Pascal Auberson Profile

July 23, 2002
by the DOUG staff

Name: Pascal Auberson
Location: London, England
E-Mail: pascal / at / specialmoves.com
Website: www.specialmoves.com

Birthday: 15th December 1975
Education: BSc (Hons) Medialab Arts, Plymouth University, England
Nickname that I hate: Not telling you ;)
Job Title that best describes what I do: Digital Media Developer
Years in Multimedia: Started using Director 3 at Uni in 1994, so about 8 years.

Favorite music to crunch code by: Music & Movement Volume One, Climate Records
Book I'm recommending to anyone who'll listen: Hyperion, Dan Simmons
If I wasn't doing this, I'd be: Probably working backstage at a theatre/gig.
I've always wanted to meet: Don't really have one.

Currently working on: A Shockwave 3D art piece for artist Michael Atavar.
If I had a time machine, I'd go: the future.

DOUG: specialmoves hit a lot of peoples' radar because of their recent hit with MTV/UK's "The Osbournes" simulation, but you've been around for about three years in this incarnation. Tell us a little about specialmoves. what you do there, and the types of projects the company has worked on.

PA: A group of us from our university course got together and started a company with the idea to do things better than companies we had worked at before. I mainly do the programming in a variety of different languages: Lingo, ActionScript, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, Perl, CF, Java depending on the job. As a company we've worked on all sorts of projects: Website/Intranet design & programming, Shockwave/Flash games, microsites and Flash/dhtml banner ads.

DOUG: Where did you grow up and go to school?

PA: On the south coast of England in a small village near Rye where I went to school.

DOUG: How did you get into multimedia?

PA: My University course was one of the first that did multimedia and I did a placement year working at Epic Multimedia in Brighton doing various Director and Authorware projects..

DOUG: "The Osbournes" employed a variety of applications, by all accounts, including 3D rendering, Flash animation, and Director programming, including pathfinding and other algorithms that are common in the gaming community, although not necessarily in Shockwave. Tell us a bit about your part in its production and development.

PA: I did most of the programming apart from the pathfinding and some of the interface code. It's been the biggest programming project I've ever worked on and I'm quite pleased how it all turned out in the end. Most of the work centred around a scripting language we decided to develop for this project called OzzyScript. It allowed us to easily setup complex interactions and reactions of the characters. For example if we wanted Ozzy to call Jack over, wait for him to arrive, have a conversation, then go into the garden, a few lines of OzzyScript would take care of it.

DOUG: Were you tempted at all to use the Shockwave 3D features for "The Osbournes"? Would that have cramped the specialmoves graphic style?

PA: Yes we were tempted, but the reason we didn't use it was nothing to do with graphic styling. We knew we could do everything we wanted in isometric, but the 3d stuff in director is new and we didn't wan't to come up against unknown problems especially as we had a very tight deadline.

DOUG: What's your opinion on the whole Flash vs. Director debate?

PA: People get too precious about "their" program. I can understand when Director users go over to Flash and think it's rubbish because of various quirks, but they forget about all the stuff they had to put up with in Director over the years. Both Flash & Director have their strengths and weaknesses and people should choose the right tool for the job.

DOUG: What tipped the scales in Shockwave's favor with "The Osbournes"?

PA: We used Shockwave over Flash because of the short development time and execution speed. We would have needed to take a different approach programming it in Flash and we probably wouldn't have been able to get as much interaction into it as we did.

DOUG: Where do you think Director needs to improve to maintain its relevance?

PA: From a developer point of view, a proper script editor and the equivalent of movieclips in flash would be a big bonus. If Macromedia could get the userbase of Shockwave up to that of Flash there would no need to convince clients to use Shockwave, it wouldn't be an issue.

DOUG: How do you spend your time outside of work (if there is any)?

PA: I play a bit of squash, the odd computer game, but mainly down the pub.

DOUG: What will you be doing in a year? Five years?

PA: A year, probably more Shockwave 3D stuff. Five years? who knows...