SXSW

SXSW

South by Southwest Music Film Interactive Festival used to be just about music and film. Over the last few years it has moved to incorporate the "Interactive". It is now a showcase for tech industry people to get together and socially network face to face.

In fact, many popular web apps have debuted at SXSW. That includes Twitter a couple years ago, now Twitter's CEO Evan Williams had a keynote interview. So how does Flash fit into this? The festival covers all kinds of new interactive technology, including gaming, education, social networking, etc. They give awards for best new innovation in different fields and websites, games, etc. Most of the companies, large and small that are winning, and gaining acclaim for great, interesting work are using Flash.

Winners

These are there winners for their Web Awards. I appreciated odosketch particularly. It is a flash based drawing platform for people to view the drawing process, including mistakes or changes.

Ok. here is a cool one to check out. booneoakley.com They are a marketing/ad firm that developed their own site in Flash and play it straight from YouTube. It just goes to show you that a FLV is just a movie clip.


Jim Carrey's site is acclaimed by SXSW, we've seen this already in class.

We Choose the Moon is a great interactive flash developed product that is really cool and a great way to show the educational ability of Flash. Another student covered this so check their blog post out.

The Student winner is a real cool "looking" site. I am not big on his politics but it's impressive that a student was able to put something this slick together.

STUDENT

I know my last thing I am going to talk about is not a flash unique site, but consider this: If I didn't watch his flash movie, I wouldn't get what is so cool about the website.

WOLFRAMALPHA

To sum up, Check out the SXSW website and look through the articles and interviews about all the cool stuff that people are doing. Most of the most cutting edge stuff, is made in flash, or uses flash or tries to look like flash.

wechosethemoon.org

wechosethemoon.org won “FWA’S FAVORITE SITE OF THE YEAR” and this is the subject of my blog today. I am particularly interested in this site because my father was one of the rocket scientists who built this rocket and trained the astronauts. At that time he worked for TRW in Redondo Beach, then moved to Cape Canaveral before this launch on July 16, 1969. This day is also significant because my birthday is July 16, and every year he would mention the Apollo 11 on my birthday. It is a thrill to be able to log into this site and watch the simulated space launch.

This re-enaction of the apollo 11 mission is broken into 11 stages which can we accessed through an interactive flight path that shows the path of the rocket with clickable links shown below. I like the way that they have used the flight path as an informational graphic to provide the users with a visual representation of the flight path while simultaneously using this as a navigational tool.


It is fun to be able to click a button ans watch the rocket launch with realistic looking flames. A short while into the flight the ship starts to come apart and the extra weight is dropped off into a burts of flames. I love the camera angles showing

Users are also able to use the mission tracker change the camera angle to watch the space ship from different perspectives throughout the journey.

The attention to detail that went into this site is amazing. This site contains original photography, audio recordings with transcripts, and videos from the space flight, and was even put live on the 40th anniversary of the space mission. I also noticed that there are fun facts like the price of gas at the time of this space mission, as well as interesting cultural facts to give a bigger picture of what was going on at this time in history.

My only complaint is that I was not able to figure out how to download the certificate that the site allows users to customize. This should be more visible.

Even the name chosen for the URL of this site is symbolic of JF Kennedy’s vision to land on the moon with men in the 1960’s. He said “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." When Domain Studios set out to put this flash piece together, they did not take the easy way, but did what was necessary to create a masterpiece.

There are so many reasons that this web site won the FWA's site of the year; it is a tribute to JFK, historical reproduction of one of this country's proudest moments, entertaining, and displays outstanding use of technology.

Studio

http://2kgames.com/#

I chose to study this website because I am at heart, a very big video game player, and I found that this website displayed and organized their respective titles very well. The transitions between pages are executed very nicely and they load dynamically so people with slower internet don't have to wait too long for a page to load and information is displayed on the fly.

The layout, graphically speaking, is very ominous and foreboding, which tends to shadow 2K's titles quite well. I found that even if you have not played any of the games being shown, they have brief overviews of what each game is about (even videos showing trailers and some gameplay) to entice people into their products.

The ability to scroll through games by cover is very nice if someone is just trying to find one specific title to research before they purchase it.

All in all, I find that 2kgames.com is an easy to navigate website that displays its product well.