I’m still reeling from the shock of it to be honest. We’ve never won any industry awards so far, so for our first to be a BAFTA is pretty incredible. (For the non-Brits among you, I guess it’s our version of the Emmys) The ceremony was at the Hilton in Park Lane, and it was even filmed for posterity (and perhaps broadcast?). Our category was for Children’s interactive and we won it for Big and Small up against 3 other incredibly deserving projects. It was a great project to work on but bloody hard work so it’s just fantastic to get some recognition. There’s a full list of team members on this post from earlier in the year.
Here’s the video, our award is at 9 minutes in. And I’d like to thank my mum, my manager…
Filmed at the official MAX hotel in downtown LA: The Westin Bonaventure, which is such a weird hotel but I really like it in a kitsch sort of way. I heard that the architect was a fan of the early 80s TV show Buck Rogers, which would explain all the concrete, chrome and glass elevators. Although I heard that it wasn’t great to stay there, mainly due to the fact that all the towers are circular, making vaguely triangular (and claustrophobic) rooms.
Either way, I couldn’t resist the strange gym equipment in the atrium in concrete “pods”. And Paul Wyatt decided it’d be a good location for an interview
Title says it all really! Suffice it to say we’re all totally blown away here at Plug-in Media in our new offices in Brighton’s North Laine. We’re in the category for “Children’s Interactive“, the same category our friends (and neighbours) at LittleLoud won last year. We have stiff competition, but honestly, it’s honour enough to be nominated. Needless to say though, wish us luck for when the awards are announced at the end of November!
Just in case you missed it, there’s a 3 page article in this month’s .net magazine all about how we made Big and Small.
I’m so pleased that we’re starting to get some recognition for this site : we’ve just earned our very first FWA Site of the day award, and we’re also a finalist in the Adobe MAX awards!
And we’ve just won another project for BBC, and we went to Pinewood studios yesterday to check out the set. This will also be an immersive Papervision3D project, but we’re not allowed to talk about it yet.
You may have noticed that I’ve been a little quieter than usual over the past few months. And for that, I’m sorry. But there’s a very good reason for that! Me and the my very talented colleagues at Plug-in Media have been hugely busy working on the biggest and most ambitious Papervision3D project we’ve ever attempted; Big and Small.
Big and Small is a comedy TV show for kids (3 to 6) about a big character (called Big) and a small character (called Small) who, despite their differences, are the very best of friends.
There are so many details that I want to share, I’m not sure where to start! There’s the close collaboration with the BBC and Kindle (the TV show’s production company). And then there’s the studio sessions with Lenny Henry (famous UK comedian) who provided the voices, and the recording of Dom’s (Plug-in’s creative director) band for the music game. Not to mention all the incredible artists, coders and producers at Plug-in who all did an amazing job of bringing it all together.
But as the head geek at Plug-in I’ll concentrate on the technology.
The first hurdle was to recreate the Big and Small house in Papervision3D; tricky, given the cluttered, busy and warm look that Dom came up with (our creative director). We spent about a month just getting the model for the living room to look right.
Many things in the living room are point sprites; a 2D image of an object that looks the same no matter which way you look at it (like the flowers). We built our own PointSprite object that uses Papervision particles to render this.
Big looks 3D and changes as you move the camera around, but he’s also a 2D point sprite. Our animator Ben rendered him on the timeline spinning around, so we work out the angle of the camera and jump to the relevant frame.
We really wanted to make sure that any 2D graphics seamlessly fit in with the 3D world, not only stylistically but also technically. We created custom 3D mesh animation to make the bed spring up and down in reaction to a 2D Small jumping up and down.
There are many clever effects that took ages to program, and although you wouldn’t necessarily notice them, we like to think they add a certain quality to the project :
The mobile in the bedroom with a custom built verlet physics system:
A custom mesh animation system for the radio in the living room, allowing our designers to animate in 2D and apply it to a 3D mesh in real time.
The mirror in the bathroom with realtime reflections.
The toothpaste particles that collide with the walls and furniture.
The lighting that changes in the bedroom when the blind is closed.
It was a massive project, and phase one alone was over 200 days of coding, not to mention the artwork, 3D modelling, sound design and music.
And brilliantly, the BBC were so pleased that they’ve also commissioned phase 2 and we’re well underway with it. Phase 1 brought you into the house, but phase 2 takes you out into the garden, with magical plants, a reflective pond, and a Doom-style mysterious woods to explore!
You can see a little more in this (very rough cut) of a behind the scenes video, exploring the less geeky aspects of the project, including collaboration, concepting, and user testing.
It’s been a brilliant experience, Rebecca at the BBC has been a joy to work with, and it’s been really exciting to stretch what is possible in Flash and Papervision3D. I’ll let you know when phase 2 is released.
And I really would like to give major kudos to everyone on the Plug-in team that worked on this, I’m very proud to work with such talented people :
Juliet Tzabar : Production Director
Dominic Minns : Creative Director
Alan Owen : Senior programmer
Jack Lang : Programmer
Sarah Bird : 3D Modeller
Ben Mantle : Artist / Animator
Cath Lloyd : Animator (lip synching)
Lee Needham-Park : Project Manager
Kate Fowler : Sound design / production assistant
Kirsty, Ellie, Bruce (and Dom!) : Musicians
(Well done guys, you all rock!) And this project will be finished in a few weeks so we’ll be open for more projects! Can you use some Plug-in magic for your project? Need some Papervision3D expertise? Drop me a mail. seb@pluginmedia.net.
PS There’s an easter egg somewhere in the Big and Small website… can you find it?
And it is with a mixture of sadness, exhaustion, and joy to have been host to such a great many Flash friends from all over the world.
The conference was pretty damn amazing, and it was incredible to catch up with my great friends Mario, Ralph, Keith, Rob, Jeremy, Carlos, Chris and the many, MANY others! My session seemed to be very well-received, although I was actually quite nervous. The room was packed and they were stopping people coming in, so I guess I felt a bit more pressure than normal. And of course there was the 20 second code challenge, which didn’t help
Peter Elst videoed the whole thing on his mobile phone! And it’s remarkably good quality. So here it is if you’re interested! Download the source files.
There was one disappointing disagreement, but I’ll save that for a full blog post later (and no, not with Jonathan Harris – I actually missed his session so have no idea what the controversy was all about).
In the meantime, I’m going to Gozo for a week’s holiday with Jenny. So I’m going to be a bit quiet and I’ll see you next week!
I’m absolutely delighted to announce that for the second year running we have (not one but) two projects as FlashForward Award finalists this year!
Our first finalist is our work with MLB.com (that’s Major League Baseball for those born under a rock or outside the USA ). We developed a Papervision3D component for their GameDay application that shows you the trajectory of each ball a few seconds after it has been thrown.
But I will do a full post on this project soon!
And the second finalist is the digital fireworks project Pyrotechnics to the People. I’m especially thrilled that this has made it as it’s a project very close to my heart! And expect to hear an announcement soon about Pyrotechnics version 2!
Let’s face it, 2007 was pretty spectacular, in fact it was SO spectacular that it’s taken me most of January to write it all down…
We flew straight into ‘07 with a massive 9 level platform game, called Extreme Pamplona. It was so big, it took 15 people 2 months to make it, we even had to move into new offices to accommodate everyone!
Then we found out that we had come best in class in 3 separate IMA awards for the Plug-in Media website.
In February I re-launched our local Flash user group as FlashBrighton and we rather insanely increased our meetings to one a week!
A trip for Boston for myself and Plug-in’s Creative Director Dominic Minns followed in May. We were invited to the New England Institute of Art to explain to an enthusiastic group of people exactly how we make games. (more…)
