Interview Hillman Curtis
The Future of Web Video


FSW: Hi Hillman, it's a pleasure to have this interview with you.
You are well-known in the design and flash community as an award winning designer and Principal and Chief Creative Director of Hillmancurtis, Inc. Before Flash supported video you integrated video elements in your projects. Since when are you using Flash for your design ideas and what was the importance of video in these projects? How does video support your creative ideas?

Hillman: That's a good question. For a long time I was almost exclusively associated with Flash and Flash design, that has fortunately changed as my company has expanded and taken on larger site design jobs. That said, Flash was what got me started. I was art director at Macromedia when they acquired it and after getting past the look of the original packaging - which had an orange crab on it - I remember thinking that it could change me. It was a natural fit, one that clearly has been felt by other designers. So it's been a long time that I've been using Flash.

Oddly I sort of dropped Flash for a few years. That's not to say I stopped using it, but that I started using it less. The larger site design jobs we've done - the Adobe sites, the Foxsearchlight site, AOL and Yahoo - use Flash sparingly and in those cases I'm hired more for concepts and visual design systems. Of course there were Flash jobs, like the recent Sideshowcreative.com site, along the way, but really, Flash represented only a small percentage of my work.

At the same time - really all along - I've been shooting and editing video. So when Sorenson licensed it's codec to Macromedia I was really excited. To me the idea of having a great codec as part of the SWF player was perfect. The idea of presenting good quality video in a single, cross platform, cross browser, 90+ percent adopted player was wonderful. Not to mention the opportunities inherent in the scriptability of that video.

FSW: Your website shows a video with several people looking towards the camera. (http://www.hillmancurtis.com) What was the idea behind it?

Hillman: I bought a new camera. It was more complicated than my previous one and I needed to learn how to use it. At the same time I was really into this German photographer named Thomas Ruff, and of course I am always intrigued by the work of the video artist Bill Viola. I came up with this idea to do a series of Ruff-esq portraits for the sole purpose of getting better at lighting, framing and general camera operation. The idea was to set up an area in my studio and take portraits of whoever visited the studio - thus the name "Visitors". What I ended up with was so much more than an exercise in camera work…it turned out to be a thematically super rich and really beautiful concept to look at. In the end it's about looking into someone's eyes… really looking at someone and seeing the beauty in that.