At the end of 2012, I joined Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, Oregon. Advertising agencies were scrambling to figure out how to leverage emerging technology as an effective marketing and communication medium. W+K didn't know what to do, but they hired enough of the people who might, and The Lodge was formed.

While The Lodge was getting spun up, I worked on the concept and development of a piece called "The Work Comes First", the manifestation of a classic Wiedenism. The idea was to create a piece with a hard-labor aesthetic, and to make it by hand. We manually cut and soldered miles of cables to control hundreds of solenoids, which responded fluidly to motion via a depth camera and software we developed in Cinder.

My first major client project was for Coca-Cola with the Happy Cycle. We brought a massive tricycle to Huntington Beach where participants burned 140 kCal to drive a Coke can through an entertaining gauntlet until they earned their beverage. The calorie tracking was actually quite accurate as we developed a system which weighed the rider and measured their effort.

We built an interactive installation for The Boxtrolls movie where users could puppet a character from the movie. Today, this is trivial with a game engine, pre-rigged assets, and the right hardware. But we didn't have those things. We used Cinder and a Kinect to build a system where we could map body tracking data to the skeleton and blend shapes of custom meshes, created by Laika. We developed a deferred lighting engine in Cinder--tech which was largely limited to AAA games at the time. We created a custom system for bugs in the background to correctly walk on the walls. We would also recognize certain gestures and facial expressions to which the Boxtrolls would respond with canned poses and animation, which we made using custom software.

One of my favorite projects during my tenure was the development of a mobile game with a 90s-arcade-game look. Red Fang is known for their creative and entertaining music videos. For "The Antidote", they opted for a music video game--which you play by headbanging with your phone. We developed the assets for the game using the same techniques as Midway did when they developed Mortal Kombat. Complete with excessive gore.