www.2advanced.com
2ADVANCED STUDIOS
Eric Jordan is the cofounder, president and chief creative officer of 2Advanced Studios. But when talking about his V.5 Attractor site, he sounds more like a painter or a storyteller—or maybe a composer or a filmmaker. In fact, he’s all of those things.

“Attractor is the fifth installment of a kind of ongoing narrative story,” says Jordan. “We think of our own website in terms of chapters in a book, creating a story over time which is told through the theme of the site.” It is intended to evoke an emotional response through its combination of epic-scale, expansive graphics and cinematic sound. “Attractor is a very progressive, futuristic look at the relationship between man and technology, and the strange attraction that seems to drive humanity forward,” Jordan says.

It began with his interest in digital matte-painting techniques commonly practiced in the movie industry. After looking at a set of instructional DVDs, Jordan made “Edge of the Ocean,” the digital matte painting showcased on the home page. “Almost immediately,” he says, “the vision for Attractor was born.” Sometime in 2004 he went off to clear his mind on a Caribbean beach before starting on Version 5. But he’d brought his laptop, and naturally he couldn’t stop himself from opening it. He didn’t ignore his heavenly surroundings; he just funneled them into his thoughts and laptop.

“I actually began writing the music for V.5 before anything else,” he says. “I was sitting on this beautiful beach in the absolute middle of paradise writing music for V.5 on my notebook.” He spent several days comping up designs, and when he wandered the island taking pictures, they became the reference material for the plant life in “River of Eschaton,” the second matte painting in the Attractor series. And then the island was hit by a little hurricane. Jordan sat in his bungalow as the rain lashed down, finalizing his designs.

If he was to emulate an artist with web design as the vehicle, he says he’d choose George Lucas. “The epic scale of Star Wars is the kind of larger-than-life feel I like to infuse into my designs,” Jordan says. He’s constantly pondering the idea of The Future, wondering how it will look, and how the relationship between humanity and technology will evolve. “These are things I think about on a daily basis,” he says. “And I think Attractor reflects that immensely.”
Romy Ashby