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

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.

The YouTube ActionScript Player API allows you to play videos hosted on YouTube in your own custom player or as part of a larger Flash site. We’re currently working on a project for Diesel which involves a recruitment phase to source participants for a music video slash online experience. This utilises a video hosted on YouTube and the API presented a great option to avoid duplicating the video resource, while also being able to customise the player design to match brand guidelines.

The API is pleasingly simple, yet no classes or interfaces are provided. This essentially means that you have to cast the loaded player to the dynamic Object class and access methods and properties as dynamic members. This is not particularly nice or easy to work with, as you have to rely heavily on documentation and your code will be highly vulnerable to runtime errors. As the player API looked like something we’d be likely to use again I coded a reusable wrapper to manage it and stored values for states, event types and video quality as constants.

Feel free to reuse the code. Download the source on our new Google code repository at http://code.google.com/p/stinkdigital-flash/. For usage example see http://code.google.com/p/stinkdigital-flash/wiki/YouTubePlayer.

You can see the player in action on diesel.com at http://recruit.diesel.com/.

Usage example:

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