This Multimedia Firm Plays to Win: A Project Profile From the Macromedia Edge Newsletter, March, 2003 If you're producing a humongous project for teenagers involving sports and ethical behavior, you better not have a dull or dogmatic bit in it, or you'll lose your audience. Keenly aware of this challenge, Del Padre Visual Productions just finished a fresh, rich, and (sshhh!) that will be distributed to 10,000 American high schools this month, in conjunction with National Sportsmanship Day by the Institute for International Sport. Nino Del Padre launched his hot enterprise in 1990 in a walk-in closet, with a high-end video focus. For two years running now, he's been named among the Top 100 Producers by AV Video Multimedia Producer magazine. Now Del Padre Visual Productions (DVP) is western Massachusetts' leading multimedia development agency, with six employees, including Director programmer Lisa Del Padre and producer Mark Archer, and with blue-chip clients including NASA and LEGO Toys. Sometimes Looking Bad is Good "Our task was to get the sportsmanship message across in a cool and hip way," Producer Mark Archer explains. "A lot of content is supported through Flash to allow for student interaction. The narrator sets up text quotations and bullet points, and the educator is asked to pick a student to read the text aloud. It's a new breed of educational delivery. In these days of MTV and videogames, you need interaction, or kids aren't going to be interested. From the outset we knew we wanted a slick, MTV style and a cool interface that kept them intrigued." "It's not often that I get creative license to make an edgy, grungy look," Nino Del Padre adds. "In fact, while we were reviewing the opening title sequence, which has an old-style flickering film effect, with shuddering, blurry titles, one of our administrative assistants walked by and said, 'That looks awful, it's all shaky and old-looking!' I explained that it took many hours to make a 10-second sequence look so bad." Face-slapping Content The DVP team shot with a digital JVC GY-DV500U camcorder, digitized the material with Matrox components, cut with Adobe Premier, and used After Effects for compositing and visual effects, which include time ramping, radial blurs, light zooms, and custom motion backgrounds. "We had to carry this visual energy into the non-video segments," Nino continues. "How could we maintain the impact? With Flash, of course! Flash MX is the only tool we could use to combine vector and bitmap animations and also incorporate the video assets we gathered. I would open Flash and import previously created images, video, music, and voice-over elements. Using the same time line manner as in a nonlinear video-editing program, I recreated the video's edgy, slap-you-in-the-face look for the interactive elements. As I completed each lesson, I sent it to Lisa to be imported into Director." Winning Graciously with Director Nino smiles, "Lisa got great transitions between MPEG and Flash. The user is not aware when you're moving from one media type to another." The user navigation interface, Lisa explains, originated in Photoshop, and was animated in Macromedia Flash MX, where music was added. The interface, an 800x600 Flash movie, was imported to Director, where Lisa "scrubbed parts of the project depending upon what the user clicked." To enable classroom interactivity, the CD's narration comprises many small segments. "We needed to have music underlying the entire presentation, including when a student will be reading text aloud," Mark details. "We had to loop that music and, when the educator hits the spacebar, move onto the next voiceover without the music interrupting. The only time we stop the music is in the long-form class discussions that take seven or eight minutes. Otherwise our premise is, always keep the music looping seamlessly." Nino elaborates on music's role in "Dare to Play Fair." "We used high-end, high-energy music. The last thing we wanted was to sound like a '70s porno movie, which is easy to do with a lot of these canned [needle-drop music tracks]. A lot of interactive developers overlook the power of high-quality, fresh, contemporary music." Parallel Universes and Shell Games It would have been impossible for DVP to hit its deadline if it built "Dare to Play Fair" in a linear fashion. Thanks to an innovative framework that Lisa built, a Macromedia Director 'shell' she prepared ahead of time for later integration of video clips, video production could and did happen up until the last day of the project schedule. "We had a script from the Institute, and up front we decided which part of the script would be Flash and which part would be video," Lisa explains. "I would work according to the script, just putting in placeholders for each specified media type, until I got the content. I would check the functionality with test-MPEG sections that are labeled correctly, so when we brought in the real MPEGs, named according to those file conventions, they worked. The shell of the project was in place when I got all the final content, and I just had to switch videos." Doing the Right Thing Which is ironic, considering no one at DVP is a jock, but they clearly know the meaning of teamwork. Linda Jacobson helped launch Wired magazine, performed with D'Cuckoo, evangelized for SGI, and now leads Glass House Studio, LLC. |