This was one of those never-ending stories where I’m lucky that my involvement was minimal. It was a huge project for a tough client and it took forever to make. Basically, I only did a few Flash gadgets for the site, like the interactive maps and a webcam application. Pretty basic stuff, really, but at a time when Flash was used for “kewl” animated menus and buttons, these gadgets were actually useful.
Sinerga is a company that makes big LED display panels, one of which is placed very prominently placed in the city center. It’s so low-tech that I can’t believe it’s still there. Most probably because it has the same effect as internet banners, it’s always in your face, but you don’t even notice it anymore.
This site is such an obvious example of the enthusiasm Ozi and I had for Flash. The idea was to create the feeling of being on some kind of Times Square-like place. Every menu choice rotated the square and changed the color of the buildings. I find it funny now, but we were dead serious then. Since there were no vector plugins for 3D applications then, the rotating square was exported as wireframe images from a 3D application and then Ozi manually drew and colored vector versions of them in Illustrator. Actually, all four sides of the square were the same, with a building in the middle which carried a huge two-part LED display. The top featured Ozi’s wacky motion graphics and the bottom was reserverd for slogans which were covered by some kind of net to create a LED look.
Anyway, in the end, we had to tone everything down, because it was just too flashy, so we halved the size and removed the motion graphics. Notice that I haven’t mentioned the content yet? Exactly.
This project got us free advertising space for a few years on the “city’s main LED display” I mentioned earlier.
The very first client work I’ve ever done was this site for the Hepatitis B awareness and innoculation campaign, conducted by the Institute of Public Health. I’m completely amazed that it’s still online, considering it was done at a time when I still had a lot to learn about Flash and other internet technologies, so the production was basically me and Ozi trying to figure out how to make a pull-down menu in Flash and me taking the programmers’ instructions on how to post a form. I was also fiddling with some audio software back then, so I created a groovy but a bit menacing sound loop for the site.
This was my first project at Parsek back in 1998. The company was still trying to get serious clients and the first thing to do was to create a flashy website. Of course, the website was crap, spinning logos and everything, but still it was among the first of its kind.
Done in Flash 4, with an annoying background loop, my friend Olga doing fake japanese accent sound effects and featuring Ozi’s wacky animations, we basically just had a good time doing it. The news section was updated manually in Flash and then re-exported, and I think we did it twice.
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