For the past 20 years I have served as a creative director, multimedia consultant and computer expert to dozens of Fortune 500 companies, advertising agencies, digital start-ups and educational institutions.

In 1986, I began my corporate career working in New York City as a computer graphic artist for consulting giant, Booz Allen. Over the next 15 years, I gained my multimedia experience working with companies such as Apple Computer, Microsoft, TimeWarner, McGraw-Hill, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Bankers Trust, Citicorp, Lehman Brothers, Chase, Chemical, American Express, Canon, Scholastic, Sony, Young & Rubicam, BBDO, Chiat-Day, Saatchi & Saatchi, Grey Advertising, Conde Naste, Times-Mirror, Ziff-Davis and CMGi.

Today, I run my own digital arts training and consulting company in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. I have been working with clients such as the Leaning Institute of America, New York Times, Williamstown Chamber of Commerce, School for International Training, Lenticular Pictures, International Film & Video, Williams College, Buxton School, and Native American performing artist Kenneth Little Hawk.


I am a creative director, art director, instructor, digital filmmaker, web designer, musician and graphic artist who is highly skilled in software such as Final Cut Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Flash, Dreamweaver, Logic, Soundtrack Pro, PowerPoint, Keynote, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark XPress and MS Office. I have complete cross-platform networking experience with PC/MAC and programming with Flash actionscript, javascript, and CSS/HTML. I also have extensive experience producing DVDs, websites, webcasts, and digital video/audio files for the internet and mobile technology (iPod, wireless phones, PDAs, etc.). In respect to large, commercial websites, I am very familiar with design and content management issues using the Vignette StoryServer on the SUN/UNIX computing platform.

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INTERACTIVE DESIGNER & FILMMAKER

I made my first digital movie in 1985 using a program called VideoWorks which became the industry standard multimedia software program known as Macromedia Director. Director allowed me to integrate my enthusiasm for interactive design with my passion for animation & filmmaking. I sought out computer projects that demanded a creative fusion of sound and the moving image. Prior to 1996, I made an entire career working on interactive Director CD-ROM projects and corporate boardroom presentations. After '96, I moved into full-time web design using Flash and digital video to create compelling interactive experiences. When the internet boom ended in 2001, I started up the Pritchard School of Digital Arts and began making my own independent movies on dvd.

MY INFLUENCES

When I was an art major at St. Lawrence University (BA 1983), I became a huge fan of pioneering video artists, Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, as well as, the playful graffiti artist, Keith Haring.



The great Stan Vanderbeek, the visionary multimedia artist and experimental filmmaker, was also a huge influential force. As an interactive designer, I have been heavily influenced by the early work of Clement Mok and greatly inspired by the Macintosh design genius of Bill Atkinson. As a filmmaker, I was weaned on Chuck Jones and the Fleischer Brothers. Most influential has been the cinema verite & direct cinema styles of D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman, as well as, the controversial, Jean-Luc Godard. My current heroes are out and out multi-talented geniuses who write and direct their own work: Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers, and Robert Rodriguez. Of course the master of all filmmaking masters was Charlie Chaplin who not only wrote, edited and directed his own films, but produced, acted and even composed the music!

MY STORY

I was born in New York City in 1961. I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina between the ages of 8 and 12. I was 10 years old when I won my first art contest for designing a poster that depicted a very colorful, Peter Max style, American bald eagle. This was the same year I got my first Slingerland drumset and also began playing the piano. The best part about living in Argentina was that I got to travel throughout South America with my family visiting Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela and Mexico. I loved all the amazing Latin cultures, their histories and especially the cool variety of people. I could speak fluent Spanish by the time I was 12.

After moving back to the states in 1972 and living in Maplewood, NJ for several years, I became captain of my freshman football and baseball teams. I also performed with a money-making rock band playing drums at the local dances. In 1977, my family moved to Williamstown, Mass., where I finished my junior and senior year playing football, serving as class president and playing in a 22 piece jazz band that toured the Berkshires. I won an outstanding musicianship award my senior year for drumming at the All-State Jazz Festival held at the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

While attending St. Lawrence University (1979-83), I was a Dean's List student who played in several rock and jazz bands. After my sophomore year, I became an art major who got completely immersed in the emerging arena of video art and short avant garde films. I made my first movie in January 1983 when I was awarded a grant to film in China as part of an educational group that traveled to Beijing, Xian, Loyang, Nanching and Shanghai. I also got to visit Tokyo, Japan where I would have loved to stay and learn all about the Kabuki Theatre. After graduation I went on to teach video classes at the Academy of Television Arts in Boston while living near the newly formed MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. In 1983, the multimedia computer revolution was just beginning to take off. Some of the projects that were being developed at the Media Lab were extremely inspiring and I began to get curious about using a computer in a creative way.

Between 1984-85, I returned to St. Lawrence (SLU) to work on a Master's degree in Education and got a faculty position as the Assistant Director for the SLU Upward Bound Program. In 1984, I got my first Mac to produce a $1.3 million government grant for Upward Bound funding. I used the Mac and video cameras to teach Native American and rural high school students how to make movies and do computer animation. I led a bunch of student filmmaking trips to places like Toronto, Montreal, the Saratoga Jazz Fest and New York City. I also produced a weekly tv show during the summer programs that featured footage the students shot themselves. Nothing like a home-made video show to bring a community of 120 students and staff together every week.

My greatest achievement with Upward Bound was developing a Creative Resource Center and making classes in creativity a mandatory part of the curriculum. We had over 20 artistic mediums for students to explore in Native arts, painting, pottery, music, film and computers. I also got a chance to film and travel through Europe in 1985 visiting Paris, Amsterdam, Switzerland, Greece and Turkey. After a couple unforgettable years, I decided to leave my educational career in upstate New York and check out more lucrative computer design opportunities in the corporate world.

I moved to New York City in November 1986 and began working as a computer graphic artist on Park Avenue for consulting giant, Booz-Allen. I got pretty bored as a corporate worker bee even after being promoted to run the computer training department. Within a year, I launched my own multimedia consulting company, Applied Imagination, with a genius programming wizard,Tom Tafuto. Tom and I got some major notoriety for creating the first interactive guide to NYC complete with neighborhood maps, hotels, restaurants, entertainment and subways (and it all fit on a single floppy disk).



We were also hired to develop the highly acclaimed "Culture 1.0 - the History of Western Civilization" software program featuring the academic work of NYU Professor, Walter Reinhold. In 1989, Peter Lewis of the NY Times called it the model for the future of educational software.

These formative years in multimedia computing were a golden time in my professional life and I was very fortunate to work on a number of projects with three excellent graphic designers: Elie Aliman, Edward Marson and Evans Young. Elie has a cool design studio on Spring Street in SoHo where I got a great education learning advanced graphic design from he and crazy man Marson. I met Evans right before he got his MFA in multimedia design out at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Evans came to New York from Ghana after studying at the infamous St. Martins College of Art and Design in London. He is without a doubt the best graphic designer I have ever known. In 1991, Evans and I created the first national television commercial on a desktop computer for the YWCA "Join Us" campaign. It was not only an industry first for being completely produced on a Mac, but it was also one of the lowest costing computer animated commercials ever made: 900 animated frames out of Photoshop into Macromedia Director costing $20,000. We thought it was pretty good scratch for 3 weeks work.

From '91 to '95 I worked with many corporations and advertising firms as an Apple computer multimedia consultant. In 1993, I won the $100,000 McGraw-Hill Multimedia Design Contest. I worked on commercial video-based CD-ROM projects for Microsoft ("Frank Lloyd Wright") and Simon & Schuster ("The Planets"). I also worked on interactive projects with legendary photographers, Michel Tcherevcoff and Douglas Kirkland.

In 1995, I got into website design and in 1996 was hired by internet giant, CMGi, to move up to Boston and work as a Creative Director. At CMGi, I helped launch several startup companies such as InfoMation.com, PlanetDirect.com, and in 1999, created an award-winning Flash site on John Lennon for Zinezone.com. In 2000, I hired a killer team of Flash artists and produced an industry first: a self-publishing, flash website service for thousands of filmmakers and musicians hosted at iCAST.com. iCAST was a $100 million online entertainment startup funded by CMGi who hired NBC TV President, Neil Braun, as iCAST CEO to compete against MTV and E!Online. One of my favorite projects was designing the nationwide "Land Your Band" contest with CBS Radio that brought several thousand unknown bands to the website for people to vote on their favorite band. The winning band opened at Howard Stern's Dysfunctional Family Picnic concert in July 2000 where I shot a 5 minute little mosh pit film (cultural commentary) called "Metalheads" (which never ceases to make me laugh). As the Internet business bubble burst, CMGi closed down iCAST in November 2000.

In 2001, I decided to move back to the Berkshires where my passion for art, education and filmmaking has come together in a full-time effort with the Pritchard School. Between consulting and training over the past 6 years, I have also recorded with my own "music for movies" band, "VyZ," and produced several independent films: A Part Apart, Unum, NOVUS, & Star Cycles.

In the fall of 2006, I filmed an educational DVD about my good friend, Kenneth Little Hawk, and we recorded some live flute and drum music together. The DVD, The Little Hawk Show, was released in January 2007 on Amazon.com and the CD, The Talking Tree, was released on March 14, 2007. I continue to volunteer my time to help bring the Little Hawk message to the world: "We are all a part of nature, not apart from nature." Little Hawk and the Gatherer Institute are organized the CARE FOR THE EARTH TOUR to bring the Little Hawk show to Asia, Europe and North America in 2008. The goal of the Care for the Earth Tour was to encourage people around the world to plant trees as part of the United Nations Billion Tree campaign.

On a personal note, I am a huge advocate of caring for our planet's oceans, forests and wildlife. If you have not already made a donation, please do so at any one of the following stellar organizations: Trees for the Future, Environmental Defense, the Wildlife Fund or the Jane Goodall Institute. I am also a big fan of alternative energy and renewable energy. In the midst of today's commercial cynicism and greed, I see a growing altruism and generosity of the human spirit. The good will and good hearts of millions of people around the world are making the world a better place every day!

In 2008, I began working in Lenox, MA with a phenomenal new life coaching company called "The Leaning Institute of America." Over the past year I have acted as a Creative Director helping the Institute develop its unique brand of "Leaning Toward Your Goals" and directed all the website and video production with an award-winning ad agency out of Albany, NY. I have also produced a social network for people to honor and pay tribute to the special people in their lives: www.LeanerNetwork.com. With nearly a year of renovations made to its 18,00 sq.fit. facility, the Institute plans to officially open its doors to the public this spring.

JAZZ-ROCK.COM

As a creative artist, I must confess that my visual work goes hand in hand with the music I play as a drummer/keyboardist and the inspirational music I listen to (such as Jack DeJohnette, Weather Report, Allan Holdsworth, etc). Music plays such a key role in my creative life that I have produced a website, jazz-rock.com, to pay homage to my heroes and instigators of creativity. It is a side project I work on every few months with my good friend, Adam Holzman, who is somewhat of a jazz-rock legend himself playing in bands with Miles Davis, Chaka Khan, Wayne Shorter, Wallace Roney, and Grover Washington. Music teaches me how important it is to improvise...to roll with life... to trust my intuition to produce my best inspired efforts and minimize the second guessing.

FEARLESSNESS IS THE KEY

In respect to creativity, I have learned the hard way about how important it is to take risks and be fearless. For several years I used to wear a hat that said, "No Fear." It is still the core of my personal philosophy eventhough the hat is retired having seen better days. One of my favorite musical groups, the KODO drummers of Japan, embody this fearless way of life.

I love everything about interactivity and filmmaking. The art of human interface design is my passion... creating an easy-to-use navigation system that produces a great user experience is what it is all about! My recent Star Cycles DVD has interactivity built in so a student watching it on a computer can simply click on the screen at any time and launch a relevant Study Guide on the Star Cycles website. Making movies interactive is still a bit of pie in the sky, but we are definitely on our way.

Interactive filmmaking is a whole new medium that is just starting to go mainstream... check out Late Fragment, the non-linear interactive film that puts you in the directors' seat and lets you unlock and edit together hidden scenes. Here is a great review in Wired magazine. The linear world of film and tv is slowly-but-surely being married to the non-linear world of the web and dvds.

After all these years, I am still blown away and completely inspired by the great minds at the MIT Media Lab - Interactive Cinema department. The Speech Interface Group is falso exploring some especially cool ideas and has a number of incredible interactive speech projects going on.

In conclusion, I strongly believe these are exciting times for interactive designers, digital filmmakers, and computer artists who have great ideas and know the technology. Interactivity is the way of the future and fearless creativity is the primary requirement for true success... and so is having a major sense of humor.

John Pritchard


The Star Cycles DVD features interactive links to online Study Guides.

Happiness is... opening the first box of store-ready DVDs!