This is a hugely ambitious project that represents an attempt to forge a new direction in car advertising and, as we’ve done on many previous projects at Stink Digital, explore new ways of bringing film to the web. The result is a 12 minute interactive film in which the user participates. After submitting themselves to a mysterious ‘interview’ at the start of the journey, the user then sees their image and hears their voice as part of the film as they ride shotgun alongside the protagonist, played by the up-and-coming actor Norman Reedus.
Technically we had a few challenges, not least having a lot of HD video to buffer and sequence, with the routes the user could take pre-buffered in time to keep the experience seamless on a decent connection. It took some experimentation to find the sweet spot of balancing highest video quality possible and performance and we made a nice queuing system to buffer the videos for the choices the user could potentially make and closing streams no longer needed.
For the interview sequence at the start, we were tasked with having as few clicks as possible. We managed to largely automate the process with face-detection for the picture, video prompts and countdowns. We achieved the recording of the user’s lines with the help of two great open source projects: Red5 for capturing the microphone and saving to the server and FFmpeg to normalise the levels and convert to Mp3.
For me, hearing your voice played back in context within the film was probably the most novel and fun part of the experience. I was also pleased with how we managed to integrate the decision points into the film, with a good-looking typographical approach and motion tracking video movements. Overall pretty proud of this one and extra pleased when it got the FWA ‘Site of the month’ for May, another first for Stink Digital and for me personally too.
www.lexusdarkride.com
www.thefwa.com/site/lexus-dark-ride
Posted By }i{ on August 31, 2010
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
Tribal DDB, Amsterdam asked us to create an online experience that could help to establish Philips new 21:9′s credentials as the best thing yet in home cinema. Adam Berg came up with a ‘frozen moment’ film treatment that really captured the imagination and we set about devising a site that would demonstrate the merits of the product in a completely effortless and uncontrived manner.
After a few days of prototyping, we settled on embedding the film in Flash to allow for total control over the playback. The user can drag through the frames of the film, slow it down or stop to inspect individual frames in detail. This, however, meant that we had a big video asset that needed to be loaded upfront, a problem we solved by adding a movie-style title sequence to the beginning of the site.
We created hot spot areas within the film where the user could go behind-the-scenes and gain some insight into the production process. We had to make this transition seamless, so that it appears that you are transported by magic into the scene, and this was achieved with some clever management of the video loading. The control bar expands to accommodate the extra footage, indicating that this new time line exists within one slice of the frozen moment.
Another big requirement of the experience was to demonstrate the key product features. We added a 16:9 view, with the typical black bars that 21:9 eliminates, and a runtime-generated ambilight effect that could both be toggled for comparison. Fully language localised to boot, there was a lot of work to do, but with the help of developers extroadinaires Matt Sweetman and Jamie Copeland and designer Eric Chia we conceived, planned and built a very solid site in only 7 weeks.
www.cinema.philips.com
Posted By }i{ on March 28, 2009
Winner, November 2006 Ri5er
The brief behind this project was simple: RM wanted to get across just how innovative they are as a company and attract the best talent, with a particular emphasis on software developers. In response, me Ken (AD) and Craig created the RM Virtual World, ditching the regular copy heavy approach for an almost text-free video based experience. We worked closely with a group of existing RM developers to test and hone our ideas to acheive something that would definately strike a chord with our target audience. Read More
Posted By }i{ on January 20, 2007
Winner, 2007 RAD Best Website
Winner, April 2006 Ri5er
Severn Trent Water had run apprentice schemes in the past – but never on this scale. They were looking for forty people to join them in areas from Engineering to Finance, and wanted to get across the complexity of the roles in an interesting and visually-stimulating way. Read More
Posted By }i{ on June 20, 2006