Creative Mac Feature Archive

2001 Archive

USER STORY • SEPTEMBER 5, 2001
All-Purpose Animation
Mixing broadcast and Web media: then and now

In the summer of 2000 I was hired by David E. Kelley Productions to produce character animations for the Fox series Boston Public. The animations would be photographed practically while playing back on a computer screen as part of a fictitious Web site. Read More

Q&A • AUGUST 24 , 2001
Rat Race's Wild Titles
10 questions with Wild Brain's Julia Tortolani and Eric Schweickert

Your task is to create an opening title sequence for the latest Jerry Zucker comedy, Rat Race. The film features, among other things, a massive ensemble cast of name-brand actors, and you need to keep the audience entertained as all of their credits parade across the screen for a whopping three minutes and 15 seconds. That's not a title sequence; it's a short film. Oh, you're also on a tight deadline with a limited budget. Read More

ROUNDTABLE • AUGUST 8 , 2001
The State of 3D Animation
Straight talk with 3D industry professionals

In the last 15 months the animation industry has seen quite a few changes take place. To some, the industry has gone from phenomenal growth to decline, while others insist that everything is just fine. In one day a company may be hiring like mad, while another is laying off talent because work has left the country for parts unknown. Despite continued creation and distribution of animated and effect laden features, commercials, television programs, and Internet shorts, the actual state of the Industry is still up in the air. Read More

Q&A • JULY 25 , 2001
The Ambiguously Mac Studio
A conversation with animator J.J. Sedelmaier

If there's a consumer out there who doesn't know J.J. Sedelmaier, it's one who doesn't watch a whole lot of television. His animation studio, J.J. Sedelmaier Productions, White Plains, N.Y., is famous for its work on Saturday Night Live's Saturday TV Funhouse, with such animated shorts as "The Ambiguously Gay Duo," "The X Presidents" and "Fun with Real Audio." The company has animated Beavis & Butthead, the pilot of Comedy Central's TV Funhouse, a recent series of interstitials for Cartoon Network called "Captain Linger" and a soon to be released pilot for the same network called Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Oh yeah, they've done some commercials too. Read More

Q&A • JULY 17 , 2001
Motion on the Mac
Five questions with Kaydara FiLMBOX Product Manager Sam Nelson

This month Kaydara will bring its FiLMBOX line of products to the Mac OS X platform. Previously available for SGI Irix, Red Hat Linux and Windows NT, FiLMBOX is a suite of tools that provide a hub for creative production. It's a real-time 3D content authoring and delivery tool, complete with a character engine and animation tools. It integrates character animation, live motion capture, camera tracking and audio and video tools in a single, unified authoring environment. And, as a little added bonus, it lets you commingle all of these elements in real time. Read More

PROFILE • MAY 21 , 2001
Multimedia Production on the Mac
Star Wars Chronicled
Five questions with Orphmedia President and TFN Digital Producer Peter Orphanos

By now, many of you have heard about or seen TFN Digital, a twice-monthly Web broadcast that covers news about the Star Wars universe and carries features about those who make things happen in said universe. For Star Wars fans, it's a must-see. For video professionals, it stands out as an example of how to use streaming media (QuickTime and Windows Media) not just to deliver entertainment, but to showcase the services your production company offers. Read More

Video Feature: First Look: Media 100 Audio:Box
We've had the chance to see AppleScript and the Mac once again taken to new levels of power and sophistication. Two days ago I and Paulo de Andrade of Digital Post Production headed up to Burbank to see Media 100's new facility. While we were there, Media 100's Jim Baker and Mike Savello took the opportunity to show off their new Audio:Box product. We just happened to have a Sony DSR-PD150 and a sun gun handy (as well as a very heavy tripod I just happen to carry around), so we got some footage of the product, as well as an interview with Baker talking about the new system.

Creative Mac's Macworld Best of Show Awards
This year's Macworld Expo in San Francisco saw a number of innovative, new products for creative professionals, ranging from animation packages to video hardware to ... well, everything. Literally. This was probably the most pro-oriented Macworld in history, and no segment of the market was excluded. Audio, video, print and the Web were all represented by vendors showing off their latest goods.

Creative Mac's Macworld Travelogue: The day to day exploits of a lone Mac psychofanatic and his peecee-using companion
I thought it would be a good idea to take a break from straight product news to put a little editorial spin on the events of the Macworld Expo going on all this week in San Francisco. I also thought it might be nice to document the day to day activities and intimate (if inane) thoughts of me and my cohort, Paolo de Andrade, during this little adventure.

2000 Archive

Roundup: The Best of Seybold
This year's Seybold convention in San Francisco proved to be one of the more enjoyable Web expos I've attended. Which is odd, of course, seeing as its a publishing show. Nevertheless, the topic on the lips of anyone who could rally a small crowd to his or her booth was the repurposing of content for the coming convergence—whatever that means.

The Future of Poser
Back when MetaCreations announced it would be selling off all of its software in favor of pursuing other interests, the future of a number of its programs was, at best, in doubt. Some of these were snatched up and (presumably) saved by large software developers. Some will, undoubtedly, be stripped for their technology and merged into other applications. Some will just be forgotten.

Road Hog: Gearing Up Your PowerBook for Serious Road Work
Last year's G3 was Apple's first truly muscular portable, and truly portable muscular machine, several pounds lighter than its less powerful predecessors and able to hold its own against nearly any "road warrior" class machine on any platform.

AppleScripting the Revolution: Unparalleled power to customize, integrate and automate creative applications
One of the key components of the Industrial Revolution is the automation of repetitive tasks. The tasks automated are primarily related to physical labor, and, as far as that goes, you'd have to admit that the Industrial Revolution has actually been pretty revolutionary.

Q&A: Bitstream Looks for a Few Good Font Designers
Bitstream announced it's launching a new program to seek out font designs from new and established designers. The program, called "New Font Collection," is an effort to expand the company's library of 1,400 PostScript, TrueType and OpenType fonts. Bitstream says it's looking for text and display typefaces, as well as extended sets.

The Future of Form•Z: Seven Questions with Chris Yessios
Last month Auto•des•sys, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, announced a major change in in the way it will market Form•Z, the company's flagship product and the modeler that helped make desktop 3D a commercial reality back at the time of its launch in 1991. Now, of course, rendering applications ship with increasingly powerful modelers of their own, all wrapped up in a tight, integrated package. On the other hand, Form•Z continues to challenge other developers with innovative new features that keep the program at the vanguard of modeling and making Form•Z an integral part of many a desktop artist's repertoire of tools.

Reality Check Studios Taps Macs for Tricky Titan AE Sequence
It’s the year 3028 and Earth has been destroyed. The only key to saving the human race is held in a legendary spacecraft called The Titan. What’s a superhero to do? Well our main man, Cale, who was precocious enough to have escaped Earth’s destruction at the age of five, sets out to find the Titan, of course, and, along the way, has to learn to drive a spacecraft to get around town.

Slack on the Mac: The Making of a Cult
You're different. You don't fit in. Everyone around you seems ... alien. The world to you seems grotesque, pasty and puritan. Something isn't right, and you're pretty sure there's a conspiracy behind it all. You don't have faith in much, but you are certain that there must be some higher power that will reach His big fist down from the heavens and crush this filthy world as you're swept to safety aboard flying saucers sent by an intergalactic savior who smokes a pipe.

Keeping Up with the Joneses Motorola and Apple look to enhanced G4-II, 64-bit G5 chips
At last fall's Microprocessor Forum, Motorola outlined the prospective roadmap for their PowerPC line. There were two main revelations associated with this announcement: first, a new 64-bit processor, the PowerPC 7500 or G5, would be forthcoming sometime in 2001; and second the current PowerPC 7400 or G4 would be revamped to create a second generation G4 with a new microarchitecture and adjusted clock speeds to bring it more in line with the parallel speed jumps of the Intel/AMD development race.

Production on the Run: Macs help M.A.D. race the clock for ski spots
PROFILE: She's on the slopes Sunday by 8:30 a.m., shooting footage of skiers and collecting sound bites for the next 30-second spot promoting skiing in Vermont. Out of there by 1 p.m., she heads back to the shop and starts digitizing the betacam SP footage while she makes the coffee. It's the start of another weekly cycle for Marion Dane of M.A.D. Productions, a Vermont-based production house that's started a series of weekly spots for the Vermont Department of Tourism & Marketing.

War Stories: A Marriage of Inconvenience: How an animated man and an animatronic woman learned to live together in sync
The project sounded straightforward enough when Scott Simmons signed onto it in late September 1997. The California Science Center in Los Angeles needed a 3D set with various animations composited into it for an exhibit called BodyWorks that shows how the human body works. But Simmons, Digital Effects Supervisor at Live Wire Productions in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., soon realized this project would be a lot tougher than he anticipated.

Artists use Adobe After Effects to create the opening title sequence for "The Talented Mr. Ripley"
Nominated for five Golden Globe awards and considered an Oscar contender for Best Picture, current box office hit The Talented Mr. Ripley features a critically acclaimed director/screenwriter (Anthony Minghella of The English Patient fame), a stellar cast of young stars (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law), sumptuous locations (New York and several cities in Italy)—and one of the longest opening title sequences (eight minutes, or 11,800 frames) to be animated and composited entirely on a desktop computer, using After Effects 4.1.

Short Film Causing The Buzzzzzzz
Take two out of your mind, fun loving and highly professional men who are tired of working their asses off in multimedia waiting for their big break to direct feature films, mix it with a great script (that they wrote), lots of talent (Mark Snow, John A. Alonzo, to name a few) and a whole lotta SWEAT, determination and calling in favors—what do you get? A 20-minute directorial/producing debut with a production (donated) budget of a quarter of a million dollars called The Dancing Cow.

1999 Archive

December: Defying Time: Fugitive Uses Commotion to Create a Stir
Fugitive is a boutique motion graphic design and effects studio. Company principles Jay Torres and award-winning Designer Shimooi, bring a spirit of collaboration and love of the creative process to every project. Fugitive produced "13 Hour Sale" a commercial for Dayton Hudson/Marshall Fields, featuring actors moving about at frenzied paces in a busy intersection.The quirky spot features some of the same actors in the same frame two and three times moving in different directions with many subtle hidden elements that allow the audience to see something new with each repeat viewing of the spot.

December: New Levels of Creativity: Nickelodeon Animation Studios New York Showcases the Power of Desktop Animation
Animators looking for jobs would normally think of heading for "Tinseltown," but the opening of Nickelodeon Animation Studios New York this month is changing all that. The new studios are at the forefront of technology and technique, using 100 percent desktop digital production technologies and pioneering a new style of animation, storybook animation. This new style combines digital images and drawings created or manipulated using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop with live action footage of actors, composited together using Adobe After Effects. With the launch this month, Nickelodeon has become the largest producer of animation on the East Coast-and all of the animation is created using Adobe software on the desktop.

December: Five Questions with Van Ling
Van spearheaded the use of Macintosh systems for storyboard processing and visual effects design on writer/director James Cameron's feature film The Abyss. In addition to serving as Cameron's technical researcher and creative liaison for all aspects of production on the film, he played a significant role in the design and creation of the visual effects, and subsequently served as visual effects coordinator and creative supervisor on "Terminator 2: Judgment Day."

December: Creative Union: edgeX and Bakery Digital Offer State-of-the-Art Motion Graphics and Audio Production Under One Roof
Looking for that one stop shop? A place to go where audio meets visual? Well, look no more. Motion design firm edgeX studio and music recording/sound post production house Bakery Digital Sound & Vision have melded their efforts to bring these resources to you all under one roof.

December: The AURA Group: E-CD Specialists
The Aura is a group of new media professionals that work with fortune 500 companies to bring them new marketing media for web and interactives. Among flash packed CD-sized business cards and web positioning, Aura specializes in E-CD/CD-EXTRA. It is almost the only developer in the Southern California area to do Enhanced CDs (the combination of audio CDs and multimedia content). They have found that because of the changing formats for E-CDs, many companies do not develop for the CD format anymore. Aura gets more referrals from other developers because they cannot develop that format. I asked co-founders Joe Stammen and David Bailey a few questions about what makes them tick?

December: War Stories: In the Mix
A few years ago I received a phone call from Messner Management about 4 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on a Friday. They were in need of a music video of "Sara B" for a fund-raising presentation and had a very small budget. In the past I had bad experiences working on projects with very little or no budget, but this guy found a weakness of mine and convinced me to produce the digital music video. The only challenge or should I say "challenges" were to write the script, shoot the video and edit it within 72 hours in Chicago, IL. I live in Southern California and hadn't heard the song.

December: War Stories: Communication is the Key
About six months ago, I was given the project of creating a 15 minute events of the 20th century video for the year end meeting for Budweiser. The specifics of the layout were the following: three days to complete the project, no footage to work with - I had previously ordered footage for such a task but my company had returned it without my knowledge (obviously upsetting the supplier) - and I had to convince our lighting director to build a pyro and light show to accompany the video (we work for a large night club with live entertainment so he could not program the show until after 1 am).

2001 Archive USER STORY • SEPTEMBER 5, 2001 All-Purpose Animation *Mixing broadcast and Web media: then and now* In the summer of 2000 I was hired by David E. Kelley Productions to produce character animations for the Fox series Boston Public. The animations would be photographed practically while playing back on a computer screen as part of a fictitious Web site. Read More Q&A • AUGUST 24 , 2001 Rat Race's Wild Titles 10 questions with Wild Brain's Julia Tortolani and Eric Schweickert Your task is to create an opening title sequence for the latest Jerry Zucker comedy, Rat Race. The film features, among other things, a massive ensemble cast of name-brand actors, and you need to keep the audience entertained as all of their credits parade across the screen for a whopping three minutes and 15 seconds. That's not a title sequence; it's a short film. Oh, you're also on a tight deadline with a limited budget. Read More ROUNDTABLE • AUGUST 8 , 2001 The State of 3D Animation Straight talk with 3D industry professionals In the last 15 months the animation industry has seen quite a few changes take place. To some, the industry has gone from phenomenal growth to decline, while others insist that everything is just fine. In one day a company may be hiring like mad, while another is laying off talent because work has left the country for parts unknown. Despite continued creation and distribution of animated and effect laden features, commercials, television programs, and Internet shorts, the actual state of the Industry is still up in the air. Read More Q&A • JULY 25 , 2001 The Ambiguously Mac Studio A conversation with animator J.J. Sedelmaier If there's a consumer out there who doesn't know J.J. Sedelmaier, it's one who doesn't watch a whole lot of television. His animation studio, J.J. Sedelmaier Productions, White Plains, N.Y., is famous for its work on Saturday Night Live's Saturday TV Funhouse, with such animated shorts as "The Ambiguously Gay Duo," "The X Presidents" and "Fun with Real Audio." The company has animated Beavis & Butthead, the pilot of Comedy Central's TV Funhouse, a recent series of interstitials for Cartoon Network called "Captain Linger" and a soon to be released pilot for the same network called Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Oh yeah, they've done some commercials too. Read More Q&A • JULY 17 , 2001 Motion on the Mac Five questions with Kaydara FiLMBOX Product Manager Sam Nelson This month Kaydara will bring its FiLMBOX line of products to the Mac OS X platform. Previously available for SGI Irix, Red Hat Linux and Windows NT, FiLMBOX is a suite of tools that provide a hub for creative production. It's a real-time 3D content authoring and delivery tool, complete with a character engine and animation tools. It integrates character animation, live motion capture, camera tracking and audio and video tools in a single, unified authoring environment. And, as a little added bonus, it lets you commingle all of these elements in real time. Read More PROFILE • MAY 21 , 2001 Multimedia Production on the Mac Star Wars Chronicled Five questions with Orphmedia President and TFN Digital Producer Peter Orphanos By now, many of you have heard about or seen TFN Digital, a twice-monthly Web broadcast that covers news about the Star Wars universe and carries features about those who make things happen in said universe. For Star Wars fans, it's a must-see. For video professionals, it stands out as an example of how to use streaming media (QuickTime and Windows Media) not just to deliver entertainment, but to showcase the services your production company offers. Read More Video Feature: First Look: Media 100 Audio:Box We've had the chance to see AppleScript and the Mac once again taken to new levels of power and sophistication. Two days ago I and Paulo de Andrade of Digital Post Production headed up to Burbank to see Media 100's new facility. While we were there, Media 100's Jim Baker and Mike Savello took the opportunity to show off their new Audio:Box product. We just happened to have a Sony DSR-PD150 and a sun gun handy (as well as a very heavy tripod I just happen to carry around), so we got some footage of the product, as well as an interview with Baker talking about the new system. Creative Mac's Macworld Best of Show Awards This year's Macworld Expo in San Francisco saw a number of innovative, new products for creative professionals, ranging from animation packages to video hardware to ... well, everything. Literally. This was probably the most pro-oriented Macworld in history, and no segment of the market was excluded. Audio, video, print and the Web were all represented by vendors showing off their latest goods. Creative Mac's Macworld Travelogue: The day to day exploits of a lone Mac psychofanatic and his peecee-using companion I thought it would be a good idea to take a break from straight product news to put a little editorial spin on the events of the Macworld Expo going on all this week in San Francisco. I also thought it might be nice to document the day to day activities and intimate (if inane) thoughts of me and my cohort, Paolo de Andrade, during this little adventure. 2000 Archive Roundup: The Best of Seybold This year's Seybold convention in San Francisco proved to be one of the more enjoyable Web expos I've attended. Which is odd, of course, seeing as its a publishing show. Nevertheless, the topic on the lips of anyone who could rally a small crowd to his or her booth was the repurposing of content for the coming convergence—whatever that means. The Future of Poser Back when MetaCreations announced it would be selling off all of its software in favor of pursuing other interests, the future of a number of its programs was, at best, in doubt. Some of these were snatched up and (presumably) saved by large software developers. Some will, undoubtedly, be stripped for their technology and merged into other applications. Some will just be forgotten. Road Hog: Gearing Up Your PowerBook for Serious Road Work Last year's G3 was Apple's first truly muscular portable, and truly portable muscular machine, several pounds lighter than its less powerful predecessors and able to hold its own against nearly any "road warrior" class machine on any platform. AppleScripting the Revolution: Unparalleled power to customize, integrate and automate creative applications One of the key components of the Industrial Revolution is the automation of repetitive tasks. The tasks automated are primarily related to physical labor, and, as far as that goes, you'd have to admit that the Industrial Revolution has actually been pretty revolutionary. Q&A: Bitstream Looks for a Few Good Font Designers Bitstream announced it's launching a new program to seek out font designs from new and established designers. The program, called "New Font Collection," is an effort to expand the company's library of 1,400 PostScript, TrueType and OpenType fonts. Bitstream says it's looking for text and display typefaces, as well as extended sets. The Future of Form•Z: Seven Questions with Chris Yessios Last month Auto•des•sys, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, announced a major change in in the way it will market Form•Z, the company's flagship product and the modeler that helped make desktop 3D a commercial reality back at the time of its launch in 1991. Now, of course, rendering applications ship with increasingly powerful modelers of their own, all wrapped up in a tight, integrated package. On the other hand, Form•Z continues to challenge other developers with innovative new features that keep the program at the vanguard of modeling and making Form•Z an integral part of many a desktop artist's repertoire of tools. Reality Check Studios Taps Macs for Tricky Titan AE Sequence It’s the year 3028 and Earth has been destroyed. The only key to saving the human race is held in a legendary spacecraft called The Titan. What’s a superhero to do? Well our main man, Cale, who was precocious enough to have escaped Earth’s destruction at the age of five, sets out to find the Titan, of course, and, along the way, has to learn to drive a spacecraft to get around town. Slack on the Mac: The Making of a Cult You're different. You don't fit in. Everyone around you seems ... alien. The world to you seems grotesque, pasty and puritan. Something isn't right, and you're pretty sure there's a conspiracy behind it all. You don't have faith in much, but you are certain that there must be some higher power that will reach His big fist down from the heavens and crush this filthy world as you're swept to safety aboard flying saucers sent by an intergalactic savior who smokes a pipe. Keeping Up with the Joneses Motorola and Apple look to enhanced G4-II, 64-bit G5 chips At last fall's Microprocessor Forum, Motorola outlined the prospective roadmap for their PowerPC line. There were two main revelations associated with this announcement: first, a new 64-bit processor, the PowerPC 7500 or G5, would be forthcoming sometime in 2001; and second the current PowerPC 7400 or G4 would be revamped to create a second generation G4 with a new microarchitecture and adjusted clock speeds to bring it more in line with the parallel speed jumps of the Intel/AMD development race. Production on the Run: Macs help M.A.D. race the clock for ski spots PROFILE: She's on the slopes Sunday by 8:30 a.m., shooting footage of skiers and collecting sound bites for the next 30-second spot promoting skiing in Vermont. Out of there by 1 p.m., she heads back to the shop and starts digitizing the betacam SP footage while she makes the coffee. It's the start of another weekly cycle for Marion Dane of M.A.D. Productions, a Vermont-based production house that's started a series of weekly spots for the Vermont Department of Tourism & Marketing. War Stories: A Marriage of Inconvenience: How an animated man and an animatronic woman learned to live together in sync The project sounded straightforward enough when Scott Simmons signed onto it in late September 1997. The California Science Center in Los Angeles needed a 3D set with various animations composited into it for an exhibit called BodyWorks that shows how the human body works. But Simmons, Digital Effects Supervisor at Live Wire Productions in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., soon realized this project would be a lot tougher than he anticipated. Artists use Adobe After Effects to create the opening title sequence for "The Talented Mr. Ripley" Nominated for five Golden Globe awards and considered an Oscar contender for Best Picture, current box office hit The Talented Mr. Ripley features a critically acclaimed director/screenwriter (Anthony Minghella of The English Patient fame), a stellar cast of young stars (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law), sumptuous locations (New York and several cities in Italy)—and one of the longest opening title sequences (eight minutes, or 11,800 frames) to be animated and composited entirely on a desktop computer, using After Effects 4.1. Short Film Causing The Buzzzzzzz Take two out of your mind, fun loving and highly professional men who are tired of working their asses off in multimedia waiting for their big break to direct feature films, mix it with a great script (that they wrote), lots of talent (Mark Snow, John A. Alonzo, to name a few) and a whole lotta SWEAT, determination and calling in favors—what do you get? A 20-minute directorial/producing debut with a production (donated) budget of a quarter of a million dollars called The Dancing Cow. 1999 Archive December: Defying Time: Fugitive Uses Commotion to Create a Stir Fugitive is a boutique motion graphic design and effects studio. Company principles Jay Torres and award-winning Designer Shimooi, bring a spirit of collaboration and love of the creative process to every project. Fugitive produced "13 Hour Sale" a commercial for Dayton Hudson/Marshall Fields, featuring actors moving about at frenzied paces in a busy intersection.The quirky spot features some of the same actors in the same frame two and three times moving in different directions with many subtle hidden elements that allow the audience to see something new with each repeat viewing of the spot. December: New Levels of Creativity: Nickelodeon Animation Studios New York Showcases the Power of Desktop Animation Animators looking for jobs would normally think of heading for "Tinseltown," but the opening of Nickelodeon Animation Studios New York this month is changing all that. The new studios are at the forefront of technology and technique, using 100 percent desktop digital production technologies and pioneering a new style of animation, storybook animation. This new style combines digital images and drawings created or manipulated using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop with live action footage of actors, composited together using Adobe After Effects. With the launch this month, Nickelodeon has become the largest producer of animation on the East Coast-and all of the animation is created using Adobe software on the desktop. December: Five Questions with Van Ling Van spearheaded the use of Macintosh systems for storyboard processing and visual effects design on writer/director James Cameron's feature film The Abyss. In addition to serving as Cameron's technical researcher and creative liaison for all aspects of production on the film, he played a significant role in the design and creation of the visual effects, and subsequently served as visual effects coordinator and creative supervisor on "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." December: Creative Union: edgeX and Bakery Digital Offer State-of-the-Art Motion Graphics and Audio Production Under One Roof Looking for that one stop shop? A place to go where audio meets visual? Well, look no more. Motion design firm edgeX studio and music recording/sound post production house Bakery Digital Sound & Vision have melded their efforts to bring these resources to you all under one roof. December: The AURA Group: E-CD Specialists The Aura is a group of new media professionals that work with fortune 500 companies to bring them new marketing media for web and interactives. Among flash packed CD-sized business cards and web positioning, Aura specializes in E-CD/CD-EXTRA. It is almost the only developer in the Southern California area to do Enhanced CDs (the combination of audio CDs and multimedia content). They have found that because of the changing formats for E-CDs, many companies do not develop for the CD format anymore. Aura gets more referrals from other developers because they cannot develop that format. I asked co-founders Joe Stammen and David Bailey a few questions about what makes them tick? December: War Stories: In the Mix A few years ago I received a phone call from Messner Management about 4 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on a Friday. They were in need of a music video of "Sara B" for a fund-raising presentation and had a very small budget. In the past I had bad experiences working on projects with very little or no budget, but this guy found a weakness of mine and convinced me to produce the digital music video. The only challenge or should I say "challenges" were to write the script, shoot the video and edit it within 72 hours in Chicago, IL. I live in Southern California and hadn't heard the song. December: War Stories: Communication is the Key About six months ago, I was given the project of creating a 15 minute events of the 20th century video for the year end meeting for Budweiser. The specifics of the layout were the following: three days to complete the project, no footage to work with - I had previously ordered footage for such a task but my company had returned it without my knowledge (obviously upsetting the supplier) - and I had to convince our lighting director to build a pyro and light show to accompany the video (we work for a large night club with live entertainment so he could not program the show until after 1 am).