Online Portfolio of Michael Wach

Charity Pictures is a local Phoenix nonprofit organization “designed to improve the quality of life for civilization”. Charity Pictures also severely needed a website makeover. This is a project I’ve been plotting and doodling ideas for over a year since they were originally going to have me do it. There were tons of ideas for designs. We needed something that looked cool and related to motion pictures.

The original idea was to have an entire desk with interactive props sitting on top of it. Each prop, such as a camera, or a reel of film, would take you to a gallery related to that medium when you clicked on it. The challenge was taking a real photo of a charity pictures desk and cutting out each prop in a way that could later be programmed interactive. If you’ve visited the Read More...

Not even a week before the official launch of demitregarza.com, I met with this local Phoenix visual effects artist, Demitre Garza. Not only was this week his 21st birthday, but he was also graduating with is bachelors at Collins College. Now he needed a place on the web to show off his demo reels. I’m not the only person that knows how to use Photoshop; Demitre began putting together a design. The original plan was to have about four or five different pages: home, reel #1, reel #2, resume, and contact. The design was good, but we didn’t use it.

After almost four days (eight different website designs), we began to worry if the design would take longer than the actual website development. I sat down in front of Photoshop that evening and created another new website design (Design 9). This time, I made two pages. Each page Read More...

By request I’ve begun developing a Flash video player with slow motion playback cababilities. There are a number of ways to achieve this effect using either Flash or Flex. One way to get slow motion is to simply keep pausing and playing the video at a specific rate. Another way I’ve discovered is to record the currently playing area of the video stream into a bitmap data cache. Then you could just pause the currently playing video and overlay the cached bitmap data, so it appears as if the bitmap data was the actual video object, even though it’s not. Since the second method sounds much more complicated, I decided to give the first method a shot. Surprisingly, the results weren’t as bad as I expected. I have embedded the resulting SWF demonstration in this Read More...

Moving on with life from the disaster of Spring 2008, I landed what I think to be the coolest job yet. The deal is, work from home, and design mind blowing web stuff. I believe the company, “Ballroom Dance Channel”, is a primarily California based company that obviously deals with dancing but also sells their own how-to dance videos. The guy that hired me is actually also a student at UAT, so the interview was on campus. The guy called me at like 7 in the evening and scheduled an interview with me for that same night, about an hour later. At about 9 o’clock, I walked out of my school with what I think to be the best job I’ve had yet.

The Read More...

Now that my semester is over, I have a lot more free time to work on all of those long lost projects. I’m basically finished with my website for now, besides going back and uploading older content. So the next project is my dad’s website.

For those of you that don’t know, Wach Gallery is the name of my father’s business. He buys and sells “Fine 19th Century, 20th Century & Contemporary Photography”. Last year I built him a custom tailored PHP and MySQL content management system. Since then, I’ve learned a lot of new things. Now, I plan to take this intermediate site to professional.

The front end mainly Read More...