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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.
