In 2009, I worked on some fun sites for Disney over at Midnight Oil Creative. This Jonas Brother’s site was an all Flash page rendering system, with content externalized in XML that I created. The task at hand was to retrofit a Hannah Montana site into the Jonas Brother’s site. The engine had a navigation bar at the top, and several panels of content in a page – used to make fluid, animated, lively sites. Using that system, I added several specialized panel widgets and an animation delay system in as3 and xml. This made it easy for graphics designers to add and update assets, as well as control the timing. As I added more capabilities and features, it was easier to build sites in XML by re-using the engine. This engine became the base code for other projects I worked on, were it evolved even further.
Category: High Profile Projects
Radio Disney – N.B.T.
The N.B.T, Next Big Thing was the new version of the flash/xml page rendering system used to build Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana sites. By this time I had added several panel components to the engine and made some new ones for media elements – audio, images, and video.
Pepsi Super Bowl
In 2009, I did a contract to build the Pepsi Superbowl site. Conceptualized and designed by The Famous Group, I added Flickr, YouTube, and Gigya APIs in ActionScript, as well as an RSS feed reader. The site would scale to any browser window size and randomly render from a list of Flickr images, as well as present a YouTube playlist of commercials for the Pepsi Superbowl 2009 campaign called Refresh Everything.
Tron
This highly immersive movie website was built by Heavenspot for Disney in 2010. During that time, Disney hired me to assist with technical integration and development of the site. For example, the developers at Heavenspot needed a persistent storage medium for the user’s avatar data – which had to fit into Disney’s enterprise infrastructure. Web site traffic was extremely high at Disney (some of the highest on the internet), and the use of CDNs and clouds were critical to keep up with the demands. To solve the problem, the Java devs built a back end service to fit the requirements for performance and security. I built the as3 components to work with that service, and assisted Heavenspot with integrating into the site. I also assisted with restructuring the asset locations for CDN deployment , as well as some promotional projects such as a sweepstakes component.
Before the big site, I worked on making this teaser site which was a placeholder. I took a Flash CS5 demo animation and made it into this interactive version for displaying promotional video and image content.
Panda Jam Ads
The ad that pops up over the Facebook Flash game Panda Jam are actually HTML / CSS / JavaScript / and ActionScript all working together. Panda Jam has over 1 million players world wide and monetizes on each ad shown. Inter-level ads display in between levels of the game and use Adap TV’s JavaScript API. For the Ad Sales team, I programmed it with a complex set of factors of how and when to show ads, such as:
- no ads until the 2nd round
- don’t show more than 1 ad within a minute
- no ads for users who made a purchase in the past
- no more than two ads per game
- restrict ads to certain geographic regions determined by Facebook API
- Ad server errors would get trapped and bypass the ad, so the user would not be affected
These settings were all configurable via an xml and may have changed since. Once the ad completes, the game resumes. Using JQuery and the Adap TV JavaScript API, PlayerIO API, and ActionScript’s External Interface, this system was then integrated into other games.
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