This page is an in-progress catalogue of my work over the past eight years at WET Design in Los Angeles. It comprises a wide range of projects, including interactive prototypes, fountain concepts, and show design. My former role was the director of media design, which included coding, animation, and occasionally building mock-ups with electronics.
Digital Media Experiments
Below you can see some tests over the years incorporating projection, dancers, water, fog, and drips :)
Projection and fog in an acrylic box:

This is a project that evolved as a pitch for an installation for one of WET's clients - it's a tank of water sitting on top a screen/high density LED grid. I coded the visuals in Processing using the pixelflow library. Photo by David Sanders and Lachlan Turczan.
LED tank with actuated valves.
Jewel Visual Development
On the left you can see a 2-dimensional animation I made, and on the right is a recording of the projection slicing through the circle of falling water. As you can see a line becomes a circle as it projects through the cylinder of water. The song is Family Portrait by the band Rachel's. This is only one hypothetical orientation of projector and water - I'm interested to play around with more complex arrangements and multiple projectors.
This is a song called Systems and Layers also by the band Rachel's. The patterns I made here are an abstract reference to the structural lattice work of the building (an airport) and kite strings.
AR Presentation Tool (2013)
This shows one of several app concepts that I have developed at WET to facilitate communication between designers and clients. This app (made in Unity) helps clients understand better the scale and behavior of the water feature as a dynamic, animated sculpture. Because clients are increasingly interested in interactive sculpture, I have been experimenting with the touch-screen interface as an input device. WET design spends a lot of time choreographing its features with international talent including Kenny Ortega (Dirty Dancing, High School Musical), so the interface needs to be able to express that level of sophistication from relatively simple gestures from the user. These examples are still in progress, but they show how the process of designing something as simple as a fountain can involve some complex ideas. This video was shot and edited by David Sanders and Lachlan Turczan.
Animation
The design team at WET creates animations to demonstrate fountain concepts to clients. The animations are used to explain how the fountains move and how they relate to the surrounding environment. I have created many custom tools over the years to help choreograph these water features, exploring a range of ideas from large-scale morphing architectural landscapes made of water to intimate, human-scale dancing fountains.

The images show some of my process while creating these animations - I use Illustrator and After Effects to create animated patterns that map directly to nozzle locations in Maya. In Maya I trigger various pre-simulated water elements based on color information. This workflow allows me to create intricate choreographed water movement.
Sketches, etc.
Below are some of the illustrations and sketches I've drawn for WET for various projects. My goal is to emphasize the drama and beauty of the concept while representing the concept accurately. Sometimes the clients are receptive to a more abstract or stylized aesthetic, so I can use visible pencil marks and painterly color. Sometimes the clients want to see something much more literal, so I have to rely more on computer-generated geometry and photographic textures.

The University of Utah approached WET to design a fountain to commemorate a natural phenomenon on campus called "The Fountain of Ute." There is a mythology surrounding the fountain going back 85 years.

Made with ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and Photoshop.

Made with ballpoint pen, colored pencil, and Photoshop.

Above and below are some sketches I made for an exercise in science fiction protoyping we did as a company. We were asked to think about the future of urban planning and to speculate about some of the sometimes grim realities facing people today. What will people need out of fountains in 30-50 years? I sketched some of the ideas we thought were particularly compelling, such as using water fountains for heating, ventilation, and cooling on top of buildings.

This image represents a sketch style called "interim," which applies to rough concepts. The image is not fully rendered or colored but instead only defines the basic outline of the water shape.

This is a more finished illustration using Maya & Photoshop.


