, and they started to also provide services like dental care and health care—they were providing all these things the government wasn’t providing.” At the same time, Mathews adds, “The land was being eyed as valuable property, where they could dump some sand on it, expand to the property, and put condos on it. It’s another common story of gentrification—displacing people and that kind of thing.
“Long story short,” Mathews concludes, “I did a video highlighting this and I was able to hang out with a couple of really lovely families there, and the video has been used as part of the arsenal for the school to show what they’re doing and to fight developers. Using the video, they’ve been able to raise a lot of attention and money to help them.”
Except for the crucial tech assist from his a dual-core Mac Pro, Panasonic, DVX100B video camera, and Final Cut Pro 5.1, Mathews is a one-man operation. “I’ll also use Motion to do text titles, or if I have to, zoom in on a map somewhere to let people know where a video is taking place.”
Mathews says much of what fuels his video work is passion. Good thing, since it’s certainly not bringing him big bucks—at least not yet.
“It’s a passion and it’s an investment because I can barely pay the rent with what I’m doing right now,” he says. “But I trust that it’s going to lead to something more lucrative and interesting.”
For more about Mathews’ work, see travisdmathews.com.
Who: Tom French’s seventh-grade class
“I was shocked at how quickly they came up with really good ideas,” French says. “When school counselor Julie Kormanyos and I were talking about it, we knew it would be a lot of work, but we said, if we come up with one good idea we’ll run with it, and if we don’t come up with anything that’s do-able, we won’t do anything. We had more than one good idea—we had two or three—and we had to choose two.”
Kormanyos, whose aim is to help the teenage students a JW Leary deal with a range of social and emotional issues, says that she’s all for finding a way to do it that speaks to the kids using video, a medium they’re familiar with. “If we can find a way to get through to them by using technology, having them understand certain things happening in their teenage world, that’s the way we want to do it—through technology.”
French and his students film the cyber-bullying PSA. French says he wishes the students used Macs, but the school’s computer lab is PC-only.
For their part, three of French’s former students who worked on the cyber-bullying PSA in 2007, say they enjoyed the experience, even if they weren’t in the spotlight.
Michael Stenlake 13, who’s in eighth-grade this year, says that his role as an on-camera extra was more than just a seat-warmer. Since the class came up with their commercial story line concepts in small groups, they couldn’t really sit by and let their classmates do all the work. “It was kind of easy and kind of hard at the same time,” Stenlake remembers. “It was hard to think of something like, out of nothing, but once we got an idea it was easy to put it together because we were all working together.”
Sarah Tyo, also 13, says she loved the acting—and seeing herself on TV wasn’t bad, either. “It made me feel accomplished knowing I actually did it; the word was out now, warning people and trying to stop [cyber-bullying],” she says.
Besides spreading the word that “cyber-bullying can hurt anyone, not just the person being bullied,” says 13-year-old Stephen David, participating in the PSA project gave the students a newfound awareness of the process of writing and filming TV commercials. David’s least favorite aspect of the project was, he says, “having to do the same scene over and over again.”
“They had lots of takes,” says Kormanyos. For his part, French says a Mac lab with seven computers and a widescreen display attached to the Mac is all he needs to continue doing these projects. Kormanyos and French are already scouting other topics to cover in 2009. They’re thinking of starting with bullying—the old-school, non-Internet-based kind (think stolen lunch money). French has a keen sense of the influence of technology in his students’ lives, especially compared to a decade ago.
Back then, he says, “I felt I was ahead of the kids in terms of the technology curve, but as I’ve gotten older, I can definitely tell they’re probably ahead of me.”
Who: John Muhlenkamp and Spencer Nugent
What: Idsketching.com
Why: To Provide a library of tools and techniques for industrial design students and enthusiasts
Designers like Nike Innovation Kitchen’s Steve McDonald were raised in an era of pen-on-paper sketching, but the pervasiveness of digital tools—both hardware and software, mostly Mac-based—in the field of industrial design has changed that for the next generation of industrial designers. Especially “kids” like John Muhlenkamp and Spencer Nugent, who founded IDsketching.com, a website that houses a large and rapidly expanding collection of industrial design–related how-to videos, sample sketches, and blogs. The duo graduated with design degrees from Brigham Young University and now work as full-time industrial designers for Astro Studios in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Muhlenkamp and Nugent conceived the idea for the site in college, when, as teaching assistants, it became clear that an online repository of digital sketching tools and techniques could be a huge help to their fellow students. “We taught ourselves how to do Web programming and video editing,” Nugent says. “We use iMovie to do all of the editing and voice-overs for the videos, and iShowU for the screen capture. Then we whipped up a site and started getting some interest online, so we decided to make it a free resource for students, to give them things we didn’t have—having two professionals running a site with interesting and helpful content for them.”
A design education, Nugent adds, is not based on learning formulas “like in mathematics—it’s learned by observation and by repetition.” He‘s quick to point out the value of the design theory that students pick up in college. But the video walkthroughs on IDsketching.com are meant to “give them a jump start.”
The site is an unpaid side project for Nugent and Muhlenkamp, avowed Apple users who do most of their design work on 17-inch MacBook Pros and Wacom Cintiq and Intuos pen tablets. “We can just hook those up to our Macs, and it’s like you have your own little portable studio. With that equipment, you can do it anywhere,” says Muhlenkamp.
Which is not to say that they don’t keep paper sketchbooks and writing implements on them at all times. There’s an entire section of the site, the Sketchbook, devoted to quick-and-dirty sketches created in the moment.
You’ll find all of these sketches—and many more—on IDsketching.com. Click to enbiggen
“With industrial design, a lot of it is practice and working out a sketch style,” says Muhlenkamp. “Ultimately, you’re going to work in an industry that’s based around producing products and selling products—it’s a business. So you have to be able to sell your ideas through sketching and be able to get people excited about those products.”
So, yeah, the guys know that part of their job is to sell good design ideas, but commercialism doesn’t factor in much to their commitment to IDsketching.com. “We’re not really looking for a quick buck,” says Muhlenkamp. Nugent adds: “We want it to be a free library that design students can access.”
For digital sketching, Muhlenkamp relies mostly on AutoDesk SketchBook Pro. “John’s pretty much the master of SketchBook Pro,” says Nugent amiably, “so I let him handle that.” Nugent uses the app too, but also sketches with Corel Painter.
“We’re the younger generation of designers, who have fully moved toward the digital space with the ability there is now to do digital sketching, digital manipulation of sketches and so forth,” says Muhlenkamp. He describes the “old-school” manual methods as “cool and inspiring,” but, he adds, “we’ve taken that to a new level with technology.”
The guys are in the midst of trying to balance the somewhat unexpected popularity of the site with their other time commitments. “Spencer just got engaged, and I’m married with a little girl who’s 1-year- old,” Muhlenkamp says. “And we both have jobs.”
To make sure they can keep their gainful employment, they say they’re looking for additional site contributors—one of whom is Nike’s McDonald.
Ultimately, they’d like IDsketching .com to be a “living library” of industrial design sketching tools, techniques, and work samples. Part of their long-term plan involves organizing the site by categories including product type, technique, and digital tools.
For now, anyone with an appetite for learning how products are conceived and designed using a range of digital and traditional tools and techniques can find plenty to chew on at IDsketching.com.
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Links:
[1] http://www.maclife.com/user/layers
[2] http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/made_mac
[3] http://www.maclife.com/article/apple_hardware_prototypes_four_radical_new_concepts_revealed?page=0,4
[4] http://www.maclife.com/files/u36/03_Made_1000.jpg
[5] http://www.kromekat.com
[6] http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/
[7] http://www.maclife.com/files/u36/06_Made_1000_0.jpg
[8] http://www.maclife.com/files/u36/05_Made_1000_1.jpg
[9] http://www.maclife.com/files/u36/10_Made_1000_0.jpg
[10] http://current.com/
[11] http://www.doilookfatthemovie.com/
[12] http://www.homeysf.org/
[13] http://travisdmathews.com/
[14] http://www.idsketching.com/
[15] http://www.maclife.com/files/u32/0121_madeonmac_1000.jpg
[16] http://www.IDsketching.com