Hi-ReS: Fragments of Imagination
Schmitt’s MacBook Pro proved essential to the Diesel holiday project. “I actually recorded the voiceover in a hotel room in San Diego,” he says. “I put the duvet cover over my head and spoke straight into the microphone of my MacBook Pro! It was crazy, but it worked. And I rendered the intro animation while I was on a plane, again on my MacBook Pro.”
Managing with Macs
On the business side, Hi-ReS! supports its unending creative workload with tools like Apple’s iWork suite and iChat. “Ever since I discovered Pages, I’ve never looked back at Word,” says Schmitt. “I hate Word with a passion, and now I don’t have to use it anymore. I’ve replaced Excel with Numbers, and I’ve certainly replaced PowerPoint with Keynote. We do quite a lot of speaking at conferences, and I use it for presentations there. It’s an amazing piece of software.”
As for iChat, he says, “It’s one of my favorite applications. People here probably iChat more than they talk — literally between people sitting next to each other. It’s also very useful if you want to send layouts back and forth, or just ask a quick question. And sending a group iChat to people in different rooms is much faster than getting everyone on the phone.”
For Schmitt, the appeal of the Mac goes beyond mere hardware and software. “I’m pretty computer-literate, and I used PCs for a long time,” he says. “But I always had an underlying fear that if I went too far, I could mess it up beyond repair. And I’ve never had that feeling with Macs. There are all these clichés about Macs, but I think they exist for a reason. There’s a warmth and humanity to them that you don’t get from other machines.”
Form and Function
Whether he’s using Maya and Flash to build and animate 3D images, or importing a Logic soundtrack into Final Cut Studio, Schmitt’s multidisciplinary interactive work is hard to imagine without Macs. In fact, his view on interactive design could just as easily be applied to the Mac: “It’s not enough just to have good design — it has to be functional as well.”
He laughs. “It sounds bizarre, me talking about functional design, because a lot of our stuff is deliberately quite the opposite. Still, it’s all about creating signifiers that tell people what they are expected to do. The message may be as simple as “grab here” or “press this,” but people react to that.”
It’s been many web-years since those first Flash experiments with soulbath.com, but in all the essential ways, the Hi-ReS! mission has remained constant. “What we do is almost like remixing — taking a track and remixing it into an album,” says Schmitt. “We like to dissect images, take them apart, give them life, and reinterpret them. In the end, we want to make people feel like they’ve been on a bit of a journey.”
