We had a ton of fun (and quite a few all-nighters) creating an ambitious, one-of-a-kind holiday site featuring an original recording, Flash animation, and an incredible amount of coding. You’ll see that while the entire animation takes only 1:42, creating, producing and developing it took a wee bit longer.

If you’re up to it, here’s a How-To Guide for creating your own version of a site like ours:

1. Photograph your employees (they may try to hide, but hunt them down – they’ll be glad you did…no, seriously).
2. Create custom illustrations of each employee (the funniest ones seem to be those with facial hair, so consider asking employees to grow mustaches and beards starting back in October.  The gals may give you some trouble on this one).
3. Animate the characters (bonus: you’ll be able to give some rhythm to employees who can’t normally dance).
4. Rewrite the lyrics to a popular song (you’ll need some time to think of some rhymes).
5. Arrange an original piece of music (it takes some major doses of caffeine to complete this step).
6. Record employees singing (helps to bribe them with some type of libation and an on-site recording studio such as ours comes in extremely handy).
7. Provide the music files to an awesome producer to do a final mix (we used our famous friend Jesse Cannon who did us a solid and hooked us up last minute).
8. Now bring all the digital assets into Flash and build all the animations and social Web components, and be sure to sync everything (Despite the name, none of this happens in a Flash).
9. Integrate a Twitter API to pull tweets that match the lyrics (be sure to add a filter to eliminate the naughty words people could be using with their 140 characters of free speech).

Here are all the tools you’ll need:

Adobe Illustrator, After Effects, Photoshop, Flash, Reason, ProTools, Garage Band, Twitter API, a lot of brain cells.

One last note: When you’re all done, you’ll want to upload the files to your web server before your Internet Service Provider explains over the phone that their servers are down. Unbelievable.

Now that you know the behind the scenes story, go experience the final product at bnoinc.com/holiday.

Tags: Flash, fun, holiday website, twitter

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 1:53 pm and is filed under BNO Work, News, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.