Drugfucked

drugfucked

Fun little (ahem) viral project for the Terrence Higgins Trust to promote awareness in HIV+ gay clubbers who indulge in recreational drugs as to their effect on whatever HIV meds they may be taking.

http://drugfucked.tht.org.uk/

Another AS3 project - all a bit hack and slash, though, as time was limited and the focus was on getting the best result with the resources available.

Sony GT5 Prologue

GT5 Prologue

Just a note to mention so recent work for the Sony GT5 Prologue game.

http://www.granturismoworld.com/

Nothing too special about this project. There’s some nice, balanced HTML/Flash integration demonstrated in the expanding flash menu that sits over the other HTML/Flash main content.

One nice feature is a Local Connection controlled auto-pause of the in-page videos whenever the flash menu is opened - and subsequent resume when it closes. The idea revolves around a satellite and controller system - the in-page videos register themselves with the menu (the controller) and then listen for events from the menu.

Jaguar XF: Extreme Fatigue

tired_small.jpgSometimes you climb a mountain and, weary from the effort, you stand up and take a good long look around. You soak up the view and, feeling exhausted but re-invigorated, you stand back and really appreciate your achievement.

I’d like to echo the sentiments above, but I’d just really like a few days to get to know my duvet again – possibly with some pottering around the house, catching up on some lapsed TV series, maybe even deflowering the copy of God Of War II that still remains untouched next to my dusty PS2. You never know, I may even go outside… drink alcohol… see this summer thing that everyone’s on about…

Bit of a monumental project, this one; the microsite for the new Jaguar XF - no less for the fact that three generations of the Global Beach Flash team were involved in the project.

In fact this project saw the majority of our senior agency staff pull together to bring this beast to life.
And quite a beautiful beast it is:

http://www.jaguarxf.com/

Bentley Continental GT Convertible

Bentley CGTC Homepage

View the Bentley Continental GT Convertible Microsite

Yet another tight deadline for this one. I think it topped out at around 3 weeks’ dev time on this. :) Completely content managed and data driven, this site featured a fair amount of ported code from the Bentley 60Yr Microsite as rewriting from scratch would simply have been impossible in the time given.

This kind of situation really brings home the value of code reusability and writing clean, modular class structures that provide flexibility and the option to slot them into different scenarios. I probably saved my own bacon on this occasion simply by putting a little forward thinking into some of my classes.

The CGTC site was another microsite, but I’m finding microsites are getting bigger and bigger. There are a hell of a lot of corporate sites out there that feature less sections, information and complexity than the majority of the ‘microsites’ that are released these days. I just hope the price of these things is growing proportionally :) .

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Bentley 60Yr Microsite

Bentley Sixty Homepage

View the Bentley 60Year Celebrations Microsite

Towards the start of 2006, my company began working with Bentley Motors and it fell to me to develop their first Global Beach content - a flash microsite celebrating 60yrs of motor cars design and development in Crewe.
Due to quite a short deadline, parts of the site had to be timeline based instead of our usual, scripted approach. It’s always quite annoying having to integrate designer created flash into your app - movieclips not being top-left aligned, scaled or just simple unnamed. It’s mainly just a case of looking at the component parts of the design and seeing how much easier it would be to create and control the layout/animation through pure code. It just takes a little longer sometimes :(
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IVCA Award Winner!

Nice to be invited to this sort of thing. Usually it’s the big business boys and clients that get to go to dinner parties and events. The developer’s path isn’t generally destined to be strewn with such treats as invites to the IVCA Awards at The Grosvenor Hotel, Park Lane, but this time, I got to go.. and received my first award!

The IVCA awards aren’t technical or flash orientated awards, but we won the bronze award in our category for our Jaguar X150 Microsite and although it would have been great to pick up the gold, we weren’t really battling in home territory and there was some really talented opposition. Maybe next year, eh?
The girls from the office scrubbed up extremely well and when the shock of seeing us scruffy developers in dinner jackets eventually wore off, we ended up having a pretty fun night all in all.

See some snaps from the evening.

Design Your Jaguar

Design Your Jaguar

View the Design Your Jaguar Application

This was an existing application that a colleague, James built back in 2004 and I was tasked with adding an accessories and bodykit layer to it.
It’s a common enough occurrence that, in dev work, you’ll have to pick up the threads of someone else’s application and modify it. It’s just a bit of a nightmare when it’s a large, complicated application.
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Jaguar XK (X150) Microsite

Site Front Page

View the JaguarXK Microsite

This was the first major site I did with Global Beach and I collaborated with the other developer there, James Costerton. I learned a hell of a lot about using and controlling video in Flash and, although it was a pretty tight deadline, had some fun writing it. James’ involvement was mainly the integration of his configurator app (design your jaguar) into my MVC framework, the addition of a hydra-esque Build + Price module and, of course, being great company while working til stupid-o’clock at night.
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Daimler Super 8

Daimler Homepage

http://www.daimlercars.com/

One of the first projects Global Beach let me loose upon was the new Daimler flash site. Content managed and localised to eight countries (including japan), it was a great opportunity to get to grips with GB’s CMS and flash data API as well as familiarise myself with the existing AS2 library.

As the brand is quite dignified/classic, there wasn’t really a lot of scope for bells and whistles, but I got to do my first 360 spinner (just a simple mc frame controller really) and some cool automated data layouts. Overall, I think this site was a good learning experience for me and gave me a chance to file some sharper edges to my AS2 teeth on a medium-sized app for a global client. I think the end result is a solid app with some very slick content, if not a little slow paced for my tastes ;)

Click the thumbs below for some screengrabs.

Daimler 360 Spinner Daimler Exterior Shot Daimler Price and Specs