Lexus Dark Ride

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

Sony PS3

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