Remembering Miss Americarna

March 10th, 2010 Tahnia Design, Stills, Video, Web
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With another successful Americarna event done and dusted we thought it a good opportunity to look back on one of the more interesting campaigns that we’ve been involved with - the Miss Americarna 2008 competition.

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At the inaugural event a year earlier the organisers had simply handpicked a girl to appear as the public face of the event, in 2008 they wanted to encourage more participation both from the applicants and  the public. A competition presented a great way to achieve this and also raise awareness of the event 6 months out so it was decided to advertise for contestants and then allow the public to vote using the website and SMS based texting. Proceeds from the texts would go to the SPCA.

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Momentum Client Area application

February 15th, 2010 Daniel Brag, Software, Technology
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Client Area Example

We regulary have the need to share assets with our clients  - videos, images, mock-ups, documents, etc.

Instead of clogging up inboxes with huge files that can’t be easily found, we created a simple, clean online Client Area.
It is extremely easy to use - it simply maps your local folders and files to a tasty interface.

Got a new client? Just create a new folder with their name, and paste your assets into it.
Then just send your client the nicely formatted URL to their project.

Videos are recognised automatically and wrapped into a custom player (with timecode).
For secutity, folders are easily locked by a password.

For a public demo, check it out here: http://www.momentumstudios.co.nz/demo/clients/

The client area is an inhouse bespoke PHP application. Get in contact if you are interested, it can be easily reskinned and deployed.

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Producing an 8 story high video

February 8th, 2010 Ant Brag, Digital Signage, Video
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We always enjoy the inevitable challenges that occur when creating media to display on unusual screens or surfaces. So when one of our international clients who had just undergone a rebrand asked us to repurpose video asset for use on the eight story high NASDAQ Marketsite Tower in New Yorks Times Square we jumped at the opportunity.

The screen measures 1,000 square metres and uses more than 18 million LEDs on a display with a top resolution of 1280×1824. Compare that with the TSB Bank 40 square metre screen that we built and operated and you get a idea of the sheer size of the sign. As you can see from the short video above, not only is the aspect ratio quite unique but we also had to plan for the windows which this massive digital sign is built around.

Fortunately its less of an issue than you’d think, as NASDAQ provides After Effect templates which help to provide a guide. Since we had originated the initial video in 720P it was quite easy to conform to the aspect ratio without losing detail. It was pretty cool to be able to watch the result via live webcam and see our work displayed in real time on the other side of the world.

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The video was shot on XDCAM EX using the Letus Ultimate and Nikon 35mm lenses, actors were filmed in downtown Wellington, at Kaitoke Regional Park and on a greenscreen in our studio. The  asset was taken from the brand video that we initially worked on. Nicci Lock from Film Wellington was a great help with securing location permissions.

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Taranaki, Like No Other

January 5th, 2010 Ben CMS, Web
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Here’s something we ain’t blogged about yet: the portal of Taranaki, the beautiful region where Momentum was born. It’s a site-system that began as an effort to unify a family of websites that dealt with different aspects of life in Taranaki, like tourism, film, business, governance, etc. This was three years ago. Today’s Taranaki - Like No Other website has evolved considerably, and, like all good sites, that process is ongoing.

Allow me to guide you through some of the cool techniques we pulled designing this site.

The menu

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The first challenge we had, was of course how to structure, and easily navigate such huge amounts of diverse data. Beyond the main areas (top-right) we still had enormous branches of information.

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McDonald Real Estate site redevelopment

January 5th, 2010 Daniel CMS, Software, Technology, Web
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mcd-screen1Momentum enjoyed the opportunity to redevelop the McDonald Real Estate site (http://www.eieio.co.nz/)  from the ground up.

A real estate site is a great technical challenge - hundreds of listings and thousands of photos changing daily, as well as complex searches and regular content changes.

We decided to use a free, open source CMS called Silverstripe.

Silverstripe is a PHP/MySQL based CMS that makes both development and future maintenance a breeze.

Silverstripe utilises an MVC (Model-View-Controller) approach to separate data, web pages and actions.

An easy to use admin interface means clients can edit content easily, and add and edit objects such as estate agents, branches and rental properties

Listings and photos are uploaded daily from a third party real estate aggregator. They arrive in XML format, and a nightly Linux cron job loads these listings into the database, using the wonderful SimpleXML PHP extension to parse the XML feed.

The site uses a combination of Flash and Javascript to enhance the users experience -
a Flash carousel showing a random selection of properties provides pizazz to the homepage, and prettyPhoto (a javascript library) is used to provide a popup slideshow of property photographs.

Other technical features includes an email to a friend function, which pops up a dialog, emails someone, and notifies of success, all without leaving the page. Also included is a print PDF function, which dynamically generates a PDF document on the fly.

Behind the scenes, agents can login and get a tailored vendor report that pulls back statistics from Google Analytics and builds graphs showing visitor numbers and global location.

We used a combination of the Google Chart API and the Google Analytics Data Export API to create these custom reports.

Technology used:

Silverstripe CMS
jQuery (a powerful, multi-purpose Javascript library)
prettyPhoto (jQuery based lightbox clone)
Datejs (a very nice, open-source Javascript date library)
SimpleXML (PHP extension for working with XML)
Google Chart API (Powerful tool to generate a wide range of dynamic charts)
Google Analytics Data Export API (Allows direct access to the data generated by Google Analytics)

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Digital Signage - ultimate messaging flexibility

December 11th, 2009 Tahnia Digital Signage, Technology, Video
0

msl_6110-blog

Momentum has a number of years experience with the installation, ongoing development and content creation for digital signage networks. As an example in 2005 we approached the TSB Bank about a digital signage network across their network of branches, and offered to work alongside them to manage the installation, help-desk, and the creation of content.

After gauging their initial interest, we set up a demonstration to showcase the hardware (screens and software), plus some digital content in the Banks house style.

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Is this the future of print?

December 4th, 2009 Ant Web
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Truth in Advertising

November 27th, 2009 Phonam Fun, Video
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Quite a long piece to watch but there is actual truth in this video ;) A great story about how a marketing campaign is made. The characters say what they think and not what they should say. It’s a bit old but still entertaining.

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Pirates of Silicon Valley, Office 2010, Google Chrome OS and Wave, and more…

November 25th, 2009 Braden Design, Fun, Gadgets, Links
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Above: Bill Gates looking envious of Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley movie . Today  this situation is massively reversed, with Bill having much more money, and Microsoft still the undisputed leader in sales, and market share.

I recently watched the 1999 film, Pirates of Silicon Valley which is based around the creation of the personal computer. The plot is heavily focused on the rise of both Apple and Microsoft (and Xerox’s blunder) and the inspirational but flawed leaders, who set out to conquer the world with computers that are for everyone. The two main characters are of course Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I thoroughly recommend this movie, even if your not a geek it’s worth seeing, because there is no other movie like it. Oh and by the way, the trailer online doesn’t do the movie justice, and has a number of scenes, that were not in the final movie.

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WOMAD Experience

November 3rd, 2009 Ant Video
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Beautifully filmed by Scottie Mckinnon of Stoney River Studios with graphics by Phonam Gatela-Garcia. Scottie used an EX3 with a Letus and Nikon 35mm film lenses including tilt shift to recreate the colour and energy of the now legendary WOMAD festivals held annually in the TSB Bowl of Brooklands.

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