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:

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

www.bimaawards.com/shortlist

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.