We’re in the final hours of work before the launch of a major new client’s website. Empty Street did the database and design, and we came in to create the web video and Flash elements. 

Lately we’ve been trying to educate clients on how to embrace Flash without causing all sorts of usability and visibility problems. We’ve developed a pretty great workflow and design solution, which we’re using for the very first time on this web design project.

This particular project really pushed us, and I can’t wait until we get signoff from the client so I can tell you more about it. This project will probably end up as a whitepaper on the Genius Monkeys website at a later date.

Today we did some post production work on a PSA for the Jewish Film Festival in Los Angeles (May 11th, 2008) to help out a friend who worked on “Couch Cases”.

There wasn’t a lot of heavy lifting needed, as the spot centers around a live action puppet show. It should be up on YouTube soon, though, and it was a fun couple of hours.

Kathi, Brandon, and I have been editing the episodes for “Couch Cases”. It’s going extremely well, and we’re all surprised (in a good way) that our little low budget indie comedy is coming together as if it were a well-oiled show on a major network.

Today we worked on episode 2, which includes some really awesome flashbacks to a Mexican restaurant experience gone wrong. It was looking really good, but then we added our music track… brilliant!

How we got this music was a happy accident- while we were on set, a mariachi band came in to rehearse. I paid them $40 to record them rehearsing (once we were done with our shoot), and for the rights to use the recordings in our show. We had them play some traditional (royalty free) songs for us. They were awesome!

And the music adds a wonderful dimension to the storytelling. 

We’ve added yet another Adobe CS3 suite to our company. Adobe’s tools- After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash help us create almost every project we do here at Genius Monkeys. Even on a high end film project, we generally do a lot of work in CS3.

In other news, we have a new blog format, courtesy of Continue Reading »