Places I Eat Sydney

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I finally got around to mapping all the places I eat in Sydney. I'll be getting the other Soap people to add in their regular eateries too. This should work well for an iPhone.

Terry's Greatest Chops

AFX Layers

I asked Jim to take a snapshot of his After Effects project for the Jumper project we did for 20th Century Fox. This is just half of the project.

Big Day Out Sydney 2008

I spent the day on Friday following Terry around as he made his way through the Big Day Out at Sydney. Terry is the official/unofficial mascot of Cornetto Ice creams. It certainly worked better than two guys dressed up as a Cow and Squirrel :)

I was filming as Brad was taking photos. Rob also filmed half the day too.

There was way to much eye candy out there on the day. Thank you summer! It also helps to have a huge guy dressed up right next to you to attract the attention of everyone.

We didn't get hassled by anyone the whole day and the vibe was really good. No fights (except for a little problem in the main stage in the Circle of Death) but that was our fault. Video of that coming soon!

There were a lot of Aussie flags and Southern Cross tattoos. Australia is becoming very patriotic and where as a few years back wearing an Aussie flag would have been considered lame. I'd say 20% of people had some form of flag motif on.

Soap's 5 Year Bowling Outing

I finally got around and spent an hour editing the footage I took at Soap's 5 year bowling outing. This was shot in March 2007. I forgot where the footage went and have since found it. I didn't take any footage at our other outings.

This is one time I actually shot specific footage for editing (I like 2 shots) but again my camera skills and lack of footage hindered by already terrible editing skills. Definitely need to cover more angles and choose more dramatic angles.

Here was 2006's Xmas party Go karting. The edit here is better although there is not much footage to work with.

I don't even want to think about 2006's Xmas party footage. I took heaps of the Sumo suit fights and more but I think it's best if no one see's that scary footage. All i have is this 15 second clip of Matt being flipped by Ross. I've added music to cover my annoying "Steve Urkle" laugh.

The thing about shooting video is it still requires editing and grading and unless you do it within a week of the event is a waste of time. I can't seem to grad the video how I treat photos. It just doesn't want to play ball the same way.

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

see something. feel something

We at Soap have just launched a new promotion for Foxtel called Feelsomething.com.au

The site extends their latest tag line "See something that makes you feel something". It's the first step in many to position Foxtel away from just price based offers and more towards emotional ties people have with their TVs.

One more TED talk

If you can sit through the songs you get to hear a great talk

TED: Creativity In Schooling

Great talk

Red Bull Air Race 2007

Seek the Signs for The Dark is Rising

We have just launched the first part for the official site of The Dark is Rising movie called Seek the Signs. It's the latest from 20th Century Fox and Walden.

This is the first time I've been able to read a script for a film that hasn't been shot yet. It's great fun. It makes brainstorming ideas for sites a lot easier when you know the movie back to front. Rather than just going off a trailer.

The movie is out October 5 and is based off a famous series of books written in the 1940's.

Also check out the MTV intern promo they are running with So You Want to be a Movie Intern. It's quite interesting and I'm jealous as I'd love to work on the set of a film.

Flame On Ginger!!!

We just finished a site that lets you send a video of yourself on fire. We also did the Myspace Widget thing aswell seen above.

Google Adsense

Back in March I decided to put Google Adsense on a few old sites Ie had done and other misc pages that still generate OK traffic. This was mostly out of curisity rather than to make money.

I put the code on a handful of pages here and there (this sites archive pages included) and let it go. I also told Brett that I would donate all the proceeds (100%) to his Oxfam trail walk fund raising. This way all the dirty Google money goes to a good cause and I don't feel bad karma wise.

Well it's been 3 months and the Adsense is now earning more than my regular monthly donation every 2 days! And it's showing no signs of slowing down. If I was still paying rent it's be paying my rent and then some. While part of me wants to keep it all I know that I need to honour my donation promise. But it is hard to resist.

Some pages are performing amazingly well. Others bring in hardly anything. As some of the pages are flash I had to create alternate content to make the Adsense work. Otherwise it just shows up ads purely based off the page title.

Checking the Adsense stats is addictive. It's stats but with a $ value associated with it. The more traffic you get the more money you earn (usually)

So if you have a niche page that still gets some decent traffic (around 1,000+ views a day) then hook it up with AdSense and earn some cash on the side. And why not make all the money you make through this your regular donation to charity. I say niche as if you're page is about are particular topic (cars, music, games) then you'll hav a better chance of getitng relavent Google ads. If you put it on a blog liek this one that has no theme or makes any sense then don't expect many clicks.

Click the button below to sign up for AdSense. It'd take about 15 min to get started and then you can sit back and lets the pennies roll in.

Currently in the US and A

I'm in NY right now and having a great time. I just went to the Comedy Celler and saw my first live stand up show. NY is spoilt for choice with 10+ comedy places to choose from. Sydney has 1 I think. I;m unsure as no one goes. Well no one I know.

Sadly I wasnt at the Laugh Factory last night to see Dave Chappelle do a 6hr set!! Ripped off! I only got 2 hrs.

I havent been able to take that many photos but I'll make sure to upload what I did when I'm back in the AU and S

My Other blog is a Webby Finalist

The title of this post woudl make a good banner for this blog. Considering it's a hodge podge of crap with badly written entries it's amazing my other blog is actually up for a webby in Business. It's a crazy world. Anyway if you have a spare 2 min please vote for us as we're currently getitng our little aussie asses kicked.

We're chuffed to be nominated for a Webby Award in Blog - Business. We'd also like to ask you, the loyal Bannerblog reader, to help us get out of 4th position in the People's Voice by voting for us. Seriously though we really appreciate the support. We're the only blog you don't need a PhD in boring, or even the ability to read, to enjoy.

Jaiku

In an effort to road test things properly I have set up a Jaiku account. I'm always skeptical of this type of stuff but we'll see how it goes. As I'm off to NY and LA next week (fuck yeah!) on a biz trip it will be good to see how it works with my Mobile.

Build Your Own Weapon Entries

I sorted many of the Build Your Own Weapon entries (all 12,000 of the fuckers) into smaller groups.

I skipped over them pretty quickly but you can now browse the brilliance (and insanity) of


Skeletons


WTF


Robots, Animals and Monsters


Vehicles


and finally actual weapons that look cool.

I'll say it again that this is still the fav comp I've been involved in and I can't belive the time spent on these entries. Some of these are 2 years old as we ran the comp at the end of 2004.

Pawnatior 2000

With the ability to export a jpeg from a flash file now a reality, I have taken up the mission to export all the Build Your Own entries we received a while back (and are still receiving) for the Saveyourself site we build for 20th Century Fox.

We had 1,500 robots, 12,000 weapons and 4,000 converse shoes.
We're still getting about 20-50 weapons exported each day, 2 years after it's launch

I have to leave a computer on with a flash file pumping this out overnight as it takes around 10 seconds to export and save each one. Multiply that by almost 20,000 and we're in for the long haul.

The entries range from the lazy (1-2 items just testing) to the extreme like the one above. It must have taken 20 or so minutes to do this.

It's goes to show that people like to create things. We did this competition back in 2004. Well before the "consumer generated content" trend was um.... trendy.

I've also created a Soap Creative flickr account. I'm not sure why I didnt do this already. So instead of flooding my Flickr account with BBQ photos and work stuff I can post it on a dedicated Flickr account.

Frubalia: The Home of Roll-Ups

We (Soap Creative) just launched one of the largest sites we have ever done. Frubalia. Well Rollups.com.au actually.

This is the first launch and there are more games and activities being rolled out over the next 12 months. The site introduces kids to the Frubas and the world of Frubalia. Uncle Toby's Roll-Ups have now been fully rebranded with the Frubalia characters on them.

It's been alot of fun to work on and somethings are still a little rough around the edges but others like the Fruba Fling game are just perfect.

We worked with Morph Marketing on this site. They actually created the 10 Fruba Characters that inhabit the world. We were then tasked to create the world they live in.

The site seems to be going well and the main TVC campaign started yesterday so it should really sky rocket the traffic now.

Almost everythign we wanted to do with the site is there now. A few things got lost on the way but the majority made it in.

I have never been so nervous to launch a site before. I'm really proud of this one but also with all the login/registration stuff, the amount of money being spent promoting the site and the fact this is the largest site I've done it all add to the worry. I'm pretty sure kids will like it. The tests we did showed a good response to all ages and genders. Time will tell I guess.

Go Kart Action

Sadly I was the slowest of the guys on the day :( I love Lah's drive off the track. Its the one at about 54 seconds. This was the racing that caused my bruise you saw earlier.

Soap Creative Xmas Parry Super Sumo Action

It's taking a while to edit all the footage we shot but here's a taste. This is when Matt went head over heels for Ross :) See if you can spot my very nerdy laugh at the end. These are the super sumo suits we hired for the party.

Talking at Online Open day in Perth

I did a talk on "kick ass" examples of online advertising yesterday in Perth, Western Australia at an event called Online Open Day. There were around 150 people which seemed to be mostly clients with a few agency peopel thrown in.

I was in the middle of other more research based talks with lots of charts and data which made it easy to stand out. Also I was just presenting other peoples work (all examples from Bannerblog's archives) so I didn't have to do much thinking just selection.

This is the second talk of this kind, the first I did for Eyeblaster at their educational day, and it went pretty well. I hope this will flow onto increase readership of Bannerblog and even if lucky a few pieces of work from the crowd on the day.

While I'm no Anthony Robbins I am getitng the hang of speaking to large crowds. It'd be easier if I had to do the same talk multiple times as then you could get the timing and jokes right but sadly the industry here is too small to do repeat shows.

Deal Signed with Eyeblaster

I organised a deal with Eyeblaster to sponsor the Bannerblog site for 3 months. I initially proposed a 12 month deal but people are skeptical when it comes to paying money so we went with a 3 month trial.

It's funny how companies can pay a lot of money to be part of an event (say AIMIA awards or Internet Awards) but is skeptical when it comes to a site like Bannerblog. I guess this is why salesmen earn their money. They convince people to fork over big wads of cash. And all I'm good at is convincing marketing people to like our ideas.

Ive also decided to donate 25% of the money to Oxfam just as I feel its good karma and it's a worthy charity. Also I donate more to MSF right now and I feel guilty about letting Oxfam down.

Now all I need is Hasbro to sponsor my Mr Potatohead Mashups and I'll be set for life.

National Geographic Kids Halloween Ecard

We just completed this fun project for National Geographic Magazine in the USA. It's a Halloween Ecard Maker. They are tryig to run a comp where the best ones get printed in the mag but with such strick legals over there in the USA it's quite tough.

Nathan J did the awesome illustrations and we designed and coded the interface. I'm really happy with this and even though we have reused this engine a few times I think this is one of the best uses of it.

We initially had a few more items but they were removed as they were too dangerous. You can see them above. The axe, exposed brain,anythign devil related and the sickle. Doh. But luckily Nathan make a whole bunch of new items that were just as cool. And not so violent. I'm sunsure what that big pink thing is but I trust Nathan that it's something cool.

My fave is the Frankenstein mask and the frog eyes.

One thing we had troubles with (i say we but all I kept doing was saying I didnt like it ) was a logo for the game. Below is the 5 versions we went through until Brad stepped in and saved the day.

We also went through many revisions of the interface. Again, mainly as I kept pushing Ron to do more. You look at the initial designs and the final ones as it's such an improvment. The top image is the final designs

We've got a a fe wmore jobs lined up for National Geo and one thats just getting approved now. I really like doing stuff for kids as you can have alot more fun and be silly.

Earth Wallpapers Stats

EarthWallpapers.org was linked up on the Google Maps Mania site and also somewhere on BBC.CO.UK. I can't track absolute paths on my stats so it must have been fleeting as the hits were up and then down the next day. The initial link on Kottke.org was a great start to the site. My only dissapointment has been the dismel Digg activity. I woudl have thought it would get more than 12 diggs. But I guess Digg is more of a tech crowd than designers.

So far the average has been 705 unique visitors a day. Considering people can also access the pictures directly through my Flickr account that's pretty good.

I did a few tweaks to the site today with the latest wallpapers taken the background and after every click it loads int he current wallpaper. I also made the link text in the current location green to make it more obvious you can visit the locations on Google Maps.

I'm blown away by the latest location in New Zealand. This volcano is amazing. Thanks Leanne for suggestion NZ.

Back from the Dead!!!

My Hard drive which died in March has been revivied!!!! They rang today to say the 98GB of crap I had on there is saved.

It has taken 5 months of waiting but I never gave up hope.

A big thanks to the guys at Xyber. Even if t did take 5 month due to my Dell's obscure and impossible to find HD model. (The HD I ordered from Ebay has never arrived so if it ever does I';ll have 3 of the mofos.

For those who need their data recovered contact the guys at Xyber. This is the 3rd time in 5 years they have saved my bacon. Or halal pork free bacon.

Xyber Computer Service Centre

Complete Macintosh (and PC) Service and Data Recovery Centre

Tel (02) 9906-7976

Fax (02) 99063620

28 Chandos St, St Leonards, NSW 2065, AUSTRALIA

email: service@xyber.com.au

Red Zero Launches

After many months of development we (Soap Creative) just launched Red Zero for Pacific Magazines.

The initial brief for a "virtual magazine" many mionths ago stipulated they wanted the "page turn: effect. After pushing back on the client I thought we had won this battle.

Then as months pass the client kept asking for the page turn effect and we finally relented. Luckily Mike was able to decode the infamous code to allow uis to do all the dynamic stuff we needed for this magazine. And also make sure it played back at a decent speed. Flash 8 saved the day for Mike by allow pages to be cached as bitmaps and reduce load times considerably.

it was a huge learning experience for the designers of the magazine. We designed the framework of the magazine but the spreads and everything else was Pac Magazines.

We had many meetings with their designers to show them the possibility of the web and that you don’t have to lay everything out on the page. Issue 2 of Red Zero will be a lot tighter I feel as the designers now have a pretty good grasp of what’s possible.

I had little to do with this project after the initial functionality spec and think it's turned out pretty good.

There's a few spreads in there that look a little rushed but we had little control over this. Hopefully issue 2 will utilise online more by allowing more video, interviews, music streaming and other stuff like that rather than just trying to replicate the feel of a traditional magaizne.

Sony HC3 HDV Handycam

We just bought the Sony HDV HC3 handy cam for our office on Friday. We just tested with tapes and importing today and couldn’t be happier with the quality.

We shoot a lot of still work for projects and have never had the ability to do video. As more of our work involves video we decided to get one of our own. We also needed it to do those "viral" videos that seem to be in vogue right now.

We bought it from a retailer we found on Shop Ferret which is pretty good at comparing prices. Don't pay the 2,299 mentioned on the Sony site as that's a rip off. Even still $1,900 for a HDV camera is amazing value.

I guess Sony will make their money on all the accessories we need to buy now ie battery, tripod, case and other shit.

So look out for more videos which will be f better quality than the two I have on Youtube right now.

Myspace Flash Hack

In an effort to stop a Myspace flash hack from spreading, Myspace has introduced strict new counter measures for any piece of flash embeded into a profile. Sadly this means any external links no longer work. I hope they fix this as it really limits the amount that advertisers can do.

I mean you put a link to say "Check out BRAND X" in a piece of flash on a profile and the user cant even click it if they want to.

I doubt these new measure will be in splace for long as it seriously reduces the scope of what can be done on myspace for advertisers. And seeing as it's the advertisers paying the bills right now they will get their way.

MySpace

In an effort to understand the juggernaut that is Myspace, I have created a myspace profile for myself. Some knob already had Mrtruffle so I had to become DrTruffle. 11 friends and counting!! Wow, I'm like so cool.

if only myspace was as well put together as Youtube or Flickr. But sadly It's a bit of a hodgepodge and if it wasn't for the huge userbase of kids on their no advertiser woudl touch it.

Software Management for a creative agency

If you run or are thinking of starting your own company here's my tip. Keep track of your software from day 1. We now have a team of 17 people and keeping track of every licence, disc and serial number is quite tough. Especially when any one of 6 people can make a purchase.

A perfect example of this is we have 7 copies of Office for Mac but only 6 Macs with two people have conflicting serials.

Other times we have the CD & box but can't find the serial or receipt and other times we have the receipt but no CD or box. Half the software if bought online with just a serial number and email as proof of purchase.

Staff borrowing and losing the CD's is also another problem.

We've tried to keep all the CD's in a CD holder and separate them from the bulky boxes as this makes it easier to find the CD you need.

Starting next week we'll do a major software stocktake and create a workflow for any future purchases. Always through the same person with serials and receipts logged in a central area. Any new installations will be run through that designated person with any conflicts fixed.

Software is a major investment with a every new staff member requiring between $4-6k worth of apps. Luckily management staff are cheaper with only about $1-2k worth of apps needed.

I'd be interested in hearing how other people manage their software or if they too have similar problems. Maybe their is an application you can get that makes this a simple process?

Rock Text

Pingball: A case study of sorts

We've just completed our first Pinball game for Artie Lange's Beer League movie.



Note: Works best on IE PC due to processor restrictions. Firefox is just too slow.

Here’s some more info on how the game was made and how it came about. We’re very proud of this game at Soap and had spent an extra 2 weeks over deadline polishing it up. Luckily the client had already pished back the release of the film so there was no pressure to get it out quickly.

The brief that came to us was to do a game to promote Beer League. A film starring Artie Lange (who we later found out was on the Howard Stern show so that’s the big draw card). The only requirement was that it contained the image or reference to “The Pitching Machine” which is from a funny scene in the movie. See below.

After throwing around initial ideas for a baseball type game, or a target shooting one Brad threw in the idea of a pinball game. Usually I say as they are almost impossible to code properly in flash but the idea fitted so well. When brad said to have the girls legs as flippers when knew that was it. We actually didn’t pitch any other ideas to the client. It was this or nothing.

Brad’s initial sketch

The client loved it (dream client, dream brief) and we proceeded forward. We had a backup plan to just create a tween version of a pinball game, meaning no code just everything would be animated and random to give the illusion of a real pinball. It was a cop out but our fail safe.

Luckily our new flash dude Chris was eager to get started and this was his first project with us. We found a Flash Phsics Engine which would help build a pinball game and from there it all went smoothly.

The hardest part was finalizing the game play as pinball’s are quite complex creatures and although they seem simple they aren’t. You not only have to make it work but make it fun.

We bought the Pinball Hall of Fame for PSP to practice up and learn from the masters and there is plenty of pinball info online too.

(Nerd Fact: when I was in highschool I played pinball all the time at the arcade. I actually joined the Pinball League which met once a week to play in a comp. I have a 1 Billion Point Trophy (which I didn’t really earn) and my fav pinball’s are Adam’s Family, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Indiana Jones) My dream was to always own a pinball at home and hopefully oneday that will still come true.

There was only one problem with the design of the game and that was the client though “The Pitching Machine” girl looked like an amputee. Which in the Howard Stern type audience isn’t really a problem but we had to tweak the flippers slightly to have shoes.
We also went through 3 versions of the girl. V1 was, thankfully) never seen by the client. V2 looked a little ugly and v3 was just right.

Oh and we had to add the glove appearing to pick up the ball as it came back down. They didn’t want it “going back into her”

You can see in Robs initial game play sketch that was used for the game design the girl looked like Jessica Rabbit.

We also added a mini game with Artie chugging a beer, which Chris did while waiting for approval on other game elements.

I think Artie himself would be flattered with this vector version of himself. As he gets older maybe we can do a cartoon based on him 

Design wise you can see version 1 shown below

was expanded on for version 3 shown below.

The film also stars Ralph Macchio the Karate Kid! It must be in his contract not to mention it as not hint is made in the film.

The only sad part for us was that no new audio was recorded for the game. We sent a list of what we wanted but only get edits from the film. Oh and that we didn’t get to do the main movie site as it’s a little rough around the edges.

The game is as un PC as they come and it was great just being able to throw what ever you wanted into an idea and the client liking it. I’ve never said “douche bag” or “fuck nuts” so much in my career.

You can see the other sketches and designs from the project on this flickr set.

XPlanet Badge

We've created these funky badges for people to put on their websites/myspace profiles. This helps spead the word of XPlanet and creates a stronger bond with the users. We hope anyway :)

Worked out pretty good and I can't wait to see if people use these on their Myspace profile.

XPlanet Chicks

Check out this chicks profile on XPlanet. It's quite funny how MYspace has dominated the site so quickly.

X Planet is live!!

We (Soap Creative) have just launched X Planet to promote the release of Xmen 3 (or X-men: The Last Stand if we want to be specific)

This is our most ambitious project yet, not only due to the complexity of the task but the fact this site is a global promotion. It's not just a local Australian site it's being promoted throughout the world by Fox to promote the film.

We created the concept and a prepared a mockup to be presented in the US at the Fox Global X-Men Summit. Which is every region of Fox in a big conference hall talking about how they will promote X-Men 3?

The initial idea was to have much more content from the first 2 films ie locations, the actual mutants from the movies with their locations and key events marked on the map but this was scaled back to concentrate on the community aspect of the site.

I still feel the site would be stronger with all that auxiliary content as it would allow users to really immerse themselves into the X-Men universe. But we’re just happy we’ve been able to push a risky but interesting idea. Another game, puzzle or competition would have just fallen into the “forgettable” bin which most things do.

Shane, Brett and Ron have been working feverishly over the last month getting this MOFO live, again I’m humbled to work with such a great bunch of people. The best advice I’ve heard is to always hire people smarter than you.

We expected more involvement from Google as we're using their Google Maps technology but they were understandably busy with other stuff. It’s funny as Google Maps kept going down for us in the office but was OK for everyone else.

Here is a grab form the initial flash mockup we did exactly 2 months ago. You can see it’s changed quite a bit. The only thing we were told late in the game was that that Xplanet had to match the official site’s looks and feel.

We’ve already had 1000 signups in the first 24hrs so I’m hoping this is a good indication that this will snowball.
Oh and we fianlly got a substantial piece of press in a trade publication for this project. No more media snubs or Soap it seems. We'll have to have a jumbo media BBQ at our office to ensure we don't fall into obscurity in the future.

Bannerblog is still to receive any press locally besides being linked up on every major international advertising blog. But hey I'm blaming Ashadi for that as maybe he's bad karma :)

FWA Interview

I have been interviewed by The FWA. Amazingly no money exchanged hands for this to happen :)

I don't want to seem like a total brown nose but The FWA is consistantly the best source for whats happening online.

I just hope we get more of our work on there in the future as it's tough when there's 25,000 submisisons a year and only 365 spots to fill.

Judging Again

I have been selected as a judge for the 2006 Asia Interactive Awards.

Sadly this is judged all online, so no gravy train trip across the globe with my goomah. Oh well maybe next time.

Soap Games

I was meant to have this done before I left for holidays but it's finally done.

Soap Games has 47 flash games so far with 2 more coming this month.

Off to Europe

I'm off to Europ for 4 weeks! So updates to here will be more sparce than usual if at all.

Ive got 2 days of work for D&AD and then 26 days of doing nothing!

But i should have a shit load of photos and stories when I get back.

Flying Cat is Live!!

3 years and 3 weeks ago we started a site for Flying Cat toys. They make Nathan J's Scarygirl toys. But due to the owner being so busy with running the company there wasn’t time to get any content.

So the project sat dormant for all those years. Suddenly Jon Burgerman emails and wants to get it live. And within 2 weeks of collecting content the site we all thought no one would ever see is live.

This is the only site I have "designed" for Soap. Rob usually handles that but back in 2003 when we were a small team there was room for me to step into the designer shoes. Although Rob did guide me along the way and finish off most of the sections.

Flying Cat has a pretty good roster of designers. Nathan J being their star designer but Tokyo Plastic is a pretty big name around the web and TADO has a big fan base, Jon Burgerman is new to the toy scene but has a big following with his artworks and people like Ghostbot and Curtis Jobling have some great artwork to work from. These are just ones I know off. Koji and PUSH seem to have been around for a long time aswell so Flying Cat is poised to release soem really cool stuff.

And speaking of Curtis I liked his stuff so much I bought two artworks from him this week. The guys worked with Tim Burton and his style is great.

Here they are below. This will be my second originals after the Nathan J ones we got for the office last year.

The Hills have Eyes Game

We (Soap Creative) have just finished a game for Fox's horror remake The Hills Have Eyes. You'll need headphones or speakers to enjoy this one though.

Check out Mutant Hunt game here.

This was the game I had to create that montage for. Check out the before and after here.

4 Years Old

Today marks the 4 year anniversery of starting Soap Creative.

We registered as a PTY LTD company on march 21st, 2002. It feels like alot longer actually but 4 years is a long time in run your own business world and alot has happened both good and bad. But luckily for us, mostly good.

BU Day

The hard drive on my lappy shat itself last night and I've sent it to a data recovery company today to get fixed. They said they normally have a 70% success rate for drives like mine where the head breaks.

This is an important lesson to all you MOFO's to back yo shit up. Lucily I will have only lost a month of photos and a small amount of work as I keep most stuff on the server and I just backed up 2 DVD's of photos last week.

But HD fuck ups like mine can strike at any time and it's like a punch in the nuts.

X-Arcade

We got one of these heavy MOFO's for the office and it's great. MacMAME is so much better and we'll get it hooked up to the PS2 later.

Definetly worth having if you want to really play the MAME games properly

The Real Australia games

The games we built for The Real Australia are now live and "bloody" free.

Check out Tan Command and help those poms get a tan.
Reel Fishing for a relaxing time behind the reel. And the tried and tested Real Surf

A big thanks to Limmy for his work on the Tan and Fishing game. They turned out great and no you didn't have BO.

Some Insight:The reason behind re-skinning Bogan Surf which we build way back in 2001 was due to budget and also it's suitability. We also had other concepts which did not suit a conservative tourism client. We had to even remove the comment "WTF!" from the surf game due to it being offensive.

Initial client request were for something "viral" but as much as that word gets thrown around these days unless it was going to be a killer viral we didn’t want to bother. We felt fun games would work better than a conservative "viral" idea. It's like porn.

No one wants to watch that shit you see in Blockbuster when the hardcore stuff is so much better. The same goes for viral. Sure it's “he he" funny or cheeky but it's not going to "viral" unless you let us go nuts.

The fishing game for me is the most fun as I haven’t seen many good fishing games as it’s quite relaxing. The use of the mouse wheel (on PC) is great fun as is the cut the line feature Limmy added.

This is the final piece of work for the The Real Australia campaign which ended up looking nice. Nothing too amazing but suits the needs of the client and the site should live on after the promotional period rather than disappear into nothingness. They are planning on using this for training and informational purposes.

Again the most fun on this project was the concept stage although this was a hard nut to crack. It’s funny we won this pitch against Tequila and a few other agencies when we weren’t confident, while we lost to Tequila on another job we though we’d cracked and were a shoe in.

In our initial concepts we proposed covers 30-40 destinations. Some with a minor amount of information others like you see on The real Australia site with a full blown montage. Time and content permitting we settled on just 14. In hindsight 40 would have been too many and the minor destinations a waste of time. Just like choosing yogurt at the supermarket has become a chore, due to choice, so would have navigating the site.

Bannerblog in CR

Our site Bannerblog was mentioned in Creative Review's March issue.

This is a quality mag and the hits seem to have gone up as a result. We didn't send them the link I guess they stumbled upon it. I'm pretty chuffed.

I just wish the Australia media would show some interest in the site. We've sent press releases (even though I think a link alone is enough) and nothing. Why send a press release? It's to make their jobs easier I guess. Writing 20 words on a site must be tough. Just check the link, make up your mind and publish the MOFO Just just rehash what we send you as that's lazy. This is exactly why people like reading blogs more as these aren't just press releases regurgitated.

I'm sounding like a bitter man with a chip on my shoulder but I guess I was naive to think people actually gave a shit what they publish.

Date Movie Game

We just completed a game for Date Movie. We wanted to keep this one simple and also try a new approach. PIxel art instead of the usualy vectors. I think it turned out great and Mike did an awesome juob building it. Dave our new designer animated Rob's initial pixel art and designed the remianing screens for the game and Brett did the sound effects. I myself didn't do much for this besides throw the initial game ideas into the ring. Oh and I also made Mike put in the secret 10,000 point bonus video :)

Hopefully we can do more games with this pixel style. Although we have a long way to go before we can animate like this guy. His pixel art work is amazing! I cant stop watching his Bell Commericals.

Ad Blog Awards

Bannerblog has been shortlisted in a the Ad Rag Ad Blog Awards. You can vote for us here

Two Shortlisted Entries in AIMIA 2005

It's always good to know your entry fee's didn't go to waste. We have two projects in this years AIMIA awards.

50Cent Create Your Own Trailer and K-Kash.

The only bad thing for us is this year seems to have the best set of shortlisted entries which means it doesn't look good to coming home a winner. Although K-Kash did kick ass in the stats and sales generated.

Looks like the bride chequebook needs to come out again :)

Check the shortlisted entires here.

Sadly Mambo didn't make the cut but there isn;t really a category for it in AIMIA.

Looks like Soap will get to check out Adelaide. We will hopefully catch some of the comedy festival while over there.

The Cage

We (and by that I mean Mike and Brett) have finally finished out Trailer Crashers rip off site for TripleM's The Cage.

While very happy with the end result it's doesn't feel the same knowing it was heavily inspired by another site. And one thats very high profile. (ie we can't hope noone notices)

In our defence we did propose a heap of other concepts and also added slightly to the Trailer Crashers idea (ie not a straight copy) but that's only a small defence.

But hey money is money and the client is a good client so sometimes you just have to shut your cake hole.

Office Fit Out

We've finally got our ass in gear and organised an office fit out. Most of our development before this has been in the BBQ area :)

We're going for a Epoxy Resin floor as opposed to wood as not only does it looks shit hot (Like Charlie and The Chocolate Factory Style) but it's cheaper and more durable.

The fitout shoudl be finished a few weeks after our 1 year anniversery of moving into the office which will time well.

Very exciting time as the most I've had a hand in decorating previously is my bedroom.

We'll fit more work spaces in, a new kitchen a proper meeting area and a better cable management. Sadly no foozball, pinball or table tap arcade system but we can't have everything.

Macromedia Crap Site of the Day

We finally got a site we did (www.samsung.com/au/theinsidejob) listed on the Macromedia Site of the Day on the worldwide site. We had previously a few under the Asia Pacific subdomain but none here. We were quite chuffed.

But today I saw the next day's winner and felt like someone was taking the piss.

www.graphicvisionsinc.com/holiday

It didn't even send me the tree I made :(

Soaperheroes Final

This is our new staff illustrations. We had robots, then monsters, then 80's characters and now Superheroes. View through flickr for a larger version which looks really shmick.

Here's the few that didnt make the cut. First is the lesbian goth version of me, then Mikes Silver Surfer and Adam who left to freelance before the illustrations could be finalised.

Off to London

I'll be off to London in April next year for the D&AD awards. I've been selected as part of the large international Jury for Online.

I couldn’t be more excited an honored to be part of D&AD. I initially thought the email I received form them was a joke or I had then compete against everyone else for one of the spots. But all was legit and I not only score a free flight to London I also get to be part of one of the biggest awards in the world.

Friend Marshall Heald (who looks after Noise) was also selected as part of the digital craft jury so I'll have another Aussie there. Another 4 Aussies have been selected and a couple of Kiwis.

The rest of the online jury is top shit working for companies I respect greatly. I just hope they aren't all wankers.

This will also be a chance for me to have a bigger holiday overseas and I’m hoping to visit France, Amsterdam and Italy while overseas.

This is all happening as our company Soap starts to get into stride and pull in bigger clients, better briefs and get our name out there in the industry. It’s also becoming a harder beast to manage and stay focused.

There’s always that feeling that you haven’t done as well as you should have but this only helps stay you to driven rather than complacent.

The hardest thing is not to compare yourself to others and worry about what’s in front of you.

2006 should be a big year for us and with a few more additions to the team we will have everything in place to “take over the world” as they say.

eAWARD 2005

We picked up a Bronze pencil at this years AWARD for our MAMBO site.

While it was great to win, it seemed everyone entry bar one entry got a bronze. So it felt like "everyone gets a medal day" on sports day :)

Life on Mars from Tequila was the only finalist not awarded in our category.
Wedding Crashers only picked up Bronze too. This left me puzzled as Trailer Creashers (part of the Wedding Crashers site) was the "Big Ad" of Interactive. It had everyone talking about it and was hugely sucessful. So why only bronze?

Does Dr Date sit on the same level as Trailer Crashers? No offence to the Farm guys but c'mon. I guess the judges know more than me.

I award that my WTF Silver Question mark award for BS.

The other part of award that confused me was the same campaign winning multiple awards for different executions. Sure the print ad looked great but should the other execution also win? Wouldn't it be better to just award the campaign rather than each ad individually? Same shit different smell if you ask me. Award the idea not the specific execution.

Internet Awards Video

Check this video of the Internet Awards when they announce the award we won. It looks likewe were already walking to thr stage before they called it. haha That's ego's for you!

Hoff at the ARIA's 2005

Part of the deal for doing the ARIA awards website was to also have our logo on the media wall. I didn't think i would be this excited to see our logo next to the Hoff or Missy Higgins.

You can see our logo in most of the media wall shots here and here

I doubt it will lead to any work for the company as it's better served for branding of a consumer brand but hey it looks cool.

More photos from the night and behind the scenes tomorrow.

Bling My Bomb

Well after a hectoc week Bling My Bomb is finally up. This was my first Flash 8 site (we needed to go to flash 8 to make the app easier to build and quicker to download) I dont think Ive even made a flash 7 site. All my previous stuff has been flash 6.

All the blurs, glows and the effects are all Flash 8 coded. Mike and Brett did an awesome job doing all the litle things like radio, background transitions, car bounce effect and upload photo that really polish off the site nicely. Normally I have to build the sites by myself and these extra bits would have not been done or left till 2-3 weeks after launch.

I'm more proud of this site than all my others based on what I learnt and the the final product. Flash 8 was a dream to work in (save for a few security sandbox issues)

I can't wait till flash 8 becomes standard as these is so much you can do it's crazy. Even the grafitti on the rollerdoor is all vector.

K-Kash: A Case Study of Sorts

DECEMBER 2006 UPDATE:
Hey kids. I've noticed alot of peopel looking at this page. There are no K-Kash codes here and the new URL is http:/www.kkash.com.au . This page has nothing to do with K-Kash 2 which is running right now.

If you want a special KKash code try "TRUFFLEKING"

I just thought I'd post some of the prelim work we did for K-Kash. When I say we I mean Soap and when I say Soap I mean Rob, Brad and Ron who worked on the design.

The brief was to design a site that would be called K-Kash where kids could login enter codes to receive K-Kash $$$ and then spend them in an online store. They wanted it to be a vault of some sort like Scrooge McDuck and they also had the idea of a character called Pig Daddy and showed us a sketch of a Piggy Bank with a punk hairstyle. All in all a great brief with lots of scope.

Here is the inital document we were given as a starting point:

We then cam back with some initial sketches:

After getting approval to proceed we went into look and feel.

This was version 1. All vector and a big fat Pig Daddy. We were happy and though Pig Daddy was pretty cool.

Then the client wanted to go more bitmap as the kids these days are very cynical and would think the vector is too cute and therefore lame. The majority of K-Zone readers are male ages 8-15 so it needs to talk their language nit just be quicker to download.

Pig Daddy also went through a few changes before settling on the final one. It also involved me shooting Christian in a purple pimp suit and Pig Mask which was a lot of fun. Brad had a friend who ran a costume shop and got all the gear, faux bling and a pimp hat with purple feather.

Click here for a few more Pig Daddy shoot photos

Below is the 3 bitmap versions Pig Daddy went though before coming to the the final solution. We needed to find a design that was cool but also easy to animate.

Here is a version of Pig Daddy no one elsze saw and it's one I attempted. As you can see not worth showing.

So we ended up with a more photo real vault and a mix of all the Pig Daddy versions together. My fav is still version 2. Ron also spent a few days animating P Daddy. The moonwalk still cracks me up.

Here's the final vault which you can see on the main site now.

Along with this we also made K-Kash notes for the magazine inserts. We were told to make it look like real money. I didn't realise the amount of detail the guys put into these. Must have been heaps of fun :)

These were designed doubled sided and printed on clear plastic to make it even more like real money. The $100 were randomly insterted ointo issues of K-Zone for lucky kids.

Here is version 1 which didn't look to much like real money (we thought the client would get in trouble but it seems not)

And here we see the final versions.

And that's it. The sites been going for almost 2 weeks now and theres 18,000 members! They are pushing it hard in the mag and online and there are some awesome items for sale in the vault.

I had fun building the site and adding the 70 or so Piggy comments that P Daddy says. The site has already done 132GB of traffic in a month! so I'm not looking forward to the bandwidth fee for that one. Lucky we hosted in the USA or we'd be screwed.

F.E.A.R and Night Watch

The guys at Soap complted this Night Watch and F.E.A.R comp page in my absence and the prize is pretty cool. Great work Brett.

Our flash team is now 3 with another flash dude starting in a week taking us to 4. Which I'm really excited about as not only does every one know their shit but we'll have the resources to really pump out quality work with a high level of finish. Oh and it means I get to rest more :)

F.E.A.R the game actually looks pretty good and adds something extra to the normal 3D shooters.

And a big thanks to Emery Frost for designing those rating labels for games and movies which are almost impossible to implement online without having them stick out like dogs balls. Even their specs show their utter lack of knowledge of screen based media. They require the warning labels to be no smaller than 2cm in height.. WTF!?

Hunter Valley Weekend

Everyine at Soap and partners just got back from the Hunter Valley. This was the first time I had play proper golf and I quite enjoyed it. I did lose about 8 balls in the 9 holes we played but It was fun.

Will post some photos soon.

Oh and the place had the best breakfast spread I have ever seen! Except for the lack of waffles it had everything you could think of + spaghetti ?!? I haven't eaten so much food before 11am ever.

Get Into It

We just launched Get Into It for the lovely ladies at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment today which has ben a lot of fun to work on.

Brett our new flash guy worked on the majority of this with me just doing bits and pieces while i work on another site. All the content and the competition mechanics were built by Brett too.

Bannerblog.com.au is back from the dead

As well as losing Happy Snaps and this site I also lost Bannerblog. Which happened to be the most popular site of the three.

Luckily (as strangely) someone had a complete archive of the site. So all that needed to be done was repost all the data in MT and rebuild the templates.

The new site looks better thanks to Ashadi's revised design*, and we'll be adding news, and a user rating system.

*Although on 800x600 you'll have to scroll like a MOFO but that's your fault loser. get with the 90's and get a bigger monitor.

Desktop Create Awards

Every since seeing Happy Gilmore I've always wanted to win a giant novelty cheque and last Friday we did that at the Desktop Create Awards. We not only get a nice glass trophy which looks nice but we get $5k which makes it better than a Cannes Cyber Lion as I don't know of any other awards with a cash prize?

If you want to meet new people just walk around with a giant cheque under your arm. People can't help but come up and chat.