Webby, One Show, D&AD and Shots

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.

Diesel A hundred lovers

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

Quick Flash Tips #2: Handling ‘Load Never Completed’ IOErrorEvent

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);