If you are here to see our work - please sneak a peek at our new site - there are still a few rough edges to smooth off before we can unwrap the plastic but its a much nicer experience.
Now that little important thing is out the way, lets continue from where we left off last time shall we…
We didn’t win any cash in the Apps4Edmonton competition even though we managed to get the most community votes so thanks to everyone who did vote for us. We rented an apartment for 3 months and enjoyed our time in Edmonton working on our competition entry, spending time with family & friends, soaking up the fringe festival and looking for work opportunities.
I had bought a beautiful new Lanyachtz longboard skateboard when we first arrived to get around and explore the city until we found a car and was keen to put it through its paces in the 20km annual River Of Green Ultimate Endurance (ROGUE) race through Edmonton’s beautiful pedestrian and bike trail system. Unfortunately it had rained a little the night before and I took a nasty spill when I hit a mossy patch at the bottom of a steep section that ripped both my hands up (I didn’t have gloves yet) quite badly. I ended up needing surgery and 4 pins sticking out of my right wrist which meant I had to wear a darth vader cast for 6 weeks and made all the moving and driving we had to do quite a bit more challenging.
After 3 months in Edmonton,with winter approaching, we decided to follow the original plan and head west towards the coast and a job possibility for me at northStudio in Victoria on Vancouver Island. I had gone down to Calgary to present a brief session at Drupalcamp Alberta and met some of the North Studio guys and lined up an interview.
There was also the small matter of another little one on the way which was both a thrilling and daunting thing and we looked forward to settling somewhere that we could call home after being transient for 5 months since Cape Town.
We had never been to “the island” before but had heard only great things and so were looking forward to a new place with new challenges.
As with any new place it took some time to settle in but we found a nice house to rent with a beautiful apple tree close to the majestic forests in Mt Doug Park. Victoria is a nice size city and felt like a gentler starting point to Vancouver’s big city - at least while we found our feet in Canada and settled enough to have another baby.
I enjoyed the work at North Studio and gained some good development experience building, theming, fixing and supporting a range of Drupal sites. I had wanted more experience working with a larger team and I enjoyed learning from and working with a range of talented people.
It was also great being more immersed in the active drupal community on the west coast and I attended the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Vancouver in 2010 and presented a case study of our fringefest app. I also attended the PNWDS the following year in Portland and had a great time.
During winter I began exploring the local mountain 3hrs away and realized a lifetime ambition to start snowboarding. I am still in absolute awe of how much fun it is and now with two seasons under my belt, Mt Washington is definitely one of my favourite places on the island (if not the planet). The memories of insane summit views, hidden powder stashes, hectic tree runs, downhill bombs, mellow carves and fun times solo, with family and with buddies continues to keep me smiling and looking forward to the next season.
Autumn Indigo Coppen was born on April 30th 2011 in our home by natural birth and has been another amazing light in our lives. Angella was an amazing warrior and the experience of giving birth at home was a very special one for us. Autumn has just turned one year old and is a source of ongoing amusement and absolute joy to us. Seeing her interactions and developing relationship with her sister Aurora is such a sweet thing to witness. She has a strong set of lungs but is sleeping through the night in her own room which is great.
Aurora continues to grow and sprout into her own amazing little person and turns 4 in a month or so. She is a creative, inventive and very funny little girl with a storytelling streak a mile wide, an ever expanding vocabulary and a level of confidence far exceeding her size. Her questions are endless and her world can be spectacular to behold at times.
Angella is an amazing mother and wife and I am grateful for her patience, love and strength. She is still creating beautiful drawings which will make their way onto her new site we are busy working on at angellacoppen.com. There is a whole lot of her lovely new work posted in the design section on the new site.
This really is a spectacularly beautiful part of the world as we re-affirmed when my folks came to visit for a few weeks and we headed up island and explored Tofino, Lake Cowichan and Parksville. Some of the old growth forest explorations and island dotted sunsets were entirely soul soothing.
I left working full time for North Studio 2 months ago and have been enjoying working from home and spending more quality time with my family. I like to work at odd hours and its been nice to shuffle around when I work - with kids now it seems that the night owl shift is often most productive - and I find I am getting much more exercise and balancing life and work better
iaminawe are working on some fun new client projects and I have finally had time to work on a personal portfolio/resume site at greggcoppen.com as well as getting the iaminawe site nearer to launch.
The new iaminawe site built in Drupal 7, is hosted on a linode LEMP stack, is managed by Barracuda/Octopus Aegir and powers the main company site and each of our personal sites through the domain access module. Its a whole lot more maintainable than this wordpress blog became and we look forward to posting stuff more often.
I had a really interesting and enlightening time at Drupalcon in Denver in March. I met a lot of legendary drupalistas (including Dries), learned a ton from the sessions, made some great new friends, tasted some great craft beers and found out that this is a great time to be looking for work if you have Drupal skills. Most of the top companies at the conference seemed to be on fairly aggressive hiring sprees and it was great to know that there are some great employment options out there.
I returned home having made some great contacts, with over 40 business cards (I did the freelancer speed dating BOF that probably accounted for half of those), inspired by the Drupal community and eager to try some of the new stuff I learned.
Its good to be busy, summer is finally here in Victoria, the cherry blossoms and sun are out and life is good and there are some interesting possibilities for the road ahead.
]]>Well it seems strange that the last blog post written here was all about moving because once again that’s what this one is about. Our nomadic notions kicked in again but this time involved a significantly bigger mission than moving over a few websites between servers.We decided to make the big move from South Africa to Canada to introduce Aurora to her Canadian family and explore what opportunities may exist north of the equator for us.
But first let me fill you in on some developments since the last blog post written here oh so long ago. With the arrival of little Aurora there was joyful chaos that made all night creative sessions and crazy deadlines that much harder to achieve.
We kicked off 2009 with an awesome theatre project called “Tree Boy” that called for some quite complex multi projector animated visuals and a shiny new poster. The show was written by my brother Neil and he was quite a perfectionist which made for many late (but fun) nights.The show ran at the Natal Playhouse and we were very proud of the results and will post a full case study soon. The video above gives a taste and there are more visuals over at designindaba.com/news-snippet/animation-meets-theatre.
I was offered the position of Web Producer for Design Indaba and I happily spent the next 14 months working for Interactive Africa on this high profile website.”It was a great experience and I have a huge amount of respect for Ravi & Leshni Naidoo and their talented team. I will post a case study of the site and write more about the experience soon. You can view the result that was created in drupal at designindaba.com.
Angella continued to fly the iaminawe flag high with new album art and packaging for Goldfish and their remixes album, some awesome identities, a few epic posters and a beautiful book cover, all that will be featured soon on our new site currently in development.
Nearly 2 months ago, Angella, Aurora and I tearfully said goodbye to our epic view and creative haven of 8 years perched on the Fish Hoek mountainside overlooking the sea near Cape Town in South Africa. We had many happy years at that house and it was sad to say goodbye to so many friends and memories. We sold off our stuff, spent a month with family in Durban, enjoyed 2 weeks of World Cup and then headed for Vancouver via London.We spent 10 days in Vancouver exploring the city before moving over to Edmonton to visit family and to get settled for a few months. The first day we were in Edmonton we saw an app building competition called Apps4Edmonton being advertised in the newspaper and we decided to put our first month in Canada towards building a web and iphone app to start making some contacts.
The city released open data feeds for developers to access and we decided to build a web/phone app for the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre festival, North America’s longest running and biggest theatre festival that just kicked off today.
We used a combination of open source tools including Drupal to pull the data feeds and build the web app at Fringefest.ca and then Titanium to code and compile the i-phone app to interact with it. The web and mobile app allow visitors to the Fringe to view a full schedule and directory of shows and allows them to rated and reviewed by the community. They are also packed with interactive maps, useful info, contact info and tools to monitor the festival buzz. The app is available for iphone for $1.99 on the AppStore.
We won the Official Fringe Special Distinction Award with our entry and the right to use the official wordmark on our application which was awesome. Our app is also in the running for some of the $50 000 worth of cash prizes being awarded at the end of the main competition at the end of the month. Please help us in the competition by filling out this simple registration form and then voting on the app. We dont know many people in Edmonton yet so are hoping that you the internet can help us out 
Its been getting some great coverage with a radio interview on CBC yesterday, an article in the Edmonton Journal covering our story and another on the app
There is a TV interview with Global HD a little later today and its great to see the exposure starting to take its effect on site traffic and app sales.
Lastly its worth mentioning that we have been busy working on a new iaminawe site in Drupal. Its taken a while to migrate all the old stuff off this blog and we are aiming for a mid September launch date with all the work completed over the last 2 years being added. It will replace this rather dated blog.
Follow me on twitter @skabenga or Angella @angellaiaminawe to keep up to date with our news and future releases.
]]>Well I have fallen into the trap of waiting too long to update this blog…with each day that passes it becomes more difficult to do until eventually the relatively simple task of writing a few lines about a few projects morphs itself into a huge task destined for extreme procrastination. So this post is just a general ice breaker to feel like we can chat again … you know… make logging in a little less awkward :)There has been so many cool projects completed over the last year and it feels like so little time to post them on the blog. This has been a year of changes and so I preclude the next flurry of blog postings with a bit of backstory as to why things have been so quiet on our little space on the web. These are not excuses as much as they are happy reasons for inactivity … or something like that
- www.animationsa.org - a Drupal powered community site for the Animation Industry in South Africa - recently launched
- www.theblackheartgang.com - wordpress powered site for this infamous trio - received over 230 gigs of traffic in 3 days…
- www.mzikishareblock.co.za - wordpress powered quick site for a Hluhluwe based Game Farm - more an internal tool than public site.
- www.pocko.com - recent updates to this London based Artist Agency/Publishing house , also a wordpress/custom artist management system.
- neil.iaminawe.com - a wordpress blog site for my brother with his always amusing stories and articles.
- www.xamtours.co.za - a Drupal powered site for this local Tours & Safaris company.
Then there were some pretty exciting animations mashing up 7de Laan (local soapie) flavoured TV remixes and footage we shot out in Delft, for the dark Afrikaans drama Steriel. The show featured an ambitious three projector and live feed stage setup and is currently on Tour in Europe after a successful second run in Cape Town.There were some animated panoramic park scenes and a finale involving portraits in the falling snow that we created for the German Opera, Werther, performed at the Artscape Opera.Then another highlight of the year was the animation we created for “The Greensman” , a compact fast paced piece of theatre being performed every day at the Green Point Stadium as part of the stadium tour. The animation was starkly styled white linework on a black background and the huge screen is pretty impressive in the cavernous theatre built in a piece of the old stadium.Thats some of the highlights of the year so far but we will be posting pictures and videos of some of the above projects and talking about them in a bit more detail when we can spend some time. There have been a few more projects than that, but some are still top secret and others will make their way onto the blog in good time.Watch this space…
]]>
www.artskinz.co.za
Unfortunately this site is no longer live as Artskinz had to shut up shop. I will move it over onto a test server at some point but until then this link is unavailable to look at. Sorry. Iaminawe recently created the website and identity for new startup, Artskinz, which manufactures high quality protective and stylish vinyl covers for your i-pod’s and laptops.The designs for the skins are cherry picked from a range of Cape Town’s hottest illustrators and fine artists including superheroes like Kronk, The Black Heart Gang, Mine Jonker, Love and Hate Collective, Carmen Ziervogel, Rick Treweek, Mikey Staal and host of other talent. There are also designs from underground graffitti maniacs Faith 47, Senyol, Warren Lewis and Wealz 130 with new designs and artists being added all the time.The site was created by integrating OSCommerce with Wordpress to create an online shop with blog attached. I won’t go so far as to say the integration was a painless one and I found trying to skin OScommerce effectively to be very tricky.We have a few designs in the range with more coming soon. Check them out and click to order any of the designs or see larger versions.
These designs came from our range of Cityflauge T-shirts so we have full cityflauge uniforms now
iaminawe recently completed graphic work on Goldfish’s second album including the print and multimedia components of the release. These included a poster, a tablecloth, a t-shirt, concert banners and bonus CD-ROM content containing a half hour live set of the fish in action. The CD is literally packed to the edge with tunes and goodies and we are proud to see our work getting exposure alongside the fishes beats and jazzy vibes. Keep reading to see some of the new designed stuff.
Angella also recently designed a limited edition hand screenprinted poster as part of the Sonic Fest Rock Poster Art Exhibition that there are some photos of here and we still have about 50 of these posters left.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but these dudes have been quietly taking the world by storm. This new album “Perceptions of Pacha” made with international label Pacha is already going through the roof with a recent US/UK tour playing Pacha NYC, Pacha London and launching their album at the Miami winter music conference alongside a host of electronic musics biggest gurus. Here is cool pic of the fishies next to one of the Jungle Brothers - note Daves styling new tee. True blue brutha.
The international release of the album is going to feature a second disc mixed by some of the top DJ’s in the Pacha stable.
With tours of the US, European performances with Paul Van Dyk and Pete Tong and a 3 month summer residency in Ibiza secure for 2008, the fish are out the bowl and into a bigger tank. Check some of these upcoming gigs
|
GOLDFISH @ THE ASSEMBLY | Cape Town | ||
|
GOLDFISH WITH FEDDE LE GRANDE AND AXWELL | Ibiza | ||
|
GOLDFISH @ ROCKINRIO FESTIVAL | Madrid | ||
|
GOLDFISH @ PACHA IBIZA WITH AXWELL AND SWEDISH HOUSE MAFIA | Ibiza | ||
|
GOLDFISH WITH BASEMENT JAXX @ PACHA IBIZA | Ibiza | ||
|
GOLDFISH WITH FAITHLESS @ PACHA IBIZA |
The banners and tablecloth were for this years packed Old Mutual Summer Sunset Concert gig at Kirstenbosch which saw about 6000 people packing this beautiful park in Cape Town and dancing the day away with Dom and Dave and special guest artists Sakhile, Tony Paco, Wayne Bosch, Monique and Max Vidima.
I didnt VJ for the fish this year and a matrix of LED lights replaced the matrix of LCD Flatscreens we had last time but we were stoked to see the new artwork huge on stage in Ross Helliers awesome photos some of which are showcased below.
To read more about this gig check out Goldfishes myspace blog on the kirstenbosch party . For more photos on facebook and over here
And of course visit the fish at the site we designed for them at www.goldfishlive.com
]]>
Iaminawe created these two animations for production company Atomik Pictures for an exciting new skateboarding documentary called MonuMental: Re-riding History. The Red Bull initiated documentary follows seven of South Africa’s best young skateboarders as they ollie, kickflip, carve and grind their way through, over and on some of South Africa’s most formidable Apartheid era monuments.
Written and Directed by Amanda Evans, the documentary has some beautiful 16mm footage of the skaters as they travel around South Africa from monument to monument meeting with controversial figures and severe but skateable architecture from South Africas dark past. For these young skaters, it is a chance to learn about their history as much as it is a chance to skate where no skater has gone before.
The animation for the documentary was used to fill in important historical elements relevant to the monument that was being skated. With a tight budget and timeframe, iaminawe helped to organise the animators needed to complete the required amount of animation. Each animator took on a scene or two and the end result in the documentary was very successful.
[See post to watch Flash video]
The first piece was about Apartheid struggle hero Robert Sobukwe and his time spent on Robben Island.
Sobukwe was kept in solitary confinement but permitted certain privileges including books, newspapers, civilian clothes, bread etc. He lived in a separate area on the Island where he had no contact with other prisoners. The only contacts were his secret hand signals whilst outside for exercise.
Source Wikipedia, read more about Robert Sobukwe there
We worked with talented Durban illustrator Colwyn Thomas from stonethecrows . Colwyn did the drawings of Robert Sobukwe and the background elements and I did the compositing in After Effects.
[See post to watch Flash video]
The second piece was set in Union Square where an oversize bust of Jannes Strijdom sternly kept an eye on passers by until 2001 when the parking garage roof below it crumbled and the bust fell through several parking garages below. Ironically it fell exactly on the 40th anniversary of South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth to pursue policies of racial segregation. Read more about the incident here and see a photo of it here. Angella did the illustrating on this and and I did the compositing in After Effects.
Unfortunately we did not get a copy of the awesome documentary soundtrack laid down by Fletcher from African Dope but Justin de Nobrega (AKA Considerate Builders Scheme) was kind enough to let us use some of his awesome atmospheric electronica from his album Exit to Riverside.
]]>
www.runwaymusic.co.za
Runway Music is an independent music company based in Cape Town promoting South African and African music. Iaminawe built this wordpress powered site for Runway to manage their new releases and artists with.
The site features video and audio from a number of up and coming young artists including mad stuff from Cape Town party people Balkanology
and Joburg hip-hopper Lungelo. There is also some cool stuff from a couple of up and coming Zambian artists and the label Runway Music looks set to take off this 2008.
www.sshadoworkss.co.za
Iaminawe created this wordpress site (no longer live) for legendary Cape Town underground event/tour/artist management outfit, sShadoworkss. These guys are the shadows behind some of Cape Town’s great parties and pulsing electronic music scene and they know how to keep the basslines rolling, the glitches glitching and the dancefloor rocking until the early hours. These behind the scenes shadows and their musical minions are exploring new areas of the sonic frontier with their fearless approach to redefining genres and inventing new ones.
South African radio stations are terrified of them and with good reason… reprezenting sonic terrorists The Real Estate Agents, apartheid afterparty glitch-a-delic-dance techno maniacs Sweat X, grand master turntablist Sibot, god of glitch Markus Wormstorm, jazz hop rockers Chromoscience, smooth groover DJ Low, improv jazzy beat-breakers Closet Snare and audio-visual tricknowledgy from Sibot and VJ Storyboy This shits too boomspastic and fantastic for general public consumption but if you dig it, you really dig it.I had the pleasure of VJing for a couple of parties for sShadoworkss this year alongside Cape Town superhero visualists Storyboy and Grrrl. It was great to project visuals this last year as 2007 saw a really cool variety of international masters like DJ’s Krush , Diplo and Jazzy Jay playing in SA and ubertalented local beat maestro’s and electro kids like Humanizer, Considerate Builders Scheme, Miss H, Marshall and Klinikal still keeping floors going into the early hours.The year climaxed with an outstanding party to celebrate Krushed and Sorted’s 10 year anniversary at the Assembly in Cape Town and pushing the bar up to the roof was Fletcher’s hour long Audio Visual set cutting and scratching all manner of pop culture video perfectly sync’ed to his rumbling basslines and foundation shaking beats. It meandered from politics to viral video to live bellydancers to classic animation and was a seamless blend of great original drum and bass and cleverly selected footage that provided a thoughtful and hilarious narrative. Respek Fletch!! People dancing and watching and laughing is a great combo to get right.Here were a couple of the years killer parties that I played visuals for as VJ Skabenga in 2007.
[See post to watch Flash video]
- DJ Krush @ the Biscuit Mill, Cape Town (video)
- E.D.I.T @ The Waiting Room, Cape Town
- Red Bull BCONE After Party with DJ Jazzy Jay, Carfax, Johannesburg
- Earthdance 2007 Festival, Cape Town
- Long Street Festival 2007, Cape Town
- Are Friends Electric 88 Lounge, johannesburg
- Krushed & Sorted 10 Year Anniversary, The Assembly, Cape Town
Those shadows know how to throw a party.
]]>
www.pocko.com
Pocko is an independent press and a creative agency based in London (and now also in Milan). As legend goes, Pocko was a Hungarian acrobat and the first person to cross the Niagara Falls walking on a tight rope. She was a fearless risk-taking individual who never looked down.
The new website was a complex undertaking and encompassed effectively managing and displaying over 45 artist portfolios and 23 pocket size pocko books already been published by Pocko. Iaminawe planned and implemented a web system and strategy that allows Pocko and the numerous artists it represents to easily keep the high quality artwork on the site up to date.
This included a system for potential clients browsing the site for artists to build their own custom portfolios that were output to high quality branded pdfs for easy printing. The cool minimal design was created by Olga from Pocko.
There are a few cool South African artists represented by Pocko already including the awesome Am I Collective and the very talented Joey Hifi.
We have been invited to submit a portfolio and are officially Pocko’s web partners which we think is great as they are a cool company and we like working with them.
Some of the key features of the site include:
- Artist admin area to allow video and image portfolios to be kept up to date by artists and overseen by admin
- Support for FLV and mov video in all portfolios
- Random Featured Artist banners
- Custom lightbox tool for collecting favourite artist images and then saving to branded printable pdf file for easy printing.
- Full newsletter/mailing list manager for 15000+ list including success tracking.
- Full RSS Feed driven news feed system for managing articles and site content
- Dynamic flash flipbooks for all the books published. (Waiting on images to finish these)
- Custom Ajax Gallery system allowing a range of media and no page refreshes.
- Search Engine optimised pages and content
The site was an excellent experiment in combining several powerful open source systems with a custom built one.
Open source systems used in this project were wordpress and phplist
]]>iaminawe recently completed work for Pandamonium Productions creating a four and a half minute animation to be used in the testing of a new potential HIV Vaccine at various centres around South Africa.
[See post to watch Flash video]
This was undoubtedly one of the most challenging briefs we have come across so far and included creating an animated sequence that in very simple terms explains how the very complex virus works. It was important to explain what the virus did and the possible benefits of a vaccine yet also had to be very clear that this was undergoing trials and was in no way a miracle cure (yet).
The client requested a very simple and informative animation style and every storyboard and script change had to be approved by an ethics committee based in the USA. Needless to say this stretched the whole process out over about 6 months of “hurry up and wait” but was an important step in making sure that the script and visuals were understandable and that the message was clear.
To contextualise what you are seeing, the animation posted here was edited into a 20 minute live action video that comprehensively covered what being a part of the trials would mean. Unfortunately this does not have the final soundtrack and effects applied but you get the idea.
Angella designed the people and scenarios in Illustrator and I animated and edited them in After Effects and Final Cut Pro.
Did I mention that the animation had to be created in 5 languages !!
Seriously… English, Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa and Tswana…. it was a mission but we made it in the end…whew..