To my delight the work we’ve done at Stink Digital continues to be recognised within the industry this year.
This article from Shots places both Carousel (aka Philips Cinema 21:9) and A hundred lovers for Diesel in their top 20 digital campaigns.
Meanwhile Carousel was a Webby Awards winner. It also picked up Gold and Silver at the One Show Interactive awards. And if that wasn’t enough, it got nominated at the 2010 D&AD awards, although sadly no pencil this time.
Posted By }i{ on June 16, 2010
Well I’ve been inexcusably slack in posting updates this year. Apologies to my readers. Both of you.
Anyway, backtracking a bit, the first big project I completed this year was an interactive film showcasing Diesel’s 2010 Summer collection.
A homage to Goddard’s 1964 film ‘Bande à part’, we shot the video in an uber cool East London pub and used an editing technique known as match-cut to squeeze the many participants adorned in Diesel’s collection into the 3 minute film.
Dubbed ‘A hundred lovers’ after the excellent song by new artist Josef Xorto, the piece took the form of a music video. The result was entertaining and somewhat charming.
The big twist from a technical and usability point of view is that you can roll over the video at any point which pauses it and shows hot spots for each garment and participant in that particular frame.
From there you can find out about participants and follow their social links, or discover what garments they are wearing and follow links to buy them on Diesel’s store.
To achieve this we first built an app, in Flash, to enable placing hot spots on the frames of the film and linking them up to the right data.
In order to be able to seek to any frame, skipping through to each look we went with Akamai real time streaming for delivery of the video.
We had to ensure we had highly optimised ActionScript to process all the hot spots for each frame. Instance reuse via an object pool was a key part of this, along with massively compressed JSON for the huge data set.
The hard work has been rewarded by great feedback from the public, which is still going strong on Twitter, the industry press and the FWA Site of the Day award for 15th April.
www.diesel.com/ahundredlovers
www.thefwa.com/site/a-hunrdred-lovers
Posted By }i{ on June 14, 2010
This is a potentially annoying error that occurs in Safari/Chrome when you hit refresh or close a tab containing Flash content. If you have the debug player you see:
Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2036: Load Never Completed.
It can crash Safari or, in the case of Chrome, show a ‘broken plugin’ screen, shutting down every instance of Flash Player in the process.
Fortunately the fix is easy. To handle it you must add an IOErrorEvent listener to every Loader instance in your project, including the ‘root’ Loader (i.e. the class that is the base of your main SWF).
To handle the main SWF simply add the following code to your base class. In ‘onIOError’ you can handle the error silently should you wish.
root.loaderInfo.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onIOError);
Posted By }i{ on June 14, 2010
This is a nice open source tool from Adobe for reviewing and optimising your code. Although the set-up is a bit fiddly, I installed it on FDT without any issue.
To run the plug-in you simply select ‘Run PMD’ and a list of warnings is generated. Examples include ‘HeavyContructor’, ‘TooManyFunction’ and ‘UnusedParameter’. You can click on the classes listed to highlight the source of the suspect code and decide what action, if any, to take. Very similar in function to the way FDT handles ActionScript errors and warnings
Any standards/optimisation junkies out there will find this very useful. Granted you will no doubt end up ignoring many of the ‘violations’ highlighted, but it’s great when it does spot something you’re grateful to discover and happy to amend.
Click here to get started
Posted By }i{ on April 7, 2010
I’ve set up a Google code repository at http://code.google.com/p/stinkdigital-flash/ with the idea of releasing some the work I do to the community. The plan is to add simple, encapsulated, useful (hopefully) chunks of code such as utilities and APIs.
The first commit is a wrapper for the YouTube ActionScript Player API. This was created for the first phase of a project we’re working on for Diesel and it basically simplifies working with YouTube within Flash.
I wrote about it in detail on the Stink Digital blog at: http://www.stinkdigital.tv/blog/2010/01/14/youtube-player-api/
Usage example:
var player:YouTubePlayer = new YouTubePlayer();
player.autoPlay = false;
player.source = “lQ3D4CqHbJM”;
addChild( player );
Posted By }i{ on January 30, 2010
The first thing I did as a developer this year was to install a trial of FDT; the result of my ongoing frustration with Flex Builder and the persuasion of a swathe of developers I’ve worked with recently.
A week in and I must say I’m mightily impressed. The whole application is really responsive, much more so than Flex Builder, and some of the code generation tools are invaluable. For example I love that after adding an event listener the event handling method is automatically created with a couple of key presses.
Being Eclipse-based, overall FDT is very similar to Flex Builder. This made it exceptionally easy to make the transition and start exploring. I haven’t figured everything out yet, but have already used it to make a small widget and develop a prototype for an upcoming project for Diesel. It definitely feels like I’ll be sticking with FDT for the foreseeable future.
Posted By }i{ on January 12, 2010
For the Stink Digital season’s greetings card we thought, as you do after a good few beers at Electricity Showrooms, that it might be cool to do some kind of snowball fight where you could record your throw and launch it at your unsuspecting friends via Twitter or Facebook. A month later we’d wrapped a bunch of really intense projects and had a clear couple of weeks to design, architect and build the thing. It was especially fun working with the excellent Red5 open source Flash media server which I’ll definitely be playing with some more in the new year. Here’s the result: http://holidays.stinkdigital.tv.
Posted By }i{ on December 15, 2009
Hooray! Our site for the new Playstation 3, www.the15reasons.com, is the FWA site of the day today. Really thrilled to have got two FWA’s this year, I think it’s my favourite award as a developer… even despite the lack of partying involved!
Read my previous post about the project here
Music experience:
Post production magic:
Posted By }i{ on December 9, 2009
This is simple but very handy little device that allows you to begin displaying your main application SWF before it’s actually loaded.
Read More
Posted By }i{ on December 6, 2009
We had a great showing at the BIMAS, winning the Microsite, B2C, Motion Graphics and GRAND PRIX categories for Carousel. We were up against some excellent work such as AKQA’s Eco Drive so it’s really a massive compliment to win – I’m still not really taking it all in…
www.bimaawards.com/shortlist
Posted By }i{ on November 20, 2009
We’ve had our noses to the grindstone in a big way creating this site for the new Sony PS3 and I definitely feel like it’s been worth the effort.
The brief was to create a ’superhuman sales pitch’ in which the presenter turns out to have extraordinary powers. This lent itself well to us creating a sprinkling of fun and surprising interactive experiences to sit alongside the post-enriched film content.
The shoot day went really well, squeezing everything into one long day, and we got everything we needed to build the rest of the site. We opted for a PureMVC multicore based architecture, using the Fabrication utility to facilitate inter-module communication and the State Machine utility to manage the state of the application. Javier Abanses, Benoit Vinay and Shane McCartney all did a great job in helping us to realise the various features and elements of the site, which comprises video, audio, games, 3D animation, sound processing, particles, physics, Facebook Connect integration, language localisation and an ‘easter egg hunt’ competition.
It was a good opportunity to utilise the advantages of Flash Player 10 on a fairly complex microsite build. For example, the 3D capabilities came in handy in coding the tumblers and loader, Vectors helped speed things up and the sound features, notably SampleDataEvent, enabled me to create a really solid, smooth running audio sequencer for the music experience.
www.the15reasons.com
Posted By }i{ on November 19, 2009