How One Forgotten Software Tool Kept Powering Hollywood (And My Career)
The Early Days: When Director Ruled Animation
Way back when, at the dawn of Motion City Films, there was only one commercial application for creating animation: Macromedia Director. We bought this program and used it to create animations for an MTV contest, plus countless corporate videos for companies like AAA (the Auto Club), Sheppard Associates, Ingram/Micro-D, and even Mattel.
The program had a brilliant “score” interface that allowed you to drop art elements into cells and animate them over time. But what made it special were the interactive features—you could trigger events based on timeline positions or user interactions with keys and mouse clicks.
The Corporate Shuffle Years
Over time, the program got passed around like a hot potato. Paracomp acquired it, then Adobe swooped in and bought Paracomp. But Adobe had bigger fish to fry—they’d also acquired the much more powerful After Effects and developed the vector-based Flash program, which quickly became the web’s go-to tool for interactive media.
So Director? It just sort of… languished.
We had no real need to upgrade past Director 8, which we used for some Enhanced CD development (remember those? Audio CDs with hidden interactive CD-ROM tracks).
An Unexpected Brazilian Adventure
But Director did give us one amazing opportunity: a trip to Brazil. A local training company had seen some of our Director work and asked me to fly down and teach their production teams how to create interactivity.
When I returned, though, I pivoted hard into animation for film and TV, diving deep into After Effects. I thought that was the end of my Director story.
The Hollywood Comeback Call
I was wrong.
In 2011, my friend David Watkinson called with an unexpected proposition. He was working on the TV show “Bones” and they needed someone who remembered Director. They had a massive amount of interactive screens to create for the season finale.
“Do you remember Director?” he asked.
“I have some memory of it,” I replied.
“Want to join the production?”
The Secret Behind Every Screen You Saw
Getting back into Director was like riding a bicycle—and it opened my eyes to an industry secret.
Pretty much every computer interface, heads-up display, Windows tablet screen, phone display, and video playback you saw in movies and TV was running through Director. Sure, some screens were blue or green-screened with effects added in post, but when real, interactive playback was needed on set? That was Director territory.
A Testament to Great Design
What struck me most was how little Director had changed over the years. It’s a testament to what a brilliant program Marc Canter developed back in the day. How many other development tools have basically stood unchanged for 15+ years and still work perfectly?
The program could generate stand-alone Mac and PC apps—no small feat for its era.
A Missed Opportunity
I kept hoping Adobe would show this program some love. At the Adobe MAX convention, I even tried advocating for it.
Why not roll this into Creative Cloud? I thought. There’s even a licensing agreement where Adobe gets 10% of commercial products made with Director. Why not get this amazing “App Engine” into as many hands as possible? The next Angry Birds could come from a Creative Cloud member!
The 2025 Reality Check
UPDATE IN 2025: Well, Director never received another chance, and technology has moved on. These days I use Tumult Hype in a full-screen browser for computer playback and Protopie for phones and sometimes tablets.
Sometimes the tools that shape our careers aren’t the flashiest ones—they’re the workhorses that quietly get the job done, year after year, project after project.