Interview with James Baker of WDDG…
James Baker ‘1-9′ the leader of the world famous WDDG recently launched their new site which is receiving some great reviews from the flash community. I wanted to find out a little more about the inspiration and process behind the site and here’s what Baker had to say:
dr. woohoo
the new wddg has a great 50s propaganda film look and i love the fact that it’s not like your typical agency site. what inspired the look and feel?
james baker
We knew that we wanted to do something with video for our new site, and something that would take advantage of the new layer and filter effects in flash 8/9. Originally we were looking at Vietnam era footage, but we ended up finding a treasure-trove of declassified 50s era nuclear films that really blew us away.
dw
there’s so much cool content – how long did it take to design and develop?
jb
From start to finish it was 5 months. Now, that wasn’t 5 months of development, more like a month of work spread out over that period. We’ve been busy, so finding the time to finish the site has been one of our biggest challenges.
dw
the wddg site incorporates skills from multiple disciplines and apps – can you describe what tools you used and the typical process for creating the content?
jb
We used the big five programs for most of the site - Flash, Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut and Illustrator. The demo-reel was edited in Final Cut. The intro to the demo-reel was done in 3d-Studio and composited in After Effects. The Process animation was created in Photoshop and Illustrator and animated in Flash. For the audio, we edited most of it in Audition and degraded everything using Reactor. The site-jitter was motion captured in After Effects, then the keyframes were exported and used by the core flash movie to shake the screen. A looping clip of dirt and grime sits above the content area of the site along with a 2 px blur.
Practically the whole site had to be storyboarded out using screengrabs of old footage and graphics we developed. I wanted to make the site interesting if no one even clicked a single button, and make typically lame sections like the services or process areas be entertaining enough to want to view.
dw
there’s some great interactive video elements throughout the site and this reminded me of totally hip’s livestage pro for creating interactive quicktime movies back in the 90s. it took a long time to bring this functionality to the web at a screen size worthy of respect due to the technology, bandwidth and codecs. with flash flvs now clearly dominating the web, where do you think video will be in 2016?
jb
Well, the professionally produced stuff should look really really good. I doubt that the myspaces of the world are going to be much nicer though.
dw
thank you for your time and energy.
woohoo!
drew
Stumble it!