Andrew Glassner's Recent Work

Here's information on some of my recent work.
You can follow up on most entries by clicking the links.
The pages pointed to here will remain on my site as long as
they are relevant, but the specific links on this page will
be updated from time to time with new items.

Maya Date

I've just released my very first original iPhone application, Maya Date. I wrote the application because I've always loved the beautiful Mayan hieroglyphs, and the creative ways that they kept time. Along the way, I discovered some cool things about the Mayan calendars, and I found some crazy bugs in Apple's calendar software.

This was a lot of fun to write! I got to research the Mayan calendars and spend many rewarding hours studying their hieroglpyhics. Working from historical sources as reference, I drew over 70 original, individual glyphs specifically to look beautiful on the iPhone's screen. It was an intensive learning experience that involved history, art, and programming. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can download the program directly from iTunes by clicking right here, which will take you to the iTunes store!

You can read all about the application and the Mayan calendar systems at the application's support pages here.

Firefly

Here's the cover of my first CD, Firely. I wrote, produced, played, and sang the eight original songs that I included on this disk, ranging from some up-tempo pieces to some slower and more serious songs. I recorded the entire disk in my home studio, using my piano, guitar, and lots of sampled instruments on my computer.

It was a heck of a learning process to dig into the production work, from figuring out a good placement for the microphone to simply managing the many, many computer files. In the midst of the project one of the metal pipes in my computer's power supply cracked, which leaked thick green coolant that oozed all over the insides of the machine! Happily, the computer was just barely still covered by the warranty. Apple replaced the hardware and gave me back my old hard drives, and from those and my backups I was able to recover most of my files.

(photo by Alex Colburn)

New Songs

I've finished up a new batch of songs. Some are uptempo and humorous (or ironic or just playful), and some are slower and more intimate. A few are of the cabaret, or even musical-theater, variety, typically giving some insight into the personality or plans and aspirations of a particular character.

In September 2005 I sang four of my new songs at Tula's Restaurant and Nightclub in downtown Seattle, as part of an evening of different singers. Because Tula's is a jazz place, I wrote a couple of original songs with a more jazzy flavor to them just for this performance. I considered accompanying myself on the piano, but I had the chance to work with a trio, and I thought that would be more fun and would allow me to focus on my singing. Here's a picture of the evening; in this photo the bassist and drummer aren't visible, but they're behind me.

Interactive Storytelling

Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction hit the shelves in March, 2004. Hooray! This book brings together a bunch of ideas I've been thinking about since I worked on my interactive story game Dead Air for the Microsoft Network. My viewpoint is that there's some wonderful hybrid of games and stories out there to be found, but that it's not in plain sight. We've seen lots of creative people try to create interactive stories, but so far we don't have anything that looks like it has the seeds of mainstream, long-term success.

The intent of the book is to clearly explain the tools of story structure and game structure. With both of these in hand, we can see why they've been so difficult to reconcile until now. And by seeing them clearly side-by-side, we can start to think of new kinds of entertainments that will avoid the rocky reefs that have claimed the many stalwart ships of interactive story that have sailed in the past, and chart a course to more rewarding waters.

The book is published by AK Peters. You can buy a copy at your local bookstore, or over at Amazon if you prefer.

Check out the Table of Contents and more information about the book on its own web page.

Morphs, Mallards,
and Montages:
Computer-Aided Imagination

In 1996 I started writing a regular column for the magazine IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. This book (to appear in August 2004) is my third collection of columns, bringing together the last three year's worth of articles. They've all been updated and revised for this

gathering, and include new material that wasn't able to make it into the columns because of space restrictions. Because I believe in the power of visuals as well as the power of words, the book contains over 900 figures. All drawn (or rendered) by me, with loving care for each and every pixel.

Like my storytelling book above, this book is published by AK Peters. It's avaialble now at Amazon. You can read more about the book here.

Cartoon Master
La Coruna, Spain

A group of European countries and companies cooperate every year to produce a series of conferences on the art and business of animation. I was invited to speak at the April 2004

meeting on the future of 3D animation in La Coruna, Spain (you can still download a copy of the PDF of the program).

To say that I had a wonderful time would be understating the case. I got to hang out in Madrid with a friend for a couple of days, and then spend a few days enjoying beautiful weather and stimulating company in the oceanside city of La Coruna (as well as a morning in nearby Santiago). Here are a few photos from my trip:

Crop Circles

Crop circles are a fascinating subject. Whether you believe they're created by artists in the middle of the night, visiting extraterrestrials, both, or neither, there's no doubting that crop formations are frequently beautiful and remarkably diverse.

For my September 2004 and November 2004 CG&A columns, I decided to look into the history and geometry of crop circles. Along the way, I developed a little computer language for capturing the shape of crop formations, which I naturally enough call Crop. You can read a complete description of the Crop language here.

I decided to try out my language by creating a crop formation of my own. There weren't any wheat fields ready for making art in Seattle in February, so a couple of friends and I used a pressure-washer to create a design on the roof of a parking garage. You can see this design above. You can read about how we made it in my November 2004 column, or in my upcoming book Morphs, Mallards, and Montages.