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
Posted By }i{ on August 31, 2010
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
Posted By }i{ on June 14, 2010
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:
Posted By }i{ on December 9, 2009