Video Editing

I took a film making course at the University of Bath and this was the result. All the editing was done in Windows Movie Maker and I'm fairly happy with the result. Working with strangers on creative projects where no one is in charge is always interesting and insightful.

This was several years ago and it was originally published to the web as an .swf file, compressed and rendered with Flash 8 Video Encoder. Things have moved on and I'm happy with result of recompressing the video in the F4V format using Media Encoder CS4. The file size is larger but the progressive download ensures there's very little delay. I used the Flash CS4 FLVPlayback component but just to be interesting the player is published as a Flex application. I made a few small changes to the player skin to get the combination of controls that I wanted - mute is essential! I also manually changed the highlight colour of the buttons. The highlights are not symbols so this change can't be made via code - I'm sure someone has changed that by now.

Warhawk Leaderboard

This is the first example of the viral widgets I made for Eike Consulting. The widgets are currently hosted on the development site so a password is required to download the XML feed which will populate the fields. Hopefully you can imagine the player names and ranks being displayed in the grey accordion headers with the stats for each player displayed in the body of their accordion tab, I am currently working on two further widgets which are configurable to show only the stats for selected users.The widget is distributed using the Clearspring platform and it has been interesting working with this new API. Because the widget is still in development, I would appreciate it if you wait until it is released before making use of the sharing features.

Astroman Arcade Game

I made this retro arcade game to get a better understanding of OOP in Actionscript 2. It is played by two players simultaneously at one keyboard and the keys are fully configurable. I plan to add powerups, AI and eventually a remote multiplayer mode with XMLSocket.

Photo Sharing Site

As a means of gathering all of our wedding guests' photos in one place for easy display and distribution, I made this photos sharing site. Guests are given an upload password which they can use with the Flash based uploader which allows multiple files to be transfered with a single transaction. The upload is handled by a Perl script which resizes the images for display and stores them based on the username given during the upload. In order to produce the gallery, Perl scans the storage area for images and produces a web page with the lists of users and images stored in Javascript arrays. The gallery navigation is handled by Javascript. I have started integrating an SQLite server to the application to enhance the storage and retrieval of photos via the PerlDBI.

Wedding Pirates Platform Game

This was the first game I made and under a tight deadline. I made it as an interesting way of informing our wedding guests that the time of the ceremony had changed. It was an interesting learning experience and highlighted the importance of making the objectives clear: a lot of people didn't realise that once you get in the cannon you have to launch yourself out again. Everyone turned up on time though.

Synaptic Microdomains Guided Presentation

This animation was published in my review on AMPA receptor trafficking. Because the paper is describing the movements of proteins, I thought that an animation would be preferable to a static image. By letting the user control the speed of the animation I hope they will be able to process the information at an appropriate pace.