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

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

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

I’ve set up a Google code repository at http://code.google.com/p/stinkdigital-flash/ with the idea of releasing some the work I do to the community. The plan is to add simple, encapsulated, useful (hopefully) chunks of code such as utilities and APIs.

The first commit is a wrapper for the YouTube ActionScript Player API. This was created for the first phase of a project we’re working on for Diesel and it basically simplifies working with YouTube within Flash.

I wrote about it in detail on the Stink Digital blog at: http://www.stinkdigital.tv/blog/2010/01/14/youtube-player-api/

Usage example:

var player:YouTubePlayer = new YouTubePlayer();
player.autoPlay = false;
player.source = “lQ3D4CqHbJM”;
addChild( player );

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.

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.

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.

http://www.eurobest.com/winners/2009/interactive/index.cfm?award=2

www.bimaawards.com/shortlist