TALKATIVE PROJECTS · OAKLAND, CA
One generalist, a lot of projects.
I'm Marvin Fussell, a young generalist from Oakland. I build websites, photograph small businesses, bring old equipment back to life, and write the occasional piece of software. If a project needs someone curious enough to dig in and see it through, that's me.
WHAT I DO
Ways I can help
Websites
Simple, warm websites for small businesses and independents, designed and photographed by me.
Photography
Product, storefront and portrait photography with an honest, natural look.
Project coordination
Lining up vendors and installers, keeping a rollout on schedule, and writing it all down so nothing gets lost.
Repair and restoration
Old cameras, scanners and other gear that most people would give up on.
Research and custom tools
Digging into a problem until it makes sense, and building a small tool when the right one doesn't exist yet.
PROJECTS
Things I've worked on
Sloan's Solutions website
WEB DESIGN · PHOTOGRAPHY
Designed and built corporatedesigned.com for Sloan's Solutions, a Human Design education and facilitation practice, and shot every photo on it.
Talk to East Bay
PHOTOGRAPHY · COMMUNITY
A free photo project for East Bay small businesses: storefront photos and owner headshots, on the house, as a thank-you to the neighborhoods that show up for their local shops.
Reviving two Nikon Coolscans
HARDWARE REPAIR
A Coolscan 9000 that sat dead until I traced the problem to drivers and got it running over FireWire, plus a $200 Coolscan 4000 with no film adapter that I got talking over SCSI. Along the way I designed a custom film mask to stop light leaking past the stock one.
Frontier SP2000 restoration
HARDWARE RESTORATION · IN PROGRESS
A 2002 lab scanner, the scanning half of a Fuji minilab, coming to me from a film lab. It's documented down to the board numbers. Next: clean out years of lint, back up the original control PC, sort out its 240V power, and get it working again.
FEATURED PROJECT
The Film Analyzer
A public reference library for analog film that I designed and built myself.
Since 2022 I've been cataloging film stocks, from new releases to rolls that expired decades ago. Each one is shot in ±2 stop brackets, scanned on different scanners, and measured against color targets using CIEDE2000. It runs as a web app with an API that other film software pulls from, and it's on its way to becoming a book.
264 FILMS · WEB APP · API · BOOK IN PROGRESS
MORE PROJECTS
And a few more
Moe's 3D Solutions
SMALL BUSINESS · STARTED AT 16
I built a 3D printer, ran it nearly around the clock for a summer, and sold over six thousand fidget spinners with a small crew of sales reps. It grew into a little custom printing business making parts, tools and prototypes.
Film lab work
FILM LAB · OAKLAND
Worked at Royal We Film Lab and still take on contract scanning for local labs. Lab work taught me how a real production day runs.
Archiving
ARCHIVING · IN PROGRESS
Scanning my film box collection inside and out for the Film Packaging Archive, and digitizing a family slide collection from the 1960s with a naming system that keeps it searchable.
ABOUT
A generalist by nature
I like trying new things, learning how they work, and making them useful for someone. That's taken me from a 3D printing business as a teenager, to early-stage startups where everyone wears every hat, to photography as The Talkative Photographer, to restoring lab equipment most people would scrap.
I studied finance at USF, live in Oakland, and started Talkative Projects as a home for all of it. If your project doesn't fit neatly into one box, that's usually where I do my best work.
GET IN TOUCH
Have a project?
Tell me what you're working on. If I can't help, I probably know someone who can.