grimmwerks

I am an organic life form that has been having an ongoing digital love affair.

After I graduated from 8″ superheros, or 2″ Star Wars figures — or the one year I got the entire 12″ set (and was able to play with them pre Christmas, expertly removing them from their wrapped boxes and returning them in such a way unseen by the naked eye) – my love affair began when the Atari 2600 was invited into our home.

The time lost to Pong, to Superman, PacMan and Pitfall. Losing on purpose so my very competitive father wouldn’t get so mad. I was hooked to the sites and sounds of the big pixels of the day.

Following soon after was the Apple II+ that seduced my hours after school.. with her textured beige plastic, her sultry green screen and her ample 5 1/4″ floppy drives. Ah the hours I lost in Zork searching for a grue, or playing the parametric view of Zaxxon, flying hellicopters by Broderbund, or trying to herd Lemmings — I wanted to know this machine inside and out. I attempted to program sprites using hexidecimal (which at the time really didn’t show rgb as I now know it — especially on a green screen — but knowing hex certainly helped later in life with my Ensoniq Mirage sampler). I spent more time trawling bbs after purchasing the phone cradle. Now I was like NASA! And NASA, I’m sure, spent time writing routines like:

10 print ‘hi’
20 goto 10.

It was then that I started to realize the worldy women I knew at age 12 might not see knowing what ‘JPEG’ stood for, or my 6 years of violin as the manly man I knew myself to be. A short experience with firecrackers in a bottle held in my hand took care of the violin practice for a time, and, after surgery to fix a severed tendon and the physical therapy that followed, helped me migrate toward stand up bass where the thicker strings wouldn’t get caught in the scars of my finger pads.

Synthesizers soon followed and once again, my parents introduced new addictions into my life by buying me a JUNO 106. My first girlfriend bought me a small midi controller and I was well on my way of being the next Howard Jones or Thomas Dolby – complete with strange hair cuts, red shoes, and strange attire: the common post punk black and white striped stretchy shirt or purple parachute pants. I spent hours recording overdubs while playing one cassette and recording to another that I finally looked to get some professional equipment.

My Fostex 1/4″ reel to reel allowed me to stripe one track with smpte time clock so that my new Roland MC500 could follow along with the bounced guitars or vocals on the other 7 tracks. I recorded myself, my band, and other bands for many years in my parents basement and only returned back to computers when I got my MacLC. Foregoing the Atari ST that many midi musicians used (my idols at the time, Skinny Puppy, being one) what power this pizza box contained. With Opcode Vision, Apple’s System 7’s and OMS in control of my Korg DSS, Ensoniq Mirage and Roland gear I was a new man with a plan.

By then not only was I on America Online like the rest but I was also subscribed to local NJ provider idt.net (grimm@idt.net back in the day). After high school, I first went to college for art, then switched to Television and Audio Production (but found it boring since I already had my own studio; reason would dictate I should’ve followed through, but why start now?) I finally settled on pursing a philosophy degree. While simultaneously trying to further my college studies (not so much) as well as the band I was singing in (much more), I continued to record many bands, eeking out the best sound I could from the Radio Shack microphones I’d purchased to mic the drums, forced to record them to stereo in order to bounce down track after track of heavy guitar. It was during this time I started to play with Photoshop 3 and coughed up the dough to get Strata3d. I played around with Director 3. Forrays into digitizing my vhs camera work (kids these days don’t remember having not only a HUGE camera but a purselike recorder slung Indiana Jones style across their chest) in After Effects at 320×240 was taxing my PowerMac of the time. I learned HTML from the HTML Manual of Style by Larry Aronson (who I would later work with as a board member of the WWWAC) and started putting up my own rudimentary webpages. Ah if only I had known all this noodling around was a viable career.

The BLINK tag is not a design.

Back then, to most people America Online WAS the internet – the concept of separate domains was a new one, and companies were just begining to realize that the internet held some viability. With new departments created to understand this ‘internet thing’ it was much easier to get a response from a real company if the company had an email address. I started to email a few record labels in the search for a development deal, and one email was sent to PolyGram. In this email not only would i describe the music I was doing, but how it was created, and how I, as an artist used the computer to create. It was a strange email to say the least. But the woman that answered the PolyGram email (and that sentence alone shows you how things have changed in 10 years) forwarded my email to Peter Kelley, who was in charge of PolyGram’s website. He wrote to me, asking if I’d like to come in for a job interview.

Being young and naiive at the time, I thought that ‘Philips Media’ was a company owned by some guy named Philip – I was quite taken aback when I walked into the World Trade Building for my interview. Sitting down with Peter to show him my haphazzard portfolio, before he excused himself to have some cake for someone’s birthday party, he offered me a job working on the PolyGram website.

At the time there was something like 8 to 12 people working in that department; and I, miraculously was one of them. Though first hired to create the Interactive New Release Book my job consisted of creating 30 second snippets of upcoming releases, adding them to a cdrom, and mailing these cdroms out to stores so purchases could be made. There was no mp3 codec at the time, nor a way of playing small snippets of audio on the web, and I remember using Digidesign’s Sound Designer software to pull audio for all our projects.. Netscape was king, but there were other browsers such as Explorer or Cyberdog, but not the media heavy internet we’ve come to know and love.

Showing an apptitude for it, i started to design web pages for PolyGram and subsidiary artists (Mercury, Island, London Records, etc). When Macromedia created Shockwave (at the time referred to as ‘fried green tomatoes’ because of it’s file type in the MacOS) , I was programming simple websites showcasing the Jerky Boys, INXS, Bon Jovi as well as bands that have disapeared from all but my memory (I dig a great Ednaswap one based on their graphics, or Ryan… hmm). I also programmed a few cdroms using Authorware for Philips Media to showcase their products to comdex, and they used some Director modules if I recall correctly. I also remember buying my own digital audio card for my Mac — a Lucent audio card that would digitize stereo audio at 16bit 44khz for only $1000!

It was around that time that Macromedia bought FutureSplash, a vector animation package. After changing the name to Flash, and thought of as Director’s dumber younger brother, the best you could do was to create interactive elements to be used within Director, and send simple commands to Director in order to create any real experience. ActionScript (as it was called) was the equivalent of baby talk, and Director could only make sense of it’s blatherings if you *really* wanted to do anything interesting.. you’d send strings to Director and let Director take care of it all…. don’t worry your pretty little vector head over it.

Web palletes are a memory.

After the demise of TradeMedia.net – and *believe* me THAT story is QUITE interesting:  we were taken over by a division of Philips Media called ‘Origin’ that was run by a woman named Ann Harrison-Mee, who not only conned her way into an executive position, she was also an ex-felon who had left prison along with her prison guard lesbian lover, conning her way into many high positions within companies time and time again including the BBC (more here) — I followed a number of my compadres (including Peter Kelley) to Marvel Comics, which was trying to really create an interactive experience for the web. I began to create interactive comics — still using Director, but with Flash interface elements. Oh the time spent taking all the drawn pictures and converting them to ’safe’ colors in Director, the joy of only using 4 channels of non-mp3-compressed audio.. that was quite the skill I had.

A film is movie pictures and sound. Sound is half the experience.

Being a musician, and really interested in the ambient audio experience, the time I spent eeking what I could from a sound file while simultaneously trying to crush it’s size so that the user experience could be better was an ongoing puzzle that I dedicated the next three years. Director at the time could do 8 channels of audio on a high end machine (high end at that time being a 386), but to be safe, I’d only do 4 tracks of audio — 2 tracks would be background ambience, 2 tracks would be more immediate sounds for shorter bits such as bangs, shouts, car squeels, you get it. There was a true finesse to make this work, for not only getting it wrong would cut off one of the sounds you had already playing, but you had to sort of guess how the user would click to read the next balloon/scene. I would attempt to use the audio to move from page to page — if the scene needed to feel like an extension of the previous page, I would use audio cues to keep that feeling there. I had no real control over how these loops played layered on another loop, nor where in a loop they might fade in and out; the trick was creating ambient loops that had similar feels/keys/beats without really making anything too distinct, and playing them back layered on top of each other anywhere within either loop would still create something distinct, random, and hopefully pleasing to the ear. On top of which these audio loops couldn’t be compressed (the mp3 codec at the time would mess up the zero index of the head and tail, creating a very noticable click), so file size was a HUGE concern. My magic was creating soundfiles that weren’t 44khz, 22khz, not even 11khz — but sometimes 5.5khz or less! Nothing like a little bitcrushing in the morning — I became really good at eq’ing the audio in such a way that I would lose the highs or lows the way I wanted to for the ambient loop I was creating.

Macromedia was seeing a lot of shockwave sites, so they created shockwave.com to show the shock site of the day, and attempted to get on the online gaming bandwagon. So they started to make ShockMachine, which was an attempt to create a virtual gaming console where users could select a shockwave on the web, download and keep it to play on their desktop. Since Marvel Comics was a Macromedia Partner, they invited me out there to one of their conferences, and I began to get onto all the beta tests, including the beta test for Flash 4.