The Pure Drop
The Pure Drop is an interactive documentary of world music, commissioned by the ABC. I was flash developer, CSS developer and advised on the interaction on the front page, for Ether Multimedia. Visit the site.
Technology
The Flash video player is capable of playing .swfs and .flvs, with Javascript hooks into the other content on the page, meaning that different parts of the page could be highlighted at appropriate keyframes in the video. The keyframe marking process was designed to be integrated with the video editing process.
Australian Screen
Australian Screen is an compendium of thousands of clips from the archives of several Australian film institutions. I was commissioned to develop the site’s interactive timeline, which shows each clip, grouped by category, over the course of the past 100 years. Clicking on a title shows the thumbnail and a link to clips from each title. Visit the site (the site is due to launch in mid-2007—if you wish to see the preview, please contact me).
Technology
The timeline is developed in Flash, and displays data on-the-fly from the Australian Screen’s database. An important technical and usability challenge was how to allow the user to navigate up to 3000 films when there is not the screen real estate to show them all at once, nor the computer processing power to animate them all. My solution involves a fairly sophisticated zooming and cacheing function, which shows the most important titles at first, then progressively introduces less-important titles as the user zooms in.
Film Australia Digital Learning
Film Australia Digital Learning features free video clips and educational content from Film Australia’s archive—one of the nation’s largest and most historically significant collections. I developed the site’s video player, with database driven title images and text captions. I also implemented the design, making sure that the site was completely standards-compliant. Visit the site (non-educators may like to try the ‘other ways to search’).
Pedestrian
I am web developer for Pedestrian, a community arts organisation, based in Leicester. The site includes a custom content management system, written using Django, featuring a Google Map showing members’ profiles. Visit the site.
Creativity and Cognition Studios & Beta_space
These two sites were developed voluntarily for research groups I am involved with. The Creativity and Cognition Studios site features a ‘collective voice’; an aggregation of the individual blogs of CCS members. Both sites use the Joomla content management system, which researchers can use to collaboratively update the sites. Visit creativityandcognition.com; Visit betaspace.net.au.
Leonardo Transactions
I am Managing Editor of Leonardo Transactions, a section in the peer-reviewed journal Leonardo that is a fast track to publishing key new developments. I developed this small site in Django to allow researchers to submit papers with the minimum of fuss, with a similarly streamlined back-end interface for reviewers to submit their reviews. Visit the site.
Cookz
Cookz aims to solve the problem of searching for recipes online, partly by using the metadata gathered by creating ‘Recipics’—simple diagrams of recipies. I work with two other partners in our free time, and we are developing in Django. The New York Times wrote a nice article about us, but it’s now behind a login. Visit the site.
Creativity and Conformity Conference
I was commissioned to create a database and interface for viewing abstracts and downloading papers for the conference, but ended up also remodelling the entire site to be more standards-compliant, whilst staying true to the original graphic design. Visit the site.