OVEN DIGITAL, London

Midway through 2000, I was recruited to work as graphic designer for the Oven Digital UK office from July till the American owned company ran into "sudden financial trouble" and shut down it's overseas operations in January 2001. The London office was a pool of creativity and amazing people and as such it was a sad loss for everyone involved that it all came to an end so suddenly.

During my time there the main project I worked on was a contract called "One Cosmos" one of the most ambitious and ultimately misguided multimedia projects I have ever, ever heard of. The project aimed to "encompass all known knowledge in the universe" and as such tied up all the Oven offices in its production and was ultimately responsible in no small part to their demise. Oven London was required to produce the Known Universe section of the project. Working from an artist's various images of the universe (and interpretations of the outer-universe) I was given the task of creating a convincing transition between scenes ranging from staggering to minimal detail as if we were flying through the universe. I subsequently learnt Adobe After Effects and managed to create a convincing (if somewhat large file-sized) simulation. As you can imagine, this is like a kid's dream come true, getting paid to go to work and make animations of light-speed transitions - woohoo!

Other projects I was involved with while there included a flash christmas card where you entered a small message to a friend and Santa then pissed his message in the snow. I created the graphics for this project and liaised with the flash programmers to make this strange and entertaining card work.