About
Adam Maitland started adammaitland.com in 2008 to make available his wide range of talents to the online community.
Adam has been working on 'bleeding edge' computer applications for the past 25 years. The depths of experience, he brings to the table, is based on interaction between teams of technicians, artists and clients.
We have included the piece below to illustrate the depth of experience that Adam has and also because it's pretty interesting.
"Whatever tools you are working with, be it Flash, PHP, DHTML, Sonar (Music) or 3D visualization, the basic principles remain the same; discerning the required outcome and completing the work required to achieve that outcome in a timely, professional and elegant manner".
Adam has worked on a plethora of projects from designing and coding Flash/XML/PHP kiosk applications for Federally funded Healthcare research to 3D CAD Models for the award winning stage design for "Wind in the Willows" at the Royal National Theatre in London.
Wind in the Willows
The Wind in the Willows project was a very interesting early use of the computer and early modem connectivity
The project required building a structure on a 12 meter drum-revolve at the Royal National Theatre in London. This drum-revolve was also split in the center with each half raising and lowering via winches.
The engineering design called for 35 actors to be abe to stand on the drum-revolve, however the safe weight limit was fairly low. It called for a strong but light framework to support the design requirements.
Where to find expertise in lightweight frames and structures? Rock and Roll was the answer. Chris Cronin of Total Fabrications, a company specializing in rock & roll staging and light towers, was asked to fabricate a tubular alloy structure exactly fitting the actual 3 foot model created by stage designer Mark Thomson.
This model looked exactly like the photo on the left which is the actual finished design at the Royal National Theatre.
Chris called Adam, who at the time was an AutoCAD developer in the UK, specializing in 3D.
He asked if the design could be constructed in 3D and then separated into individual parts to plot fabrication plans. These plans would then be sent, via 2400 baud modem from Adam's office in Sussex to Tomcat's plant in the Cotswolds.
Adam accepted the project. The next thing he knew was that Fedex were delivering a large fragile parcel, "Mark Thomson's precious stage design model"!
The first step was to measure the model accurately and then scale a 3D autoCAD virtual copy to the 12 meter drum-revolve dimensions.
In the reproduction of the original plot below, you can see the outer surfaces of the 3D model and the functionality of the drum revolve.
The next step was to build a virtual engineering framework to be the inner skeleton of the whole design. This was accomplished by telethons between Adam and Chris and the occasional visit.
In the plot below, you can see the autoCAD 3D model. There was hardly a 90 degree angle anywhere. It involved writing a few autoLisp apps to speed drawing production.
The final step was to separate the parts and then label and plot them in plan view so that Chris' guys could get on with fabrication.
In the plot below, you can see the autoCAD 3D model split into various components.
Each of the parts was sent via 2400 baud modem as a DXF file.
This allowed fabrication to begin as soon as the plans were ready even though the offices were 100 miles apart.
No mean feat in 1990!
The big day came! All the parts had been completed at the Total Fabrications factory . Everything was packed into a truck and transported to the Royal National Theatre.
Once there the rigging crew bolted it all together from the plans. A tense period...Would it fit?
Happily the entire construction was accurate to within 3 millimeters and spot on most of the time.
The whole computer project was carried out on very antiquated machinery by today's standards.
286 CPUs and 2400 baud modems...
But it all goes to prove that with ingenuity, patience and concentration you can achieve a lot with a little!
If you would like to see a video of this stage design in action you can view it at youtube.com. Most of the relevant footage is towards the end of the video.
Wind in the Willows at youtube.com