Recent Soap work

I came back to work after two weeks holidays and two new projects were launching on that day. We've also got a few more great projects launching in the next few weeks and some even bigger ones early next year. We had a dry patch at Soap Creative for a few months with not many projects launching. Mainly due to the large Seeker project that took up everyone's time and pitches for new business. One big one we lost and a bigger one we won.

Here's a brief overview of three new projects we just launched in November.

MunkYourself

Ever wanted to see what you'd sound like as a chipmunk? Now you can with Munkyourself with Alvin and the Chipmunks. In theaters December and January worldwide. We created this using Oddcast Technology. The record by phone feature is pretty amazing. This was created for 20th Century Fox US. The site is being rolled out across 9 languages and 12 regions and is already going pretty well with little media support. The media is due to start one every language is complete.

The geometry of the chipmunk 3D model was supplied but due to the Rhythm and Hues using proprietary software. They couldn't just export the model for us. We had to extensively remodel and tweak the character in house. We also modeled and textured the 30+ clothing items for the chipmunk. Patrick our 3D guy did a great job getting it to look close to the Alvin models in the movie. Rhythm and Hues have a huge team working on this. We just had one guy so I think we did pretty good.

Hitman Challenge

A smaller project we just launched is the Hitman Challenge. This time for 20th Century Fox Australia. Fox had partnered with In The Mix and suggested a Hitman Shooting School game type game. Funny we had suggested a Hitman Training Academy game and git knocked back :)

The basic idea is you have 10 games a day in which to train. Your score accumulates over each game. The more times you play the bigger your score and the better chance you have of winning a trip to any music festival in Australia.

We team feature was built to allow people to start teams. Initially we tried to remove the teams feature from the brief as the deadline was tight and this was the largest component of the project. So I'm happy to be humbled as the team feature seems to be going off and a really good feature. It did take the longest to build. The game itself was a few days work while the team feature, with all it's complex user flows and the like, took over a week I think to fully bug fix.

There's also prizes for who has the biggest team. Right now it's close between the Queensland Gamers League and DDB Sydney teams. The only downside to a promotion like this for the user is that people who hear about it early have the best chance of winning. Anyone starting now is a week behind in scores and at a massive disadvantage.

The disadvantage for us is the In The Mix URL means that after the promotion ends we have little control over the page. Archived links for our portfolio will need to change. But this is a small issue I guess.

Mr. Magorums Toy Creator

We had a little over 2 weeks to put together this Toy Creator for Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. A new Fox Walden family film.

Luckily we could reuse our Design Tool Engine so the code was no worries. We had Ron illustrating the items right away from a set list of toy parts and Rob designing it.

This launched November 2 and has since had 90,000 134,000 toys submitted. I'm blown away by the response as it's our most successful "Design Your Own" promotion yet. 32% of people who started a toy submitted one which compared to our previous high of 15% is amazing. (although to the same level as our Design Your Own Weaon and Build Your Own Robot apps.

Also the quality of submissions is fantastic especially seeing as there is no prize or incentive for users to submit anything. They are just doing it because it's fun.

Over the next two weeks we're also launching a game for Vivendi Universal Games, another Zipper game for National Geographic Kids, a slick site for Samsung. 2008 will see two large promotions for Unilever launch. So we're going to finish off 2007 with a influx of new work and start 2008 with a bang.

Sales Pitch
We're actually looking to expand our team by several people in 2008 (designers, animators, flash coders, producers, creative folk) with roles to start in early Feb 08.

If you want to work in Sydney, Australia, have a passion for online and the will to do kick ass work then check out our site and email us at jobs at soap.com.au