Philip Van Horn Weems Dodds (May 17, 1951 â€" October 6, 2007),
credited as Phil Dodds and Philip Dodds, was an audio engineer who
appeared in the 1977 motion picture Close Encounters of the Third
Kind. Working for ARP Instruments, Inc., Dodds was on the set to
install and manage the ARP 2500 synthesizer used in the movie to play
the five alien tones, and to program it for the sounds the filmmakers
wanted. He had performed a similar function on other science fiction
films, such as Logan's Run, and some of the early Star Trek
movies.Steven Spielberg, liking his looks, offered him a part in the
movie on the spot; he spent the next nine weeks filming the now-iconic
final scenes of the movie. He has considerable screen time for an
extra, playing the notes on the synthesizer under the direction of
several scientists and musicians, and gazing raptly up at the alien
spaceship. In the film's credits, Dodds's name appears twiceâ€"once as
"Jean Claude" (as Philip Dodds) and once as "ARP Musician" (as Phil
Dodds). In his original script, with the working title of Watch the
Skies, Spielberg had written these as two separate parts, but combined
them into one character during filming.Later vice president of R&D for
Kurzweil Music (developer of digital keyboard products), Dodds was a
project analyst with Randall House Associates, Inc. in Annapolis, MD.
He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference
Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning
(ADL) Initiative, a project of the United States Department of
Defense. The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve
interoperability, accessibility and reuse of the component pieces of
web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems.
Philip's work on SCORM will continue as hundred of organizations
around the world continue their collective efforts to resolve
remaining issues associated with SCORMs Simple Sequencing Models, such
as lack of common instructional strategies and taxonomies (common
definitions) for learning objects.Dodds' grandfather was Philip Van
Horn Weems, pioneering founder of navigational instrument company
Weems and Plath.
credited as Phil Dodds and Philip Dodds, was an audio engineer who
appeared in the 1977 motion picture Close Encounters of the Third
Kind. Working for ARP Instruments, Inc., Dodds was on the set to
install and manage the ARP 2500 synthesizer used in the movie to play
the five alien tones, and to program it for the sounds the filmmakers
wanted. He had performed a similar function on other science fiction
films, such as Logan's Run, and some of the early Star Trek
movies.Steven Spielberg, liking his looks, offered him a part in the
movie on the spot; he spent the next nine weeks filming the now-iconic
final scenes of the movie. He has considerable screen time for an
extra, playing the notes on the synthesizer under the direction of
several scientists and musicians, and gazing raptly up at the alien
spaceship. In the film's credits, Dodds's name appears twiceâ€"once as
"Jean Claude" (as Philip Dodds) and once as "ARP Musician" (as Phil
Dodds). In his original script, with the working title of Watch the
Skies, Spielberg had written these as two separate parts, but combined
them into one character during filming.Later vice president of R&D for
Kurzweil Music (developer of digital keyboard products), Dodds was a
project analyst with Randall House Associates, Inc. in Annapolis, MD.
He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference
Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning
(ADL) Initiative, a project of the United States Department of
Defense. The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve
interoperability, accessibility and reuse of the component pieces of
web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems.
Philip's work on SCORM will continue as hundred of organizations
around the world continue their collective efforts to resolve
remaining issues associated with SCORMs Simple Sequencing Models, such
as lack of common instructional strategies and taxonomies (common
definitions) for learning objects.Dodds' grandfather was Philip Van
Horn Weems, pioneering founder of navigational instrument company
Weems and Plath.
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