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!
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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.

introducing a new way to enjoy music!

Mix your favourite music blogs with your social bookmarks, add streaming radio and folksonomy… integrate with new music web services plus the latest web trends and what do you get…?

What is it?

A fancy new website that collects your favourite music blogs, MP3s and net playlists into one universally accessible site. Read about music, discover new music, and listen to & download the latest songs based on your web-based bookmarks and the social bookmarks of thousands.

What does it do?

The use of a social bookmarking service allows you to bookmark practically any music service. You can save simple RSS or ATOM feeds from your favourite music blog, your XSPF playlists, even M3U radiostreams! The volume of music services is growing by the day, so you can aggregate all your favourite music from sites such as Imeem, IJig, The Hype Machine, BlogDigger or any blog from the thousands collected on el.bo.ws.

Furthermore, if you use last.fm webservices – which I highly recommend – you can save your recently played songs, find out which songs you already have in your collection and get advice on music that you would like but just haven’t yet heard.

How does it work?

The channels are saved in your favourite online social bookmark collection. If you don’t have one, look no further than Del.icio.us…

Simply save the RSS feed from your favourite music blog using the tag mp3blogfeed and your music-blog will be automatically available to everybody in the world on the home page with the most recent at the top. If you prefer to only see your own bookmarks, simply enter your del.icio.us username in the settings box, or if you are using another service, the correct RSS URL.

Playlists are automatically saved onto your hard disk as shared flash-cookies along with such useful things as volume and the last page you visited – dive back in from where you started!

Technical details

Written entirely from the ground up in actionscript 2 – no components, no templates.
Uses Shared Local Objects to save xspf playlist, volume and recent browsing history.
Features javascript data api to allow bookmarking and the emailing of blog links.
Uses your existing social bookmarking services – imports RSS, XML & OPML.
Intelligent caching of data and pre-empting of user desired information.

Features a scrolling data window with mousewheel input, inertia and variable speed scrolling.

Note : This project has been discontinued due to lack of time thanks to my new job as the head of flash at Last.fm!

music meet art / east meets west

A fascinating hybrid of electro J-Pop and classical cello, the Stereo Art project is still in its early phase, but thanks to many live performances, the word is spreading!

As the idea is to combine music & art, I was commissioned to put together a clean but ‘scribbled’ style Flash website to show off the music and display live news. The end result is a scruffy but-not-too-shabby gallery and news reader all wrapped round a live music streamer. The design process was refreshingly quick with this project…After five minutes of sketch ideas, Producer Pop lifts up the most basic looking sketch and finalised,

Less is more! … Complete! and so within a short space of sketching (and a few months of actionscript coding!) the site was launched and began picking up popularity

Technical details

Full Screen 100% actionscript 2 – no components, no templates. Uses Shared Local Objects to save volume. Imports web services from Flickr and Blogger.com. Intelligent gallery module with thumbnail zoom and comments. Designed as a widget to be entirely embeddable into any site with just three lines of html.

If you want to check out the Western J-Pop sounds, see it here!