Max The Rocket

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This is the website for an annual 4D Events party at the Guvernment. This year I wanted to give the site a look and feel of love, happiness, and a little hippie. I used a lot of circular shapes, smooth curves and an explosion of vibrant colors. Doesn’t this website make you happy when you look at it? Doesn’t it scream Unity? Well it should.

I used Papervision 3D for the Unity logo at the top, it moves with your mouse . I thought the video on the background is a good way to show what the party is all about, which worked out well. Since the site if full page flash it was a quite challenge to figure out how to move all the elements on stage when the window gets resized, not to mention resizing the video. But I love challenges.

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A web site for an annual party at the Guvernment. The website was done in flash, AS2. It consists of “Blobs” that randomly morph and float around the screen, they pretty much have a life of their own. Each “Blob” represents a menu item. By clicking on a menu item a “Blob” expands to show the content. Give it a try.

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A website for an end-of-school party at The Guvernment. I had to program an animated flame in flash that used only one graphic to create a dynamic flame effect.

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Another web site for 4D Events‘ annual all ages party at The Guvernment. The most challenging part of this website was to create a 3D ball, with reflections, rendered live inside flash.

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I had to fake the ball reflections by making a enviromental map with the reflection and moving the dummy light used for the enviromental map. I did the background of the website in 3Ds Max, I got the idea from Eagle Eye movie, the room where the main computer was:

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This web site was one of the most viral web campaigns I have ever done. The website was for an all ages party hosted by 4Devents.ca. What the Blackout parties are famous for is that at around midnight we turn off most of the lights inside the club and throw out hundreds of glow sticks into the crowd. We first did a Blackout party when we were just starting with 4D Events, it was a small venue called Ice Castle. This party got a huge turnout and ever since we made the Blackout party an annual thing.

Toronto was hit with a 2 day power outage, which was part of the Northeast Blackout of 2003, it was around the same time we had the first Blackout party. Ever since the real Blackout all the web campaigns for the Blackout parties had a dark and scary theme. I tried to re-create the same feelings and experiences people had when the real Blackout hit Toronto. I wanted create fear, surprise, shock and somehow relate the party and campaign to the real Blackout. For the 2008 Blackout party I created a terrorist character who wears a gas mask to cover his face.

I made it look as if someone hacks the website when it’s not even done loading. By “hacks the website” I mean the screen turns all black and some “computer code” starts running down the screen. After the “hacked screen” a video starts to tile down the screen, it’s a video of the terrorist in a gas mask. The terrorist talks about how he will create another Blackout throughout Toronto with the energy generated from people’s body movements at the Blackout party. It is somewhat cheese, but the teens appreciated it. The terrorist was meant to be more funny than scary. At the end of the video an option is provided to send a personalized message to a friend, either through email or by copying a personalized link. The personalized link contains an encoded name of the friend. When the friend visits the link the “hacking code” contains the friend’s name. The code displays “Hello Friends Name” down the screen just before the terrorist video goes on. The viral video was shared by about 300 people, using the send to friend by email feature. That’s a lot considering most of these people were teenagers who don’t use email as a way to communicate with each other. Teenagers mostly sent the link, generated for their friend, through Facebook or MSN messenger. This viral campaign generated more hits than any other web campaign for an all ages party that I’ve done before.

I shot the video in my Garage, by myself. I used a 5-year-old Panasonic camcorder to shoot it. The gas mask I had from Halloween. I created the backdrop using some Christmas lights, tape and a large, flat, gray bag from dry-cleaning, that hid all the wires. I modified my voice using some filters in Sony Vegas. I also used Vegas to add some grunge effects to the video. I also ended up making a video for the night of the party that was played right before the blackout.

Aside from the viral campaign there was also a website that had all the information for the Blackout party. The design of the web site was inspired by the 90′s, specifically the early Macintosh desktop and the internet, version 0.0.2. I put a big, green wireframe globe in the middle, which I think was inspired by 90’s news shows in Ukraine (they always had a green globe in the background, from what I remember). I used a cheesy computer font; I think it worked well with the whole theme. I could’ve made the design of the actual website a lot nicer I guess, but I’ve spent so much time on the “viral terrorist” that I didn’t have much time left to work on the design.

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This is another flash site I made for an annual all ages party hosted by 4Devents.ca in 2006. This site was pretty simple. Probably, the most complicated part was the “Venue” section, I had to load images dynamically from the server. Of course this task is trivial for me right now but at that time I had to learn how to do it for the first time. The “Location” section features dragable map area thingy, this feature was challenging for me at that time, but I love challenges.

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This was the first full flash site I did for 4D. The year was 2005, I was 18 years old at that time. I was in first year in college, doing Digital Media Technical Production at Seneca @ York. This UNITY party was a big step for 4D as we had to fill up the entire Guvernment/Koolhaus complex, that’s about 5000 people that we had to bring on that night so the party is not a flop.  I had to go all out for this site, do something that’s never been done before. We were well ahead of our competitors with our web presence. We had the best website, we had videos from our events, picture gallery from each party we did and it was always updated, unlike our competitor’s web sites… Well I was in charge of the website so it had to be better than the rest! No other company did flash websites for their parties, so I though if i do it we would set a new standard.

We spent a lot of money on flyers for this party.  We had a custom dye cut for the flyer, check out the flyer here. It was the coolest flyer the all ages scene in Toronto has ever seen. I wanted to make the website look like the flyer. I got the working files from the company that designed the flyer. I used some artwork from the flyer, added some of my own and pieced together a very cool layout. I really wanted to show the size and the layout of this massive venue so I took the building blueprints from the Guvernment website, outlines them in illustrator and made a pretty-looking map of the whole building, 2 floors. The building layout took me quite a bit of time, but it turned out good at the end, I actually used it for a school project. I did this all the time, I tried to turn school projects into something useful. At that time, Flash didn’t let you import AI files as smoothly as it does now, Flash was still a Macromedia product at the time. I had to export all the AI files as SWFs and import them into Flash. It was a pain in the ass, thank god Adobe bought Macromedia!

I made 2 different wallpapers available for download. I had to make different sized for the wallpapers, it was just a bit of sizing and cropping nothing hard. I’m not sure how many kids actually downloaded and used these wallpapers, I didn’t track these sort of things back then. One of the wallpapers had a picture from Koolhaus at one of their annual 19+ all access sketchy parties, I think Armin Van Buren was playing when I took the shot with my Sony cybershot…lol It came out really nice.

The video commercial I made myself. I got alot of the footage from Labour of Love, Guvernments all-access 19+ party on Labour day weekend, we just went in, still underage, and recorded each room with my Panasonic camcorder. Got our MC to do the voice over and the sound track, pulled some motion graphics out of my ass and it turned out to be a cool video. I’m still proud of that video to this day. I used Sony Vegas for the whole thing, I know, I know I should have used some real production software, but it did the job.

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