The Salton Sea - She Ages Well

I know what you are going to say if you’ve ever been here in the near past. She ages well? The putrid, disgusting, smelly, hot, and downright vile hole in the middle of the Anza Borrego Desert that just so happens to be filled with a man-made lake. The one that with the right wind can stink up the entire Los Angeles basin in the hot miserable summer. Yes this one. Let me explain.

Water runs downhill and one of the main sources for this water is the New River which originates in Mexico and consists mostly of agricultural runoff, sewage, and industrial waste. It is often referred to as the most polluted river in North America. While it is said that The Salton Sea may have more fish in it than any other lake in the United States, each year hundreds of thousands to millions of fish die when the warm water and algae blooms, fed by poop river, suck the oxygen out of the water.

Smoked fish, anyone?

The Salton Sea was at one time a mecca for the glamorous. A place to fish and water ski, or hangout with the likes of the Rat Pack. Things were so groovy in the 40′s and 50′s that the place was on its way to becoming the next Palm Springs. People started buying up lots left and right, all wanting a piece of this new and exciting resort in the desert. Then as water moves downhill, poop floats down stream too.

The salinity of the old Colorado river delta and farmland runoff has turned the Salton Sea in to a body of water saltier than the Pacific Ocean. With the low oxygen levels during the summer months the only fish known to survive the conditions are Tilapia and every year these are the fish that end up rotting on shore; some survive only because they are in shallow waters where wave activity helps the oxygen flow. They must reproduce at an amazing rate because every summer, millions more die and everything stinks again. If you think Dean Martin is going to hangout in a place that smells of rotten fish, think again.

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Wasteland’s Rainbow, Bombay Beach

This leads me to where I was going with my statement. Where most would see an abandoned trailer park, or a home that a family clearly resides in covered in graffiti or worse and feel a sense of dread and despair, us photographers find an absolute beauty. A stunner who may have a lot of mileage on her, but oh what she can teach you. When referring to a person who ages well we generally talk about people who age the right way to us visually, but what about those things like the Salton Sea that age best? It isn’t about if it ages right, but that it ages true and with authority. Whole neighborhoods flooded and then left half-buried in sand and dead fish when the water recedes. Once swanky yacht clubs that were hangouts for only the coolest of cats are now fenced up or an empty lot with only the imported palm trees that once served as a decorative beacon swaying in the hot breeze. From their fronds you can clearly hear their death rattle. Wouldn’t this truly be aging to the fullest?

Breakwater at Bombay Beach, Salton Sea

I hope The Salton Sea can be saved, at least for the people who by now don’t have much of a choice but stick with her. They’ve done it for much of their lives. She would be sexy and alluring again. She would attract celebrities and sports stars. The fishing would again bring tens of thousands annually and kids like the young Sonny Bono could learn to water ski here. Yes, she would be the sparkling jewel of the desert, but we must remember she is a fugazi: an accident gone bad. If this happens and we are rubbing elbows with the likes of Snooki while sipping Mai Tais at the North Shore Yacht Club, many of us will be secretly longing for the times when it looked like a wasteland to the rest, because to us she truly is beautiful just the way she is.

All Star Glass Features My Photo On Thirty Billboards

All Star Glass has thirty billboards up right now using one of my photos. The image includes my niece Makayla, but don’t let the mock miss fool you. She’s a stud softball player! This photo of the billboard was taken at State and Kalmia St. The streak of light in the sky is a plane landing at San Diego International Airport.

Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia/New Zealand Chose My Illustration Out of Thousands For Their Cover Story On Google

1.6 Million Australians will be meeting my Google Bot this Sunday as it was chosen as the publication’s cover relating to their article on Google. Good Weekend was allowed access to both Google HQ as well as several of the executives and I’m looking forward to reading what they have to say. It’s an honor that out of thousands of examples of Google’s logo, mine was chosen for the number one spot.

On a side note, this illustration jumped to #1 on DIGG the morning it was posted, completely shutting down the server at the marketing agency I worked at due to the massive flow of traffic it produced. My boss let me go home early that day to an office-wide standing ovation. Boy, that felt good!

What Would Happen if a Tsunami Hit New York City?

There would be perfect surf!

After weeks of work, my new illustration is finished. This is arguably the longest time I’ve spent on one project. I don’t think some of my large wall murals have taken this long to complete.

Global Warming

Update - This illustration won Pacific Magaizine’s curated art contest and was always a popular piece at showings. So glad all that hard work paid off, but it was a labor of love, for sure!

The Story Behind The Creation of McDonald's Online Game, Stack My Mac!

It all started with a different burger. While working as Creative Director for the internet marketing agency, eVisibility, one of my biggest projects was being in charge of the creative for our client, McDonald’s. My first task was the website for their newest burger addition, Angus Third Pounders®. I designed web pages, banner ads, landing pages and coupons for this fresh new product.

Then, in a meeting we started discussing ways in which we could take this project to a new level by incorporating an online casual game into the mix. The following month saw research into the numbers to see if going this route would drive traffic to our goals and beyond, as well as work out how we would build it, if approved by the client. We worked side-by-side with Davis Elen Agency in the Pacific Northwest who had the experience and client knowledge of McDonald’s to help us communicate our goals with them and set timelines and expectations.

From our research at the time, we concluded that online casual gaming was a great viral campaign strategy, and these games reached over one hundred, forty-five million people aged twelve to sixty-five in 2007. Of that figure, over seventy-one million played casual games for one or more hours per week. The growth of the casual gaming audience, the engagement with the medium itself, and the heightened interest from advertisers had contributed to ad revenue projections approaching $400-700 million by 2010. Combining this with the fact that the strong majority of casual gamers (eighty-five percent) would prefer to play free ad-supported games than pay for downloads, and it was clear that online casual gaming is more than just a fun way to pass some time.

Our first direction for the game was going to be to design a first-person shooter-type game so Andre Couturier and I got to work on the mechanics. I had this idea come about because the guy who sat across From me in the office looked like a real life zombie and I thought it would be fun to fend off zombies by using a sling shot to launch burgers at them, feeding them in the process and keeping them at bay. Because my coworker resembled a zombie, he naturally was drawn as a character in the game, tentatively title Feed The Unfed. Then I thought it would be fun to make zombie versions of all my co-workers. This brought everyone into the game and really got coworkers into the creation.

Angus Third Pounders® Feed The Unfed Concept

After some back and forth between, the agencies and McDonald’s we decided not to go the shooter route and instead find another type of casual game so it was back to the drawing board. I thought of this fun bar-top game at a club where my band used to play. It was called Q-Shot and was a game similar to Bejeweled you could play on those Megatouch machines. These games are super fun and really addictive so I thought this could be a good direction for us, if we can be creative and make it our own. The game goes like this: combine three or more of a like icon, (or ingredient of a BigMac®) and you add this to the empty burger area. We all know the jingle, “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.” You are limited in time so each time you create an entire burger you get more as a reward. You score points by combining ingredients, with bonus points for big combos.

The first phase of design centered around creating the game board and the game pieces. Since prizes will be awarded, we worked out the security concerns through encryption and worked on the promotional strategy. Many of the icon pieces were pretty straight forward, with exception of Special Sauce, so this one took creation of many different revisions.

Special Sauce Game Piece Revisions

The addition of a beverage to quench your thirst for making so many BigMac® sandwiches works as a creative way to both add a timer to the game and cross market another product, and adding another sponsor for the game.

To differentiate ourselves from Q-shot or Bejeweled, we added a diagonal move to the gameplay. Then we needed to figure out an option for the timer. A simple timer to me, just lacks creativity and since we have an open canvas to work on, we started putting a lot of thought into how we make this game easy enough for a novice to understand, but adding wrinkles in to the gameplay to make it challenging enough that people would play it over and over again. Working with Andre, we came up with a creative and innovative solution: let’s add a soft drink to wash these burgers down and quench your thirst as you play. This way as you construct burgers, you take sips of the drink. When you complete a burger you pour more of the beverage into your glass, but if you run out of your drink, the game ends. This new game piece allowed for cross marketing another product and added another sponsor to the game! Win-win!

As we moved through creation phases and entered the final one, it was time for making the audio. The part of every project that brings me some of the most joy. Doing voices for characters, customizing explosive sounds, recording pouring soda, slurping straws and ice in a glass. All these things really start to bring the animations to life. Just like editing is such a key importance to video, audio is equally important to everything that moves.

In just four months, Andre and I created two fully operational games, one shooter, one stacker, while also working on the graphics for their web marketing for Angus Third Pounders®. We had a happy client and were really excited to premiere our creation. So we flew to the Pacific Northwest of the US, to Portland, Oregon where we’d introduce Stack My Mac at the NBA Portland Trailblazers Streetball Jam. Along with professional NBA players, there were Star Wars Stormtroopers, full-size dinosaurs, and even Ronald McDonald trying his best to make high score on our game.

Ronald McDonald playing Stack My Mac at the 2008 Portland Trailblazers Streetball Jam. The dude was a natural.

In the end, Stack My Mac was a huge success. Recorded scores on the game reached over two million, proving that players were playing over and over again to earn bragging rights and score prizes from BigMac® or Dr. Pepper® coupons to sporting event tickets. From a marketing standpoint, between our Angus Third Pounders® campaign and Stack My Mac, we exceeded our predicted numbers by over 1,000% for our client.