The world’s largest online collection of skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding videos – presented in one, small, embeddable media player. Generation 3 of the Factory Media Browser connects to all the sports channels, offers full user analytics and commercials, and offers the user buffer free full screen playback and the chance to share the movies with friends.
As Mpora is one of my favourite and most frequently visited sites, I wanted to make sure that the new media player would be slick, seamless and operated as smooth as possible.  Working solo for Factory Media, the largest action sports publisher in the world.

MPORA : Action Sports – Click a video file to watch it

Check out the embedded player below featuring my favourite skater John Rattray in “H’Min Bam”.

Factory Media Browser V3 presents “H’Min Bam”

See it in action on these  great sites :

• Dirtmountainbike.com
• Mpora.com
• Sidewalkmag.com
• Kingpinmag.com
• rideukbmx.com
• Digbmx.com
• Surfeuropemag.com
• Ssurferspath.com
• Motomagazine.co.uk
• Onboardsnowboarding.com
• Whitelines.com
• Skiunion.com
• coolermag.com
• Boards.co.uk
• Boardseeker.com
• thebicyclebuyer.com

Synaesthetic Binaural Bassline Generator

Move fun that trying to create colour palettes, here is a sound palette creator. By using colours as the basis for sounds, this tool creates harmonic, and sometimes inharmonic basslines that modulate together to form a powerful binaural beat, and a series of grooving basslines.

A colour wheel is designed so that harmonic colour palettes can be easily found by placing the colours at set spacings around the wheel. The only real difference between sound and light is the speed and shape of the waveform, something that this instrument helps to bring back together. I was thinking of calling this kind of tool a synaesthesizer!

Sound Wheel

Instructions for use :

Double Click to add a new note and form a chord
Click anywhere black to remove a node (or right click)

Use the following keys to :
Z – Increase Intonation Range
X – Decrease Intonation Range
M – Change the next note’s Timbre
N – Change the next Timbre
UP – Move child chords closer to the centre
DOWN – Move child chords away from centre
LEFT – Change Variable Intonation (Microtonality Mode)
RIGHT – Change Variable Intonation (Microtonality Mode)

Open the Sound Wheel in a new window

Places talking about the SoundWheel :

• CNet
• Wired
• Think Design
• Elephant Candy

Grab some buddies, boot up your laptops and sing the zombie anthem in perfect harmony with your friends  (or not!). Classic retro fun gaming using 21st century technology and crowd participation for a spooky karaoke experience. Zombie Barbershop Quartet
This was my team submission for Music Hack Day 2010, written alongside multi talented developer Robin Beitra and evil genius mastermind, Alastair Dant.

Based around the classic games of the 80s, but with a modern twist, Zombie Barbershop Quartet is best played in a room where many people are playing simultaneously, as the musical score is synchronised with a central server, all the zombies sing in tune and in time!

Using the fantastic new microphone sampling facility in Flash 10.1, we wrote some classes that sample and record the microphone input allowing us to do some pretty nifty transformations of the waveforms. Originally we started trying to deduce the frequency you are singing using a Fast Fourier Transformation, which as Flash does not have one in built, made performance quite sluggish. We eventually wrote an Auto Correlator Class that compares periods of waveforms against each other to quickly determine the dominant frequency using very few resources.

Diesel interactive film catalogue

How do you show off an entire catalogue of clothes whilst dancing in a pop video… An homage to Goddard’s 1964 film Bande à part, and named after the pop song by Josef Xorto, this interactive pop video doubles as this years Diesel clothes catalogue. A fun and engaging film with more than a little charm.Edited with a technique known as match-cut, which allows movements to remain fluid from a character, even whilst they are changing clothes and actors, meaning we could show off the entire Diesel range in a just 3 minutes!

The fun part is that you can roll over the video at any time which pauses it to show information about each garment and each actor. From there you can follow links to buy the clothes on Diesel’s store, or even cyber-stalk the actors.

A hundred lovers

FWA Site of the Day

Lexus Interactive Film Game

A high octane car chase movie that adapts it’s plot to feature the user as the co-driver! Released as part of a promotional campaign, this engaging video which is tailor made for you, features your photograph, your voice and your interactions, can be saved and shared on Facebook and Twitter.

May 2010′s  FWA Site of the month : The Dark Ride is a fun interactive commercial for Lexus Cars developed by the award winning Stink Digital. Working closely with the Lexus Producers and Directors and a team of 5 Flash Developers, the Dark Ride is a promotional campaign for an upcoming car. Using Hollywood actors and directors, Lexus created a series of videos that form paths throughout the story, where each user selects the outcome. Using Flash for its amazing multimedia tools, the user themselves feature in the movie by using photographs taken from the webcam, the user’s mugshot is displayed alongside the driver – even during the interactive perspective parts. Lots of little niceties are featured in the back end for this project, from using face detection algorithms on the web cam to recording user audio to the Red5 database. The most amazing part of the whole project in my mind is the fact that the whole movie of the car is computer rendered – not even a prototype existed for us to film!

Experience the “Dark Ride”

FWA : Site of the Year Readers Choice 2010

Inspiration. Quick.

Inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s work to prevent creative blocks… try this widget out when you are facing the wall.

Full of sage like quotes and abstract commands, the Oblique Strategies are a series of cards designed to be pulled out when you need to shake things up creatively.

I have tried to keep these cards as accurate as possible (even down to the 10 point sans-serif font!) to the real thing. The further you click away from the card, the more inertia you spin it with, and the angle of spin is entirely dependent on where you are clicking. It features all the original 4 versions – you can select between them using the controls in the lower left corner – the original version is still available from Eno’s shop. The only thing really missing from this virtual version are the 6 blank cards that came with the original. I will leave that for you create.

Try it out and tell me what you think!
Oblique Strategies : V5

Find out more about the original Oblique Strategies and order your own :

1. The Oblique Strategies Fansite
2. Buy your own

Surround Sound Chillage

Ever feel you just need a bit of harmony in your day, a few moments of clarity and calm? Find yourself battling with noise? Now you can relax online with the 3D Buddha Machine! Load it up and click until happy… if you feel it is too loud, scroll the mouse wheel.

What is it?

Based on the world famous Buddha Machine by FM3 (Zhang Jian and Christiaan Virant), this is an authentic online replica. Coded using the incredible Papervision libraries and my own personal Media Framework, the Buddha Machine 3D features all 9 original sounds from each the Buddha Machine I and II – kindly released under creative commons. Thanks to the magic of the internet, Christiaan popped by to offer his support. Thanks!
.

What does it do?

Put on some headphones, click to find the sound for you, use the mouse wheel to set your volume, and relax. If you need a portable version, consider buying the original product – it fits in your pocket!

How does it work?

The Audio system reacts to the position of the 3D object, decided by the mouse, and considers one face as a speaker. As the object rotates this pans and fades the audio according to the trigonometry formulated from the angle between the user and the normal of the speaker faced plane. The volume is also reactive to clipped faces, and by that I mean speakers that are pointing away from the user, the further a speaker turns away from the user, the less it can be heard.

Sounds are loaded as mp3s from an xspf playlist and streamed, whilst the next track is pre-fetched to prevent gaps and loading delays when changing sounds.

How was it made?

I decided to avoid Flash entirely and instead use the free FLEX compiler from the Adobe site. This was mainly to see how using the FLEX compiler affects the size and performance of swf files compared to compiling through Flash, but also to see if I could avoid non OSS software. Process wise, using this development system, along with swc files for symbols, it is possible to create amazing web apps absolutely free of charge. As I am saving up for the next Flash, but in the meantime this lets me test out new features in the player right now! I see a synthesizer on the horizon next

Once you perfect your workflow, and don’t mind creating libraries of swc files, this is probably the most integrated and fastest method for Flash development. There are many tweaks and hacks that you have to apply to the commandline if you want to use a preloader, or don’t need all the FLEX libraries, or want to set a player target version, but thankfully, my development system of choice, FlashDevelop, has all of these as options preset in the GUI.

On the negative side, using the FLEX compiler does seem to add quite a few extra bytes to the runtime code, so at least consider a preloader!

Check it out

Buddha Machine 3D I.

Renegade Web Radio

Bored of the charts? Looking for sounds to keep you occupied? Look no longer with music and mixes from around the world in one simple interface – combining a podcast, blog and mix aggregator – held together with AJAX magic

check it out
nomadradio.fm

Features

• Cross Fading between tracks
• Prefetching of the next track so that there aren’t any gaps between songs
• A fast visualiser that reacts onbeat as well as to the frequencies
• Saved volume and a rotary dial
• AJAX backend so that you can browse around without losing audio
• Flash <-> Javascript bi-communication

Get involved and send over your mixes!

Ever evolving portfolio

Hi, my name is Zen. Ths is my website full of stuff. Feel free to have a browse around some of the things I have done, and don’t forget about the media player at the top. Read how the site was made by following the blog posts.

Gentle Flash Banners

Promotional Campaign for a new car by Form Motors. As the car is targetted at the active individual, Ford wanted lots of people having fun with the suggestion that it could be you having all this fun.

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