Samuel Wan : News, Information and Resources

Expression by Proxy Source Code!

If you haven't visited my almost-award-winning project, "Expression by Proxy",
you should check it out here. Someone asked about the source code last month, and at my request, he wrote back today to remind me about posting the source code online. I'm still working on the "Tao of Actionscript" book, so I don't have much time to clean up the source file. You'll probably get access to a big zip file by the end of the week. I'm taking a break from writing about Actionscript tonight, so here's the story behind "Expression by Proxy", and why I plan to release the source code:

Back in the summer of 2000, when I'd just graduated from college, my Flash skills were pretty good, and not just in programming either :) I had started freelancing on small projects. I had just received a standing ovation at the Web World conference. I was in the middle of writing for the Flash 5 Magic book. Things looked promising!

The previous two years of college had been very difficult, and I had spent every night for 2 years learning Flash and web development on my own. The fact that I had acquired all this skill and didn't even have my own website seemed a bit ironic. But a website needs solid content, right? My photoshop mentor once told me that every successful design tells a story, but I didn't really have anything to say. Then I remembered an experience recorded in my journal...

My undergraduate degree in health information management requires a 2-month management internship at another hospital. We have to spend time under the mentorshop of a hospital administrator before we're allowed to graduate. So, three months before graduating in 2000, I spent February and March working with the Executive Director of Information Services at the Detroit Medical Center (which is actually a huge group of 8 major hospitals). Let me tell you, management is fun if you don't mind attending spending 6 hours in meetings every day. I have never sat through so many meetings in my life. Most of our time was spent debating about JCAHO compliance, medical records processing, archive management, employee conflict-resolution, medicare / medicaid policies, and more health insurance abbreviations than you can find in a 26 character alphabet!!!

At one of these meetings, I got bored and started writing down what happened at the airport, on my way to Detroit. At the Mississippi airport, I had run into an old high-school friend. She was a professional violinist, and I used to play the viola. We used to play at the same gigs to make good money during high school: professional orchestra performances, christmas chamber music, small quartet performances, church events, etc. Her dad was a music minister and my viola instructor was the head of the local musician's union. Now, Mississippi is not a popular destination for classical musicians, so you'd see the same group of performers at each job. It also helps if your instructor knows all the pros in the state :)

So anyways, I met Leanne at the Mississippi airport, and it turned out we were taking the same flight to Chicago! (I would transfer to Detroit later.) We started reminiscing about our high school days, swapping news about friends we hadn't seen for years. I told her I'd stopped playing classical music for personal reasons after high school. I told her why I allowed my viola technique to deteriorate. It was very inspiring to meet a fellow musician again, to talk about topics few people really care about unless they go through at least 10 years of classical training. For me, the conversation felt like a splash of reality, as I slipped back into a creative mindset that I had thrown away during college.

I don't think I realized how wrong a path I'd chosen until we landed in Chicago. Leanne and I stopped briefly at the Midway airport cafe to chat before she took the train to Kalamazoo. The cafe almost feels like an outdoor venue because the main terminal at Midway airport is an immense hollow structure with high ceilings and brightly-lit windows. The details of what happened are described in "Expression by Proxy", so I won't go into the whole story here. However, the significance of this event is that it woke me up. I was heading into a management career, prepped and molded to climb up the corporate ladder of the healthcare industry. Leanne's music blew away four years of uninspired choices, and I realized these things as I wrote them down during a management meeting in the basement of the Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Several months after graduation, I was working on the Flash 5 Magic book one night, similar to the way I'm working on the Object Oriented Actionscript book tonight. I needed to take a break, wanted to build a complete website for once, and looked in my journal for inspiration. I came back to the description of what had happened in Chicago, and remembered the intensity of the event. To me, the story described a moment in a person's life when a choice is made between the security of docile ambitions and the uncertainty of creative expression. It raises the question of how hard you're willing to work for a dream that doesn't mean much to anyone else, how hard you're willing to work for your own voice.

I ended up working for three days and three nights on the project. First, I asked the band called Natasha's Ghost for permission to use a song from their album (I'm a HUGE fan and became friends with the lead singer in San Diego... that's another story). Then, I found other bits of personal writing, stock photography, sheet music, and the Poetica Chancery font. The first few hours were spent in Photoshop, creating the artwork for the site. My strongest design influence at the time came from Irene Chan's projects at Eneri.net (she's disappeared from the web now), so I focused especially on rich colors and textured symbols. After the main artwork was done, I created the first narrative sequence, "Chapter 1", as an animation scene in Flash 5. Other ideas came up, and I re-engineered some code from earlier experiments to create chapters 2 and 3. By the nineteenth version, I finally had a personal website. I only posted the URL once, at the Were-Here.com forums.

It's been two years since the creation of Expression by Proxy. Again, I've graduated with a new degree and a new perspective. Again, I'm working on a book during summer vacation. Two-year cycles seem to be a recurring pattern. I'd like to build one more summer art project before I find a full-time job, something to capture the important moments during my time at the School of Information.

You are welcome to download the source code when I post it sometime before Friday, because there's no reason for me to keep it anymore. I hope you find some interesting bits of techniques in there. Please don't rip off the artwork, and don't ask for the music files because I don't have permission to distribute the originals. If you learn something from the files, or if it helps you build an interesting project, feel free to post the URL in the comments section :)

Regards,
-Sam