Flash Development

In the two years that Grant Skinner showed his small company’s prowess in developing Flash animation, he acquired corporate clients such as Sony, film director George Lucas’s LucasArts, America Online, Teletoon, General Electric, and Hewlett Packard, to create cutting-edge applications, games, multimedia pieces and mini-websites.

Flash (software that displays text and images) is installed on more than 98 per cent of the world’s computers, and is used for corporate websites, games and online humour such as animated greeting cards.

Developed by the San Francisco-based software firm Macromedia, Flash is downloaded for free. Businesses, however, pay Macromedia to install Flash tools for their websites.

Between 2004 and 2005, the company, gskinner.com, grew from a single-owner entity to a six-employee operation.

As David Finlayson wrote in the Edmonton Journal, "not having to shoulder all the burden himself gives him more time to work on special projects. And to indulge in experimental work, such as the game he’s just developed that involves the player, as a space ship’s sole survivor, dealing with a swarm of bloodthirsty little creatures called Pukis."

Skinner considers it to be the first true 3D first-person shooter ever developed in Flash, and in the three weeks since its beta release in 2005, more than a million people played the game. It can be viewed at www.gskinner.com/games/puki.

The designer also introduced a blog in September 2005, some of which uses Flash animation, and describes his various speaking engagements around the world—as well as more personal information, such as his marriage on 11 June 2005 to his partner of nine years. The blog can be found at www.gskinner.com/blog.

[<<back]

Albertasource.ca | Contact Us | Partnerships
For more on innovation and invention in Alberta , visit Peel’s Prairie Provinces.