FWA - All the Way

The FWA (Favourite Website Awards) is well-known among Web and multimedia communities -- its site welcomes 44,000 visitors a day and maintains a Google page rank of eight, in addition to listing some of the newest, ground-breaking Web sites on the Internet - not to mention updating that list daily.

Del Padre Digital's own site has received an FWA nod in the past, as has its client Robert Charles Photography. However, now the spotlight is on us in a different way.

A piece we wrote is currently the featured article at the FWA, looking at some of the innovative SEO-for-Flash things we're doing at delpadre.com and how it's made us one of the most searchable Flash sites on the Internet.

As part of the article, we spoke to Rostislav Hristov, creator of SWFAddress -- one of the tools we used when relaunching delpadre.com in June, 2008.

"[Del Padre] started developing their new site from scratch, and ended up with a solid base that can be extended even more in the future," Hristov said of delpadre.com's redesign.

We tend to agree.

View the printable version of the FWA article Flash Forward

Del Padre-Produced NASA DVD Released

Completing a project that began two years ago, we've just received our first copies of a three-part educational movie filmed for NASA, for which we served as directors, animators, editors, and producers.

Spacefaring: The Radiation Challenge, addresses the topic of radiation and human space flight, and was produced in tandem with the Space Science Institute. We combined live action with 3D animation and compositing to create a trio of video shorts for DVD. The plot follows three young astronauts encountering a solar storm on their way to Mars, but it's more than just a movie --classroom activities accompany each act of the story, designed for both middle school and high school students.

Spacefaring also includes video-game-level special effects, and is available in both standard definition and HD formats.

Del Padre On Hand to Announce STEPS at ASTC, Philly

Del Padre Digital's Creative Director Mark Archer and Senior Programmer Joe Maki were recently among more than 1,800 science-center professionals from 31 countries, who gathered for the 2008 ASTC (Association of Science Technology Centers) annual conference, held at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pa.

Del Padre's Mark Archer meets and greets with Philly's resident Founding Father.

Archer and Maki attended as part of their involvement with the STEPS (Science Theater Educational Programming System) project, an application being developed by a collaborative of science and multimedia professionals, including the Space Science Institute of Boulder, Colo., the SETI institute in Mountain View, Calif., and NASA. STEPS will be for use by educators in museums across the country, and will create interactive presentations to help science educators of all types stage theatrical presentations for museum audiences.

Del Padre Digital has been tasked with developing the multimedia aspects of STEPS, utilizing the latest tools in digital design to create a software engine with groundbreaking, yet easy-to-use functionality.

The project is slated for completion in 2010, and the ASTC conference coincided with the end of the first development year of this three-year project. A trailer was also produced by the STEPS team and Del Padre Digital for the conference, giving what will be its key audience a first look at the developing platform. The video was filmed in part at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, one of the science centers that will utilize the final STEPS product.

A beta version of STEPS will be unveiled next year, at the ASTC conference in Fort Worth, Texas.