I first met John Mecray at an International Yacht Restoration School event. John was a founder and board member. I volunteered on the Education Committee. John became a client but we subsequently became good friends sharing an interest in painting, small models and flying. John's limited-edition prints set a benchmark for detailed yacht paintings - principally of the late Victorian and early Edwardian era. His research was meticulous. Sadly John passed away in 2017. More about John HERE.
As a client we had been asked to overhaul his website. He was very particular about how he wanted it to look - and the early days of the Internet with multiple web browsers displaying content differently over very slow dial up connections made this quite a challenge. We were also looking for ways to market his prints. Time between editions could be up to a year - so keeping potential clients interested was a challenge. What we came up with was animations - updated every two weeks or so - of John's work in progress. Prospective purchasers were kept up to date with progress reports by email. The technology we used at the time was Adobe Flash animation. Selected because it was very tolerant of slow Internet connections and would "slow down" rather than fail if a connection was too slow. Flash animation is no longer with us. So before its demise - we converted them to YouTube videos. These are not the highest of resolution as they were originally designed to work across dial up - but they give a sense of John's work method. The later two videos - faster internet was becoming more available so we increased the resolution a touch and included music!