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

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.

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.

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.

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

Leo Burnett approached us to create an online event and experience to augment their ‘House of Cards’ campaign for the housing charity Shelter.

The site features the work of leading artists such as Damien Hirst and the Chapmans, and by uploading their own art through the site, users had the chance of having their work exhibited alongside them.

I created a 3d experience using Papervision, with design by Tim and HTML/PHP by Vincent and Marcel. Users could view the cards falling, view details of them, vote for their favorites and upload their own designs. We ended up with several thousand entries. After the competition was closed the entries were replaced with the artists cards, along with the winning entry and options to help the cause. The site was redesigned by Kristian Saliba with further Flash development by Huy Dinh.

http://www.shelterhouseofcards.org.uk

Along with W+K, we’ve been helping Jack White’s new band The Dead Weather build interest in and broadcast a live concert over the www, sponsored by Nokia. My task was primarily to build a custom video player to be used to brooadcast the Akamai stream on the site, various blogs and on screens in record stores. It needed to be very lightweight and work at pretty much any size. I took the opportunity to create some nice reusable PureMVC classes for the streaming and player build. The player is also in use on the Stink Digital website.

View the live set here: www.fromthebasement.tv/live

Here are the source files for the Model side of things: VideoStreamProxies.zip

They are dependent on PureMVC and, in the case of the AkamaiConnectionProxy, on the Akamai connection package.

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

I have just launched this website for the Bank of England. Being a truly unique organisation, it’s been a really interesting project to work on. Through meetings with the client we gained quite an insight in the culture of the organisation and, along with Emma (WD), I set out to architect the site to communicate the open, dynamic feel we uncovered under the austere exterior. Bringing forward the bank’s people as a human face talking about their experiences seemed to be the best way to acheive this. With the design, we had to strike the right balance of looking and feeling very modern, while still staying fairly safe and conservative, and I think the approach we’ve taken using design elements from banknotes has acheived that.

The site is content managed using WordPress. I chose the YUI CSS framework again for the templates and used Flash (ActionScript 3) for the video and interactive features. The video interviews (shot by Simon Drew of kaspar films) in particular are key to the experience and I worked them into a stylised Flash interface. I used JQuery to handle the alternative text for the video.

When we were approached to create a web site promoting poet Caroline Bird it presented a somewhat new challenge in that we had to get ourselves into the mindset of creating something for an individual, rather than a brand or corporation. Taking inspiration from her unique brand of highly visual, often surreal poetry the AD (Eric) and I found ourselves bouncing around ideas of creating some fantastical journey or wierd surrealist online experience. This started to feel a little uncormfortable and it became clear to us that our approach should not be to try to illustrate or compete with the poetry, but to provide a blank page from which the words could have their own life. We acheived this by focussing not on the content of the poems, but on the tools used to create them – the pencil and paper.

Meeting Caroline you get a strong sense of her passion and desire to inspire others and get them excited about poetry. The blog gives her the opportunity to personalise the site and reach her readers. The ‘latest updates’ area ensures that any timely information is noticed. In this way the site serves it’s two targets equally: publishers/educationalists/etc who might employ Caroline, and fans interested in her poetry and readings.

Technically this was an interesting project too. We wanted the site to feel fluid, organic and slightly playful, so we chose Flash for its smooth animation capabilities and typographical possibilities. We based the Flash build on Steven Sacks’ Gaia Flash Framework (great out of the box deep-linking), which helped us concentrate more on the sexy bits. These included the mouse-tracking pencil that draws as you move around the site and the mouse-over scrolling technique, both of which I coded in ActionScript 3. Craig made some really nice paper animations in Swift 3D and I used ActionScript 3 and PHP to code a Flash/Wordpress integration (something I think we’ll be using a fair bit) so that the site could be managed easily by Caroline herself.