Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Surfacescapes on Vimeo.

So, what did I do to give it my best shot:

1. Signed up a profile – and took my sweet time doing so (so much so that I thought I procrastinated so much that I was already disqualified – and THEN ALAS I GOT THE INVITATIONAL EMAIL to participate!)  Woot! Step #1
2. I took some time trying to concoct some crazy ideas for my cube canvas – and got all my links together (got my social networking all ready to go) and started pestering my pals to support me like crazy.  I’m sure I need to actually mend some overdrawn relationship “accounts” now that I’ve relentlessly harassed a lot of people to vote religiously (hopefully no-one is too mad? heh, heh.)
3. Dreamed up some kooky ideas for a really random and light/dark hemisperical canvas designs using Flash and PNGs and some neato Actionscript to draw out random phrases from a sequence of words/sentence parts.  It was kind of neat I thought – had some motion and life (and I tried to inject MOTION into each of my canvases thereafter).  Got to know @TSWIZZ (Telma) a bit through twitter as we seemed to be “early adopters” to some degree – and she rapidly outpaced all my efforts (the lady deserves a Cube people!)

   

4. Continued the vote pestering extensively.
5. Updated my cube canvas based on being inspired by the Cube’s rippled design elements.  On door/ceiling panels and on parts of the body etc – super fun.  And tried to make it metaphorical too – making ripples/making waves – i like making waves in the world with my life, i think the Nissan Cube and this promotion in particular are making waves in the promotional marketing world.

   So I integrated some interactive Flash actionscript ripple effects into my canvas allowing the user to make ripples on the cube – I still like playing with this…  try it out below:

6. I thought of an idea for a t-shirt design I could setup a cafepress storefront for – a shirt designed for any hypercubist to maybe wear to help promote their own vote earning campaign (and not just shirts but bags, mugs and hats too!).  Quickly found out I was at least perceived to be infringing on another hypercubist’s property by doing this – so I had to drop this mini-campaign.  I thought it was cool and would’ve had legs – If I had had more time on my hands i would’ve probably tried to relaunch this idea but alas too much going on…

   CAFEPRESS STORE LOGO:
   

   SHIRT CREATIVE FRONT:

   

   SHIRT BACK (with room for a hypercubist to write their own name in and wear around town!):

   

7. I then thought up the update idea to actually create a looping animation that would eternally loop over and over in illusory fashion where it never seems to end.  So I thought up the idea of me in the cube, the cube in me. 

   I took a bunch of silly reference photos of myself (actually my son did) and then tested/tweaked the motion in flash with a prototype, then sat down for many hours (more than it should have because my drawing/animating is RUSTY) to do the hand drawing of the animation frames in Flash – I was pretty happy with the “Take on Me – A-ha video” end result.  I even thought of using a Take on Me loop but was told to steer clear of the possible legal/copyright hassles (if I hadn’t taken so long to think this up I could’ve actually asked for permission since I am a huge A-ha fan – they’ve put out amazing recent stuff post 2000!)

    

   





Take on me – AHA

8. So was it enough?  I guess we’ll find out…  Wish I could’ve done more (sure wish i could’ve been in toronto for the tweetups too!)