In 2008 we had an opportunity to work on a interesting project with the creator of the Moonjoos line of vodka jellos.

Aidan wanted to create an experience site where the legend of the brand could be developed. So working with our friends Digitalus we set to and devised a world on the dark side of the moon where men were tempted by beautiful maidens on earth, kidnapped and then set to work as slaves of the Moonjoos Corporation, mining, distilling and packaging the famous Moonjoos brand of vodka jellies.

Most of the work was completed in-house with the dark moon caves and factory environments being modeled in Maya and layers built up in flash, similar to our other work with Canadian Club Whisky. Since the jellos are an RTD and targeted at the 18 to 24 year old market we decided to base the experience around a set of games.

As a slave you have to complete a series of tasks, firstly mining the rare moon rock for the secret ingredients, then mixing them correctly, before working in the packaging room distributing the product around the world. All the time you are cajoled and harrassed by the moon maiden who has become an evil slave driver with a particularly sharp tongue.

Once all tasks are completed you end up in the bar where you learn how to consume the jellos and presumably have achieved a rank worthy of being released back to earth.

The site received a lot of attention, statistics showed many game players from Asia and China in particular. It was shortlisted in the top five of the animation category of the 2008 Pixel Awards alongside our heroes Firstborn and Big Spaceship. It was eventually pipped by Firstborn’s Microsoft Zune Journey.

Go play and enjoy Moonjoos here

The problem with 3D animation appearing so bewitching and almost anything being possible, is that people don’t understand certain 3D workflows can be extremely linear, and therefore certain things cannot be adjusted after the fact, without losing a great amount of work (this video is highly simplified, but it presents a few of these issues clearly).

The Foundry, developers of Nuke, have purchased Mari from Weta. Mari is an extremely scalable painting application, including highly complex deforming meshes, that was built in tandem with the production of Avatar, and allowed the dense world to be realised. Interestingly Weta will still develop features for this product, so the two builds will continually merge at given dates. The Foundry know how to build products, by jump starting development by purchasing them after being rigorously developed and tuned on full scale Hollywood blockbuster films. Nuke was originally created by Digital Domain and used on many of their films in the 90s, and in the last decade. Mari is targeted for public release on Windows and Linux 64bit platforms. Article byCGSociety here, and video interview by fxPhd here.

Google enters a new market, the home media box, as a new front against competitors with products such as Apple TV, Tivo, Windows Media Center, and many others. Google’s main differentiating aspect to their product, is their expertise with search and vast video libraries.

Here is some interesting research by Alias-Wavefront (now owned by Autodesk) from the late nineties. The Boom Chameleon running Maya software, is a motion capture device with screen. This could be recreated in a much more portable way these days, if a light version of Maya were created for the iPad, or similar device. The iPad could be used on movie sets, to check out virtual sets, and make simplistic layout changes. This would be a very inexpensive way for many different departments to check out a set before it is built, or fully developed as a virtual set. More Boom Chameleon here and here.

Recently I have seen Bill Buxton (in the previous Alias Videos ) pop up in some Microsoft research demo’s, regarding natural user interfaces, this guy is a genius and a brilliant speaker. I wonder when the public is going to see a mainstream product from Microsoft to show the results of their research. Microsoft have great tech, they just aren’t very quick at turning it into commercial products.

Project Natal is looking good (CES 2010 Video here, and here), but come on Microsoft when are you going to give it a real name (Project Birth), not a code name? Playstation Move is the perfect name for Sony’s motion control device - the name is important. Playstation Move preview here and excellent development diary here.

Microsoft Office Labs 2019 Vision Montage

This is very cool and most of the technology is quite probable at some point.

Microsoft Project Gutav is another Microsoft Research group experimenting with advanced painting software. Hopefully one day available in a portable tablet! If your interested in Microsoft’s other natural input technologies, Microsoft Surface is worth checking out - a large multi-touch, multi-person surface designed for large commercial clients. Though much of Microsoft’s Surface technology could also be directly applicable to a portable tablet.

Oh and if anyone thinks Microsoft copied Apple regarding touch based interfaces, research has been on going world wide for decades by many companies. Besides Microsoft actually released Microsoft Surface one month before the iPhone, Apple’s first touch device. The first iteration of MS Surface had all the same functionality and more as the iPhone, regarding touch control interface innovations - Microsoft just focused on the business market. Also Microsoft have fully implemented touch interaction natively in Windows 7, with OSX currently having no touch support.

Talking about future technology, here is the Playstation 9 preview video - yep pretty extreme.

What’s the biggest video game development blunder ever? Duke Nukem Forever and it’s nightmarish production. This article explains in a detailed chronological manner, what went so wrong, leading to a twelve year development cycle, and the eventual demise of 3D Realms - a great lesson in how not to make a game.

Marc Petit, Senior Vice President of the Media and Entertainment Division of Autodesk gives a tour of the Toronto office where Autodesk Maya, Mudbox, Alias and Sketchbook are created. Also for Max, Softimage, and Motion Builder users, here is a video glimpse of the Montreal office - which was once a ship building warehouse!

Wickedly realistic Porsche commercial, celebrating Porsche’s 60th Anniversary, showing a family tree of cars. SideFX Houdini used for rendering, effects, and car rigging. Traditionally Houdini has been a weak modelling application, because of it’s procedural workflow being cumbersome, and lack of specialist modelling tools - so It would be interesting to know if Houdini was used for modelling.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The competition between Microsoft and Apple has entered a new era, Apple’s market value exceeds Microsoft ’s slightly for the first time - with Google trailing not a insurmountable distance behind. Intriguing given the fact Microsoft makes more revenue(x1.5) and profit (x3) than Apple. Market value represents shareholders perception on the company’s potential. Hopefully Apple keeps delivering, otherwise market value (share price) decreases. Competitors like Microsoft have time to react, and spend up large on innovation using larger built up cash reserves. Microsoft has fantastic research teams, producing amazing technologies they just need to focus on building products that encapsulate these. Great news for consumers, everything in the computer world will speed up a bit more…

See graph below for revenue comparisons, interesting Sony makes a lot of revenue…I bet that doesn’t equate to the most profit - televisions and electrical equipment must cost a lot to build, unlike replicating software. Also worth noting that with Windows 7 released this year, Microsoft will see a nice bump back up to higher revenue this year. Windows 7 has become the fastest selling operating system of all time.

Oh and poor Steve Jobs (in relation to Bill Gates) misses his chance to make 10 billion dollars.

“Trouble in the Boom Times”, an enlightening overview of the nature of business and competition amongst Hollywood visual effects studios - a very rare article for the mainstream media to cover. Lee Stranham, a writer for The Huffington Post, and experienced production artist for feature films, has written an open letter to James Cameron regarding these issues and more, in an endeavour to broaden the awareness.

Also worth noting, since both these articles don’t mention it, is that it is very common in Hollywood films for many artists and even entire effects houses to be missing from the credits - there is a predefined number of artist’s allowed in the credits. Apparently having too many artist’s makes the film reel longer, and therefore more expensive. Yet because of unions even coffee runners and helpers legally must be in the credits.

20 years of Photoshop, an article explaining the creation and development of Photoshop, up to present day.

The History of 3D Studio Max for the 20th anniversary of Max.

For visual effects artists, this will be of interest - Maya 2011 has been out for a month or so. Mac users finally got some love from Autodesk with a 64 bit version, though predictably the word is that the Mac version is more buggy than the Windows version. The most significant new feature is a complete rebuild of the interface (on Mac, PC, and Linux) around the Nokia QT framework . Maya 2011 is a huge upgrade, probably the biggest since Maya 7, or even earlier versions.

This release has improvements in assets, skinning, rigging, fluids, nParticles, modelling, performance, script highlighting , auto completion, multithreading, new hypershade and colour picker design, and countless small additions and refinements. For a full list of these changes click here, and for a review click here. The main Maya homepage shows a very sparse overview of new features. I think Autodesk feel content enough with Maya still being the industry standard for visual effects, that they don’t bother putting much effort in showing off all their new features like other smaller companies, such as Luxology Modo, SideFX Houdini and Maxon Cinema 4D.

Smoke 2010 has been released from the grip of proprietary expensive hardware, and is now available on the Mac platform - though in comparison to After Effects, this is still an expensive application! Smoke is an editing and finishing application with excellent tool sets for colour correction, 3D compositing, 3D type, keying, and effects.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s why we jumped at the opportunity to create an application that can have impact in the real world. ”Giving Nature a Voice” is a Facebook based multi-petition application for Forest & Bird New Zealand. Their first petition was to encourage people to speak up and help prevent more mining of our conservation areas:

There are existing Facebook petition apps about (eg; Causes), but they are all bloated with unnecessary extra features and weren’t able to be branded as tightly as Forest and Bird required. A custom solution was the best course forward, not only as we could design as we saw fit, but so we could learn what makes Facebook apps tick.

For obvious security reasons, Facebook has locked down how apps work - you have to authorise them before you can use them. The issue with this for app creators is conversion rates  - a user may see a Wall post that interests them, like the one below:

But when they click it, they get a scary looking dialogue:

This is immediately a barrier to users, many will leave the application at this point, as it seems too intrusive and they are worried that their personal information will be mined and used for dubious purposes. The recent Facebook wall spam issues won’t help to change attitudes here and I predict that its going to get progressively more difficult to use this part of the API as a way to make an app more viral. In our case we were seeking to present the user with a simple way to send the petition on to their friends.

So what is the solution? I wouldn’t suggest getting rid of the warning - it’s there for a good purpose, to prevent dodgy apps from collecting all your personal information.

There are two tactics that can be used:

1. Link users to the Facebook App Page rather than directly to an App. Pages require no security to access, and its very easy for someone to become a fan of a page. Another bonus here is the speed of setting up a page, less than 10 minutes in most cases - so a topical subject can have its own page within a few minutes of the news breaking. Add the app later to the page for more interactivity.

2. You don’t have to ask users access unless you’re actually using their Facebook data. Facebooks calls these Public Canvas Pages

Here’s the base link for our app:

http://apps.facebook.com/givingnatureavoice/

You can visit this link without even being signed into Facebook. As soon as you click one of the petitions however, authorisation is required as the app needs it to see if your friend have signed, to post to your wall, etc.

For the past 18 months we’ve worked with the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology to help them create a large number of interactive animations for their Aeronautical Engineering courses. We’ve posted stills of a few of our favourite models below so that you can appreciate the quality and  attention to detail in each animation.

Students enjoy being able to interact directly with each model and are able to visualise the functions in a step by step and hands on approach. They can switch individual groups of lights on and off in aircraft, watch an animated character demonstrate airtraffic signals or see how heat affects different metals by lighting their own virtual bunsen burner.

More pictures after the jump.

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.

So we set to our onerous task of photographing and video the nine stunning entrants as well as designing the branding, print advertising and of the course the website where all the action would take place.

The final line-up were featured in newspapers and posters, using traditional media to raise awareness of the campaign. Contestants were supplied with their own collateral and they proceeded to spread the word through their networks and to enlist the help of friends and colleagues to capture votes. Facebook and Bebo pages were set up and other elaborate schemes were dreamt up. The eventual winner tapped into her hometown of Moosomin, Saskatchewan in Canada and was able to generate a groundswell of support.

We were amazed at the ferocity of personal campaigning of some of the contestants and there was the inevitable cheating where the voting site was hacked by more than one of the contenders (well maybe their friends). Fortunately we were able to keep a track of this and the voting system was not compromised.

The public chose the top five contestants and then judging determined the eventual winner and runnersup. Video was taken of all five and the winners video was uploaded to the internet as soon as the announcement was made. All up it was an enjoyable experience, but due to the incredible competitiveness of the contestants, one we decided not to redo in a hurry.

The site with bio’s and videos of the nine entrants can be viewed here.

We regularly 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, or resorting to third parties such as yousendit we created a simple, clean online Client Area.

It is extremely easy to use - it simply maps our 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 security, 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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

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

The menu

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.

Finite, but potentially gigantic lists of links, that are structured into multiple levels, that have to be accessible as easy as possible (no-click), that, furthermore, don’t cover body content, and that don’t conflict with the strip of cross-fading images. Our solution was the flash-based drop-up menu, driven by XML, which sort of lends itself to the multi-level structure. So each of the taranaki.info menus is really driven by an XML tree, managed in the admin area, that looks something like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>
<site name=”Visit”>
<level1   title=”About Taranaki”>
<level2   title=”A Region - Like No Other” url=…”>
<level3   url=”…”>North Taranaki</level3>
<level3   url=”…”>New Plymouth</level3>
<level3   url=”…”>Stratford</level3>
<level3   url=”…”>South Taranaki</level3>
</level2>
<level2   url=”…”>Climate and Weather</level2>
<level2   url=”…”>History</level2>
<level2   url=”…”>News</level2>
<level2   url=”…”>Request Visitor Brochures</level2>
<level2 target=”_blank”  url=”…”>Taranaki Image Gallery</level2>
</level1>
…
</site>

In addition, each menu lists (in a random order) a unique set of images in the photo-strip, that is hard-coded.

Modular homepages

Homepages are tricky beasts. They change all the time, and they need to do that without smashing the basic aesthetic of the thing. If you create a static page, you ensure it is, and remains pretty all the time, but you end up changing it’s elements all the time. If you create a totally open, CMS-editable homepage, you risk it turning into an abomination within a year. So the solution we employed was somewhere in the middle : a modular approach. That is we didn’t design / develop homepages, we created the building blocks, that can be re-used all over the sitescape. So with each homepage, we put forward, and socialised a schematic view, like this :

that seems to have turned into a homepage, like this :

What’s missing here, is the crucial middle step, the modules. You see this homepage has a set of strict governing rules, to ensure aesthetic standards, under which nicely pre-designed modules exist, which allow great freedom of content. For example, we usually have a lot of current “highlights” on a site, hot topics, pages of interest, etc. Now instead of just putting five current ones up there in some format (that we’d have to change very frequently), we created the Showcase module :

This way there’s a clearly defined structure for highlights, one that can be easily updated by the client at any time, and it will always look good. The admins spend less time updating these, we spend less time tweaking the homepage.

Centralised features

Fair enough, but modules alone still leave the problem of having to update content individually on each homepage, which in some cases means duplicate workflows. Say there’s a piece of news that appears on both the Visit, and the Business homepages, you have no choice but to type it up into each news module. So we realised some features of the site have to be centralised, like News and Events :

These modules are not individually managed. They grab their data from a central News, and Events repository, in which elements are written, and with a tickbox, are published to one or many of the homepages. I never told you but someone has at some point heard about a central News/Events feature on the site too, where you can filter all news elements to your liking, and subscribe using your custom settings.

Snackbox

There’s some other, smaller treats scattered around the site (like the map module, google Maps implementation, different menu concepts, some cool content-scrollers) but I thought I’d just run you through the rough governing principles of our approach. So for dessert, here’s a set of graphical elements used around the site :

Happy New Year!

Momentum 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)