My first full Flash site
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.