It was an intense year at Stink Digital but overall an intensely enjoyable one! It was also a year where we went from being a few nerds in a room to having a full team truly capable of multi-tasking and taking on really anything we dare to. When I think back I find it hard to believe how much we crammed in.

We’ve delivered major interactive projects for the likes of Diesel, Lexus, Nike, Gucci*, Ikea, Axe and Wrangler*. We won another 4 FWA SOTD’s and our first FWA SOTM, as well as Webby, One Show, BIMA and Eurobest awards and a D&AD nomination. We worked with agencies such as Anomaly, W+K, Mother, BBH and Santo to name but a few. Plus, we end the year stuck into projects for Diesel and Wrangler which have the potential to be our best work yet.

Bring on 2011!

* yet to be released

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

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);

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

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.

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:

Personally I’ve settled on naming my first class ‘Main’, with the actual application hanging off a class called ‘Application’, so my arg looks like ‘-frame start Application’ or ‘-frame start tv.stinkdigital.projectName.Application’. I define a ratio of the total anticipated loading weight to the application SWF so that I can continue to load assets such as XML files and SWFs when the app has started whilst maintaining a smooth, consistent visual preloading progress from start to finish.

We have won Stink Digital’s first FWA SOTD award for our new site for Philips – Cinema 21:9, a.k.a Carousel. Special congrats to fellow Flashers Jamie (”FWA is so cool it’s uncool”) Copeland and Matt Sweetman, who worked with us on the project. Not bad for our first Flash project – Let’s make it number one of many

And as if that wasn’t good enough, yesterday we got major props from Kanye West on his blog and got tweeted to APlusK’s 1,200,000 followers!

Colleague and JavaScript whiz kid Stephen Band just released his first jQuery plugin ‘jParallax’. Very nice stuff, he’s already used it to create a stunning presentation for an important pitch recently. Hopefully we’ll come up with a site concept that gives us a chance to exploit its coolness to devastating effect .

Get it here: http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html

The first site was for for one of the partners where I work, advertising her palatial pad in Spain for rent: sesvistes.com. Very modest, and designed by me so doesn’t look as good as the regular stuff I do with proper designers, but it did prove the point to me that WordPress can work very well as a cms for small/medium sites. So, when I got another little freelance job for an air conditioning specialist through a designer at work, I broke out the WP again. This time the site was a bit larger scale and a few more plugins were employed and it’s worked a treat again. The result (which the client has now added loads of content too): coolingandheating.info.

Conclusion: WordPress definitely works very slickly as a website cms. One of the best things about it in my opinion is that non-technical people find it crazily easy to use – and that’s got to be a major advantage in the cms stakes. Next step to start thinking about doing a Flash integration…

Candidata is a web application that enables posting of job opportunities on companies websites and for people to apply online for the vacancies. The client can then manage all the applications they receive and generate reports and so on.

I devised and wrote this web application from scratch with Sade (developer) using C#.NET, SQL Server and a pinch of JavaScript. The agency have since sold it on to several organisations, most notably British Waterways and Southern Railway. The application forms, reports and feature sets are completely configurable from the back-end and it has a basic theming system, meaning that setting up new ones is a doddle.