Christopher Pace

Consultant, Small Business Owner, and Director in Malta

Christopher Pace

Consultant, Small Business Owner, and Director in Malta

Like many others in the early nineties, I was was lucky enough to find myself landing a job in an advertising agency purely by coincidence. That company is JPA. Upon landing my first official job at the agency, I started applying my sketching skills to projects as I wasn’t computer literate at the time but quickly picked it up exploring early releases of Photoshop, Freehand and Pagemaker. I quickly mastered the Apple Macintosh (No great achievement I know!) and put myself in the fast track lane to become a senior creative in the studio working on projects that were considered the largest on the the island. Everything was revolutionary at the time; the print industry, early non-linear editing systems, the hip job titled 'graphic designer' and desktop computers were meant to be getting faster too! It was great to work in a creative environment. It felt like I was getting paid for having fun. It was a time when an 80 Mb hard drive was considered a luxury and it was also a time when I was first experimenting with a single floppy drive installation of what was the first release of an application called Premiere. The software celebrated Eadward Muybridge's inspirational Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, featuring the famous animation of a galloping horse on a loop (An interesting way to indicate the computer was processing something). The installation disk happened to be lying around in the Agency for a couple of years before I discovered it and when I did, I decided my future within a matter of milliseconds. The application was no great shakes; looking back at it today but, when I discovered I could put my love for fonts to life and be able to create graphics in motion, I was lost in a world that deprived me of calculating the concept of time. I simply loved what I did and was eager to learn more. Unfortunately, this discipline was not taught anywhere on the island so I had to put my self-learning capabilities on overtime and rummage through magazines and other bits of information I could find during a time when the word internet hardly existed. Without elaborating too much on the nostalgic moments of my roots, I quickly set up an audio visual unit within the Agency (JPA), and in the fall of 1996, I worked on my first official job using a Media 100 System with a total of 4GB of space. This creative space opened new doors not only to the agency but also to myself and at the time I was experimenting with all types of available software namely Aft

  • Work
    • JPA