We’re almost at the completion of 2008 and a few major changes have occurred to my humble life. Due to the global financial crisis, my position as Senior Flash Developer and lead Melbourne creative at The White Agency had become redundant as of this day last week.

I mustn’t dwell on this; rather take advantage of the situation. It’s given me time to redevelop half arsed versions of my website to something I’m really happy with. This also forces me to explore the digital advertising industry in Melbourne. I’ve worked with Brisbane based Cru and Sydney based White, but never a Melbourne based agency.

Website

This new website will provide me with the infrastructure to provide something back to the online digital community and industry that has given so much to me; as well as provide an online presence that will showcase my work to peers and potential employers.

In the near future you’ll be expecting; tutorials and start up files to the way I approach website and banner projects and why; and cutting edge Flash and web concepts I’ve been dabbling in.

Where to now?

This week I’ll be contacting advertising and recruitment agencies for full-time employment. Understanding that it is so close to the holiday season, employers may hold back on recruitment decisions, I will be happy to freelance and upskill/provide Flash training to occupy my time.

Client: Mt Franklin
URL: http://www.thewellofpositivity.com/nbcf/

Launched: 25 August 2008
Agency: The White Agency
Project: User Generated Content, Viral Campaign, Blog and Facebook Widget

Recognition:

• B & T

Major Features:

• Extensive Deeplinking for key sections and sub-sections.
• Deeplinking support for user generated content (UGC).
• Clever math equations and infrastructure techniques to allow the “Well” to work in such a unique way to handle the dataflow of the dynamic content.
• Complete custom User Interaction elements to fit design and user errors.
• Search facility for UGC with deeplinking support.
• Clever bitmap effects to allow a liquid effect for the widget.
• The website was re-structured and reused to suite a widget framework.
• Widget utilises website content, and filters UGC to the widget.
• Comprehensive technical SEO strategy to fill the void in Flash. (To be implemented)

The Story:

The lifestyle surrounding this project was an experience on its own. I’m based in the satellite office in Melbourne, but this was a large scale project with a tight deadline – so the best solution was to base me in Sydney for a month.

I was able to deal with the rest of the creative and production team face to face. I couldn’t believe how much I missed that element – phone conversations really take out the vibe and excitement in creative discussions.

When I saw the designs, the Well in particular, and how that was to work – I took a deep gulp! At first I had no clue how to tackle it. There were many variable and possible complications surrounding it. As per usual, after I slept on it, my mind did its thing and broke down the complications into something that can be worked with much easier. Once you get the ball rolling in these games of Tetris, all the pieces start falling into place on its own, and the scary part is not so scary anymore.

The rest of the site wasn’t anything I hadn’t done before. The only thing to be done is improve in development from my previous techniques ways of attacking these styles of projects. The biggest development in this area was improving on my AS3 skills and the XML infrastructure to allow multi-developer simultaneous development easy.

Areas I still did struggle with has time-management, but as any Flash developer knows, when you’re making feature projects, you can’t put hours against creativity, especially with the variables of meeting the design (which was usually still pending client approval), functionality and an abundance of effects. Sacrifices of weeknights and weekends are unquestionable.

During the aftermath of this project, I was thinking about what just happened. I realised we had the ingredients for doing something ground breaking.

The topic of Flash SEO has been floating around for a while now, and Google is able to seep inside the Flash and index the content. Although this doesn’t help our situation as Google can’t seep into Flash’s dynamic content.

The manual way of providing SEO content to Google for a Flash website is putting the content behind the Flash interface, in the non-Flash area. The problem with this is, it will always be the same content over and over, even though you have a comprehensive content heavy website.

Given our ingredients; dynamic content and deeplinking of dynamic content; we can filter search optimised content in the non-Flash area to the specific URL. Now with deeplinking, we can point Flash to specific sections within the site, when the website is initially loaded. In the non-Flash content we can have specially formatted internal links that will provide Google with the section relevant content and allow users to see the specific content in the Flash.

The plan’s been made and will be implemented in the near future to this website.

I will do a full development report on this dynamic Flash SEO topic in the near future with diagrams.

Technology Analysis:

• Flash w/ Actionscript 3
• ASP.NET CMS
• XML
• Javascript

The Team:

• Strategy - Katie Chatfield
• Creative Director - Matt Grogan
• Producer - Jeff Gougeon
• Copy Writer - Luke Sandral
• Designer - Mike Barry, Penn Lee and Greg Miller
• ASP.NET Developer - David Carson & Duncan Ion
• HTML Developer - Kevin Jarvis
• Flash Developer - Neil Nand

Screenshots:

Client: Coke Zero
URL: http://www.cokezero.com.au/

Launched: 4 August 2008
Agency: The White Agency
Project: Microsite, Game, Screensavers, Ringtones & Wallpaper Downloads

Recognition:

• The FWA Featured Mention (10 Nov 2008)
• Adverblog

Major Features:

• Rich 3D in-game cut-scenes.
• Heavy use of FLVs.

The Story:

I can pretty much do anything in Flash. Make applications, RIAs, handle video, heavy database processing and more … but when it comes to games, I’m a lost cause. It’s a whole new ball game, that is better left with an expert. There is plenty of optimisation and physics that need to be taken into consideration.

My role in the project was the initial website development, setting up the site infrastructure and interaction and animation between the sections. Mark Fennell later came on to lead this project and looked after the gaming aspects of it. He changed the way some parts of the site worked, to optimise the performance of the processor intensive game. I became one of the support developers, where I made some in-game elements, and helped out where I could.

It was great meeting and working with Mark, and being able to query him on why he did certains in certain ways.

Props need to go to Jennings for design and Aiden for his spectacular 3D work.

Technology Analysis:

• Flash w/ Actionscript 3
• XML
• Javascript

The Team:

• Concepts - Alister McCann, Fabian Hupfauf
• Designer - Jennings
• Lead Flash Developer - Mark Fennell
• 3D & Video - Aiden Weatherby
• Support Flash Developers - Neil Nand & Aiden Weatherby

Screenshots:

Client: Carsales.com.au
URL: Banner Landing Page

Launched: 7 July 2008
Agency: The White Agency
Project: Medium Rectangle Banner, Skyscraper Banner, Leaderboard Banner & Full Banner

Recognition:

• Banner Blog

Major Features:

• Manual interaction and automated interaction modes.
• Automated interaction is scripted, so it can go to manual interation mid-animation.
• Eye positions are based on equations in relation to the car position.

The Story:

I’ve been a Flash Developer for about 3 years now, and this is probably my first real banner project. I guess starting at a new company, they didn’t want to throw me too far into the deep end, just incase I drown.

I’m so used to making complex interactive internet applications, that I had to really restrain myself with this project. And I really did have to, because with banners, all the content needs to be embedded into the flash and keep the output file under a certian filesize.

I did enjoy making this banner, as I’d never done one before, but I don’t think I want to make another .. ever again. I love pushing the boundaries of the digital medium, and banners are confined to a maximum security prison.

Technology Analysis:

• Flash w/ Actionscript 2

The Team:

• Account Manager - Ben Howden
• Art Direction - Fabian Hupfauf
• Flash Developer - Neil Nand

Screenshots:

Client: Diet Coca-Cola
URL: http://www.dietcoca-cola.com.au/feelthebrightness/

Launched: 30 June 2008
Agency: The White Agency
Project: TVC Landing Page

Major Features:

• Video Player
• Google Analytics on video playhead positions

The Story:

This is just a simple landing page for Diet Coke, to sit the TVC somewhere on the internet.

I don’t understand why the simpler Diet Coke URLs (eg, dietcoke.com.au, dietcoca-cola.com.au) all don’t go to this page. It may be because the coke.com.au site that it gets redirected to holds actual product information about the Diet Coke softdrink. Oh well, these decisions aren’t my call.

Irrelevant to that, I enjoy the way the background environment changes upon play and stop of the video playback.

A neat feature on this page is the measurement of how far the user has viewed the video. This information is relayed to Google Analytics, where extra measurement information is collected and presented.

Technology Analysis:

• Flash w/ Actionscript 3
• Flash FLV
• Google Analytics

The Team:

• Account Manager - Lauren Boyce
• Art Direction - Paul Jeffress
• Flash Developer - Neil Nand

Screenshots: