Firstborn has been nominated for the .net “Design Agency of the Year” award (in the running with some amazing companies, including AKQA, Poke, Big Spaceship, Barbarian Group, FI, etc.). The .net Awards celebrate the best in web design and development, mixing public opinion with the insights of a leading panel of judges from the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google.
Anyone can vote for the winner online. That means YOU can too. Please take a minute to vote and then get everyone you know - friends, family, pets etc. – to do the same. You do not have to vote in every category so this will be quick and painless (we're category number 9). Public voting will close on October 13th and then the judges take the top three people’s choice nominees in each category and choose the winner.
*edit: We scored a good 2nd place. Congrats to the winner F-I. Next year it's going to be us.
It is safe to say that nowadays nearly every single project here at firstborn contains Flash Video files (short: flv). Due to our success and experience, I think it is also safe to say that we are well-versed with web video and Flash Video in particular. Sadly, it is as well safe to say, that with each single project that we work on, we encounter new problems with that video format, even if it is simply the dark magic one has to perform, to achieve good filesize-to-quality ratios or a simple action like looping the video fluently without a millisecond of lag between the ending and recurring beginning.
Many of our former projects contain PNG image sequences, just so they can be looped smoothly, and therefore make our designers happy (read: make them stop getting on the developer's nerves). The downside of this technique is the much heavier filesize compared to an flv solution. This problem has been solved as of today. Imagine our surprise when we practically "stumbled" upon the solution of some major difficulties. The secret is the "keyframe interval" option when compressing the Flash Video. Usually you would try to set this to a slightly higher value, because this means smaller filesizes. In our case, the optimal (and embarrassingly obvious) solution would be to make it as small as possible though: "1 keyframe per frame"... This way the flv loops perfectly smooth and when embedded it in a MovieClip-Timeline in Flash, can - with the help of a little bit of code - finally be treated like a "real" regular MovieClip. I annouce the discovery of the holy grail: As long as they don't have sound, we can now change the playback speed of flvs and reverse (!!!) them. How cool is that.
I made 4 little demos, to illustrate what I'm talking about. Have a look at the different performances, as well as the filesizes:
National Grid Floe got featured on "Creativity" magazine's website. Check out the right column. Lead Developer: Jens Fischer. Very nice.
*edit: Since it has been more than 14 days, you now need a subsciption to view the post on Creativity's website. For those who don't have one, check out the link to Ads Of The World, it's pretty much the same thing...
Whoa. During the Lost season's finale the national grid commercial, which is driving traffic to our site, was aired. I'm surprised how efficient such a commercial is: so many people visited the site, that around midnight the server gave up and had to be restarted.
The site had around 1000 new registrations in one night (not visitors... registrations !!!), which is a huge success. Usually no one registers on a website if it's not necessary...
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...
Today I got up in the middle of the night (6:15 am) and arrived on 66th Street one hour later. Seven firstborn members, including Mathieu Badimon (http://lab.mathieu-badimon.com) and the boss Michael Ferdman, were meeting at the Reebok Sports Club/NY for a pre-work 3vs3 basketball session. And I have to say that this location is AMAZING! The locker room is bigger than most gyms, has better furniture than most homes and every single detail screams "luxury". They even have free hairproducts waiting for you after your workout. The club itself offers a wide variety of things to do, from working out in the regular gym over swimming to freeclimbing.
And they have basketball courts. Thats why we were there. Three vs three, fullcourt, at 7 in the morning. Oh boy. I died. Several times over. My last handball game was over 4 or 5 years ago, and I have played basketball exactly 3 times since then. But it was so worth it. We had a lot of fun and I actually did better than expected. Apart from the dieing of course. But noone, not even our intern from Luxembourg who plays basketball for 12 years was as good as Michel Ferdman. It's a pretty weird feeling, when a 40 year old guy absolutely kicks your ass and while you're being devastated he doesn't even break a sweat. But then again. Respect. This guy plays basketball and ice hockey. Daily. Both of it. And obviously his Michael Jordan training camps were worth visiting. And I'm sure you won't be elected "Michael Jordan TrainingCamp MVP" without a reason either (most valuable player, hi Mom and Dad). While playing, the whole bunch of us joked a lot and when we asked him why he's not playing in the NBA with his 3 pointer rate (roughly 100%) his answer was: "I'm a 40 year old, 6 foot tall Jew. That's why." Harhar.
After showering we had some nice breakfast (Michael paid) and then went to the office, to start our working day. What a cool way to start the day. I hope we can do it again as soon as possible. If I got you in the mood for some basketball, you might wanna check out http://www.mbf40.com. It's the site about Michael's 40th birthday. Apparently his wife rented out the Madison Square Garden for some time so he and his friends could have a game there. Damn. I need more money.
I managed to live the lazy life for exactly one weekend and two days after my arrival in New York. After that I had sorted out most things like opening a bank account and just HAD to go to work and DO something. Maybe it's the city; everything is moving here and as soon as you see someone just standing somewhere, not going anywhere, something smells suspicious. The flow of the city drives you forward and sitting at home, twiddling your thumbs feels even worse than usually. So I came in a few days earlier than expected by Firstborn and started setting up my workspace in the new office. The view of the 9th Avenue from my window on the 9th floor is pretty nice, but what's more important is that we finally have a real kitchen for lunch breaks, a really good looking conference room and an amazing studio for in house video shootings. Not only the office, also the team has grown since my last visit in October '07 but it still feels very harmonic and partially even like a little family to me.
My return was also perfectly timed because of the annual "Peter Luger's" feast. Each year Firstborn's owner Michael Ferdman takes us to the famous steak house in Brooklyn and it's all you can eat. I was lucky enough to be back on time to join for steaks and drinks.
and every single detail screams "luxury". They even have free hairproducts waiting for you after your workout. The club itself offers a wide variety of things to do, from working out in the regular gym over swimming to freeclimbing.