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Hasselblad
This was a very interesting piece that contained a lot of pieces and parts. The core of the piece were videos describing the Hasselblad camera system, its picture manipulation software, and a slew of interview style parts for a few different photographers who use Hasselblad cameras.
My job was to create a Flash navigation between the different sections of the site by integrating a third-party component that manipulates stage elements in 3D. There were video intros to the major sections of the site as well as a Flex application that allowed the user to navigate and filter photographs taken by the site’s photographers. Picture information was read dynamically from an XML file at runtime and the Flex piece was loaded into the main Flash movie when needed. When you click a photograph, a Flex HTML viewing component would load up that photo’s Zoomify files. Zoomify is a Flash-based navigation of high resolution pictures that operates like Google maps where higher resolution tiles are requested as the photograph is zoomed in. The Zoomify files where created as and export type in Photoshop, however I did all the work of loading them in dynamically and removing them when the user wanted to move on.
There was a web and a kiosk version of the software created with the kiosk version having a few extra features including keeping track of visitor interactions in Flash shared objects and allowing those interactions to be export in a CSV file when a specific key combination is activated on the keyboard. It also had a screensaver-type mode that would automatically play a video repeatedly if there was no keyboard or mouse interactions for a few minutes.
I later went back and added subtitle support for the videos so that external files could be loaded to show German translations over the videos for another version of the software. I was already using the Flash FLVPlaybackComponent for displaying the videos, so adding on the FLVPlayackCaptioning component allowed me to achieve the subtitling without rewriting all of the video logic. It was still a bit of a pain to get right, but after enough tweaking and it turned out pretty nice.
The link for the website is a backed up copy with German translations so that you can see all of the parts of the application I worked on.
Technologies: ActionScript 3, Flash, Flex, JavaScript
