Last Instinct

While working at Basilicon, I made a few full browser video intros for Pågen’s sites in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The videos are integrated using a extremely flexible technique that also features instant bandwidth measuring and automatic quality adjustments.

Note: The film itself was not made by me. Only the technique behind it the intro.

I’ve done a few video intros like this before, but these video’s were first off to be featured on a new powerful media server. The server was specially configured at Basilicon with custom scripts to enable lots of customized video features. This solution enables very cost effective fully customized video services for Basilicon’s clients, any way they like. The video is mainly H.264 up to HD quality desktop playback or high quality mobile viewing. Also the videos are controlled by a schedule using a custom built media manager.

Recently, Basilicon made a bunch of mini games for Bamse’s new site. Bamse is the world’s strongest cartoon bear. My job was to put together an online coloring book where you could paint Bamse and his friends.

The application had to be really easy to use, since the target group was really young kids. At the same time, there was a big challenge putting it together because we had a lot of games to do in extremely short time. So all the games we made were each made in less than a day. That’s not what we do normally, but this was a very special project. The application was made entirely in Flash, even the image tracing.

Fun fact
The storyteller is actually my ex-boss Anders Ekström, who will figure as the new storyteller in most of the upcoming Bamse productions.

The fast asynchronous JPEG encoder made by Mateusz Małczak has been updated. I made a tutorial on how to use the fast JPEG-encoder in Adobe Flash earlier. The new release has resolved memory leaks and the asynchronous encoding shall also be faster. I have not had time to try it out, but you can read all about it and download it at segfaultlabs.

Thanks for the update Mateusz!

I’m glad to announce that I’ve been nominated this year as well. Last year I won the gold medal for the LdB campaign I made at Basilicon. This year’s contribution is the Christmas card making site we made to promote Basilicon annually. It’s a kind of crazy application where you can put together your own Santa Claus from the different face parts of me and my co-workers and send as a Christmas card to your friends.

The project is an offspring from the LdB campaign, and my part this time was photography, the overall UI graphics and the server side scripting.

Please cast your vote for us (this week only) at Svenska Designpriset. Remember to submit your e-mailaddress when you vote.

For the launch of the new Jeep Cherokee in 2008, I made a frontflash and a spot for the campaign at Basilicon.

The main design and animation was made by me, but I got some help from Anders Ekström, who really wanted the leopard to jump in from the right. Since we only had a leopard laying down, we had to fabricate the jumping leopard.

At Basilicon, we were recently proud to release a dedicated video player for Thule globally. I have over some years developed a unique video technique for Basilicon which is rather cutting edge. It measures and estimates your bandwidth capabilities in 0.3 seconds and adapts the video to this.

Well, this can be done with any sophisticated streaming server, but this technique does it without the need of a streaming server, which reduces the cost and maintenance significantly. It’s done using Adobe Flash and it’s currently not possible to do in HTML5. It uses H.264 codec, which works like a charm in the latest Flash Player. Even on my old crappy laptop. It also features automatic quality control to optimize performance during playback.

Everything from video coding to player design and setting up the server was done by me. It was a bit nervous to estimate what performance we needed from the server and find a hosting partner that could deliver this for a reasonable price. I chose a cloud VPS for this, which could be upgraded with better performance when necessary. We have not needed to upgrade it yet and I am really satisfied with the performance and flexibility of our hosting. After some fine tuning it now serves 10000+ videos every day perfectly. That number will probably increase a lot later on, but the server has much more to give.

This was a campaign site for Mercedes-Benz company cars I made at Basilicon in 2009. It was an flash application with a funny approach to comparing leasing costs for cars. Everything was measured in how many caffe lattes you saved each month.

It was actually based on a similar campaign made by another web agency earlier. I got the assignment to redesign it so it matched Mercedes-Benz new corporate identity. But the project ended up being a lot bigger than that, since the wanted to update most car models and add pages with environmental information on so on. I also had to rewrite most of the code, since it was such bad design and so buggy from the start. So at the end I had rebuilt the whole application.

This was my first big campaign when I started working at Basilicon in 2007. Jeep had a collaboration together with the wildlife park Kolmården where Jeep sponsored a terrain driving track. We made the campaign site and also the booking system, which my boss Anders Ekström put lots of energy into.

I directed the art and programmed most of the flash interaction and the implementation in HTML. I worked together with David Andersson in designing all the sub sections. The main design was formed as an old map with a little Jeep as mouse pointer. The little car was actually the hardest part to get to work correctly.

The technical solution for the window was really cool, since most of the campaigns back then used rather annoying popup-windows. This was made as a layer with transparency and shadows in flash instead. This wasn’t really possible before that point, since Safari on Mac had terrible and very buggy support for this. Fortunately, Firefox had just gotten better support for it. The web support have really developed a lot on Mac in the three years since then!

This was a project I made together with Danny Gomez in 2008 at Basilicon. Duni wanted an interactive product presentation for their customizable transparent plastic salad bowl. I made the design, the text & logo effects and interaction flow, while Danny made the 3D-model and animation. I think we got a realistic and really interesting presentation of the product.

I’ve updated the website of my friend Linn Nydrén. New features include online shopping through PayPal and VIP mailinglist. She has just released her new Holiday collection and you can even order Customized Clothing. So visit the l i n n n clothing web shop and make an order!

Now to the tech talk: I added form support, so that she could add forms from PayPal on her own. I also updated the js-libraries to include SWFAdress for deep linking with Flash and UFO for unobtrusive Flash embedding. SWFAdress is really tricky to get working. I think video tutorials take too much time, so someone should really make a great non-video tutorial on how to use it with Flash properly. But once it works, it does an excellent job.

I chose UFO instead to the newer SWFObject 2.0, since the syntax is cleaner and more consistent. Also, I had more trouble with SWFObject than UFO, especially with the static publishing method. I was also looking for an old thing called SWFSize, but I couldn’t find it. Then I realized that I didn’t need it, since the size constraint I wanted to achieve can be accomplished using min-width in CSS3.