The Art of Rawr

Finally, after a good one and a half months of hard work, short nights and tons of coffee and 0.5 liter Red Bull cans, http://www.nationalgridfloe.com went live. It's been my first project as a full time employee for firstborn, and I think it's safe to say, that it was a good start. Firstborn was approached by the ad-agency Mullen to build a site for the electricity and gas company National Grid. The goal of the website is to create awareness of the fact, that even little everyday actions have an impact on the environment and that by taking little actions in your everyday life, you can make a positive change. To achieve that, we went with a polar bear theme, which is a very emotional topic right now, because of the US government's very recent admission, that the polar bear is an endangered species. On the site, you will find three main sections: "take action", "befriend a bear" and "community".

Take action:
This is the "adult" part of the site, where you can compare everyday actions and find out, how they affect the environment. For example: Eating one cheeseburger has the same impact on the environment as drinking 28 cans of coke. Who would have thought that? But don't worry. In this section, you can also add those everyday actions to your private action list and pledge to behave good in this special area. So if you pledge to eat one less cheeseburger per week, for example, you would save 1.22 lbs. of CO2 per week. The moment you drag an action into your action list and pledge to make the change, you can see the environment in the background react...

Befriend a bear:
This section features a little polar bear cub and is a little bit less serious, it's meant for kids and adults at work. By playing little games with the polar bear, you can increase his health, happiness and friendship. Throughout the game play, you have to answer questions, to unlock games for example, and those questions teach a few facts about environmental impact in a playful way. I love this section.

Community:
This section keeps track about the statistics of the site. You can let the community know, why you decided to take action and can see, which actions have been pledged the most, how much has the community saved in total and how much you have saved yourself since you joined the site. As of May 29th, 2008 over 3800 people registered on the site already, which is pretty amazing. Usually no one registers on websites if it doesn't really have to be. Also, due to the site being hooked up to Google analytics, we know that the average user stays around 8-9 minutes on the site, which is also pretty amazing for an average.

Our team:
- PRODUCER: dealing with the ad-agency and the client, managing the whole project time line, working on concept and copy
- CREATIVE DIRECTOR: modeling and rendering the 3d, designing pretty much the whole site
- MOTION DESIGNER: animating the 3d models, which is a lot more work than it sounds
- BACKEND DEVELOPER: our main programmer, working on the php and database part of the site (saving user data etc)
- SOUND PRODUCTION ARTIST: hired by firstborn on a freelance basis, to produce the sounds for the site, in the end our German intern did most of the work tho (hi Marcus)
- ME: I was the only frontend developer, which means i put the whole thing together in Flash and brought the static screendesign to life. The project is coded in Actionscript 3 and funnily enough: even tho it's a Flash site, I didn't really open the program Flash for this project, because I used Eclipse and FDT to code and Flex to compile the project... Last but not least, I also played a major role in the conceptual design, so I was allowed to do the two things I enjoy most: C&C... concept and code...

To sum it up...
I'm pretty proud of the outcome, especially because firstborn showed a whole lot of trust, by giving me such an important role in a pretty big/important/expensive project as my first job. I'm thrilled to be part of the team/family and the next project for me starts on Monday already. I'm excited and you'll have plenty of cool things to look forward to here on this blog...

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Project Link: http://www.nationalgridfloe.com