I really enjoyed working on this with a tight team including fellow dev, the awesome Phil Bulley. It was a big challenge, especially in terms of optimisation as the technique required to swap the videos perfectly was so expensive (basically sneakily achieved by baking several videos into one large canvas and scrollRecting it). Anyway through sheer determination and hard work we got there in the end. Unusually I also did some of the sound design on this project as well as the coding, selecting what to use and where from a library of loops.

I think the film is really beautiful. It was directed by Stinkdigital’s Marco Brambilla, who also did the ‘Power’ video for Kanye West.

www.youtube.com/hugobosstv
FWA SOTD November 16 2011

This is an interactive film trailer for the BBC’s One Life film. Users can drag up at any time during the trailer to get additional content related to the shot currently on screen. Dragging down accesses global content such as audience reactions and interviews.

www.one-life.com

FWA SOTD September 12 2011
Commarts Webpick of the Week

The UI is enriched by sampling the colours from the video. I used BitmapData.merge to gradually step through the colour changes, creating a smooth, fluid effect. Here’s the code:

This was an exciting and challenging project. I was lead developer and was also heavily involved in the creative and technical planning.

To bring the island to life we made a mock Streetview interface using Away3d and integrated the site very tightly with Facebook to allow users to become citizens. Connected users could find a home, contribute laws, create national holidays, write a line of the national anthem, gain social status and even become the president for a day, taking over Diesel’s Twitter account.

For musical accompaniment we made a ‘pirate radio’ that plays, as if by magic, (almost) anything you request. I did this by sneakily connecting to the YouTube API, searching the music category and playing back the audio without showing the video. This came from an earlier experiment of mine and it was great to get it used in a project.

Archived version of site
Case study video on Vimeo

Awards:
FWA SOTD April 27 2011
Bronze Cannes Cyber Lions

I still can’t really take this in!

http://www.thefwa.com/article/fwa-people-s-choice-award-2010

http://alwaysinbeta.org/lexus-dark-ride

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

The combination of cats and competition was sure to be a www winner. We filmed a clutter of cats prowling around Ikea in Wembley. The interactivity was simple and engaging: Choose the product you want to win and the cat that might gravitate to it. If you guessed right you won the product.

The site was a roaring success generating tonnes of traffic in a very short space of time. We even got blocked by Facebook for a brief period because the site was generating so many shares (none automatic) their systems thought it was a spam app. Technically speaking this was quite a straightforward project but fun nonetheless.

cats.archive.stinkdigital.com

FWA SOTD November 18 2010
www.thefwa.com/site/happy-inside

Cannes Cyber Lions Bronze in Websites and Microsites category
www.canneslions.com/work/cyber/entry.cfm?entryid=6897&award=4

Case study film:

Ikea – Cats – Case Study from Stinkdigital on Vimeo.

This was an exciting and challenging project to work on. To make it happen we worked with agencies W+K and AKQA, motion graphics experts Mainframe, developers Lifelike, and 3D avatar service Digimi.

Essentially, the user can upload an image or use their web cam to transform them self into a footballer and see a film chronicling their rise, fall and eventual triumph.

We shot new scenes, including with some Arsenal stars, created motion graphics sequences and reused some shots from the TVC to construct the film. We then motion tracked all the scenes in order to map the user’s face and name onto the film. Users who connected with Facebook also saw their friends at certain points.

The Digimi service creates a 3D avatar from the user’s photo. This is what made it possible to apply different textures and morphs to the user’s image so we were able to make them look sad, happy or even like a statue. We built a small app that worked with the Digimi API in order to get the right expressions, angles and lighting effects for each scene.

Eyal from Digimi posted a video showing the user journey and resulting film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiq02wyt0Hk

FWA SOTD July 28th 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.

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

Case study film:

Diesel – A Hundred Lovers – Case Study from Stinkdigital on Vimeo.

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

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.

RM is an innovative organisation, leading ICT in Education, hence in the Virtual World, each company division is represented by a different fantastical room where extraordinary things happen. While exploring each room, visitors can watch and listen to people who already work there, and find out more about the company by clicking on various objects.

At the core of the site is the game, which is started when curious visitors click on a discarded newspaper lying on the ground. They then have to complete a series of puzzles, following the clues via a variety of different media to find Professor von Straaten – a fictional professor who has apparently gone missing. The game features various games, puzzles and clues, some fiendishly difficult, including one hidden in the html source code on Professor von Straaten’s personal homepage. Those who do solve the mystery are invited to leave their name and contact number so that someone from RM can call them back.

We shot the participants against a green screen and put the website and game together using Illustrator, Flash and After Effects. We had to turn round the project very quickly, which was tough considering the technical challenges, but in the end we exceeded the client’s expectations and got great feedback from visitors.

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.

When formulating our ideas, it struck us that the majority of applicants would already have heard of the company and, indeed, most likely would have been drinking their water for many years. Hence with the body made up of two thirds water, they would literally already be 66.6% Severn Trent. This led us to think about a variety of other ‘th2ought provoking’ facts, and we commissioned 12 eye-catching illustrations to demonstrate these across the whole campaign.

The result was a suite of colourful web-driving materials, all pinned together by a playful website which featured a ‘thought provoking’ quiz, bathtime game and ‘interactive home’, demonstrating a number of water-saving initiatives. With the young audience in mind, not only is the site entertaining and engaging, but the information throughout is clear, friendly and educational, with no management speak or jargon.

I used Flash to construct the site along with Craig adding animations, games, sound effects and an unusual navigation in order to achieve a fun, engaging feel. We also made a simple content management system so that the content could be kept up to date throughout the campaign.

In a two-month period, the website received more than 7,000 visits, with users spending an average of 12 minutes on the site. In total, 963 applications for the scheme were received, and all positions were filled in time for the September 2006 start date.