Chris Paterson

A local painter’s website done in all Flash. In addition to creating a cool design, I also programmed an administration system that allows Nela to go in and update all her copy and even add photos of new artwork pieces.

My Role:
Flash Development
Flash Design
Creative Concept
Visual Design
PHP Development

This is a little Flash piece I did for the company Rain Master. They create intelligent sprinkler systems for large landscapes and the software that controls them. This particular piece was used as the log in screen backdrop. It senses the user’s local time and builds a different scene accordingly. There is also a really cool Easter Egg that the client left in. If you click on one of the birds, it suddenly becomes a shooting game! Make sure your sound is on!

My Role:
Flash Development
Flash Design
Creative Concept

Created for the 2007 Disney Vacation Club Members site redesign. This single header piece is used across the entire site in a few different formats. Each format is configured via the CMS. It can be a slideshow with music and characters, a slideshow with the ability to select thumbnails or it can be used as just a static image holder that loads in the image with a cool blur effect. There is even an option to set it to a shorter height.

• My Role:
  Flash Design
  Flash Development

As well as doing most of the Flash on Adventures by Disney’s website a I also created these interactive maps. There are 18 total maps each one showing the route and destination of the trips. Although I did not illustrate the maps I did all of the Flash Animation and functionality behind them.

• My Role:
  Flash Design
  Flash Development

project mysterio. grew organically from its inception. Originally, it was about chasing the paper boy late at night and trying to avoid getting hit by his maniacal driving. The concept soon grew as I put an identity to it. Today, project mysterio. is bigger than chasing the paper boy. It started a small underground movement of fans who wear the clothing and look for their own radical “paper boy”. The website has won many awards including first place in the California State University-wide Media Arts Festival. I also wrote, designed and photographed a 20 page book called, project mysterio – what it is.

• My Role:
  logo design
  website design/programming
  photography
  clothing design
  video shooting
  video editing
  chasing Mysterio

Featured on DisneyVacationClub.com/members. If you are not familiar with Disney Vacation Club, it’s a very large sector of Disney’s travel business and is essentially a time share exchange. One of the properties that I helped maintain at Disney Parks and Resorts was Disney Vacation Club. This particular piece was a part of the global marketing campaign “Year of a Million Dreams.” In the 1970’s when Disneyworld was being built Roy O. Disney (Walt’s brother; CEO upon Walt’s death) had planned to put a penthouse suite inside Cinderella’s Castle. Unfortunately, the idea never came to fruition until last year. As part of the Year of a Million Dreams campaign they decided to finish what Roy had started. For the entire year or length of the campaign they have been giving out free night stays in the suite to lucky families. This piece was part of a photo sweepstakes that DVC did for it’s members to win a night in the Cinderella Castle.

• Key technical achievments:
  Flash Overlay on transparent div

• My Role:
  Flash Development
  Flash Design
  Interface Architecture
  Really came up with the concept of doing an overlay piece which DVC loved and used again and again in various campaigns.

Taken on through La Visual. The ValueClick Performance interviews mini site is used as a marketing vehicle for ValueClick Media. The videos highlight industry leaders speaking about the concept of performance.

• Key technical achievments:
  Scripted motion
  MySql PHP driven through XML rpc
  Bookmarkable videos through anchor links parsed in javascript
  Page titles update on video change

• My Role:
  Flash Development
  Interface Architecture participation
  Motion design
  Concept development

Designed for the Epcot Special Events landing page on Disneyworld.com. The special events are held throughout the year at Epcot.

• Key technical achievments:
  Scripted motion
  Drawing API to mask sections

• My Role:
  Visual Design
  Flash Development
  Interface Architecture participation

Created for driving traffic to the newsletter section of disneyworld.com. Launched in Feb 2006 and is still used frequently. The newsletter is a gated content area which forces uses to register with disneyworld.com to get exclusive content.

• Key technical achievments:
  Uses all dynamic data
  Everything visual is drawn with Flash Drawing API
  (Not a single visual asset in the library)
  Mostly OOP, definitely no timeline but there are some includes

• My Role:
  Visual Design
  Flash Development
  Interface Architecture participation
  Proposing the idea to the business

Introducing the SWX format:

SWX is the native data format for the Flash Platform.

SWX RPC is a remote procedure call protocol encoded in SWX. It’s simple enough that you can get up and running with it in about five minutes. SWX RPC is perfect for building mashups (with easy-to-use APIs for Flickr, Twitter, and others), mobile applications (Flash Lite 2.0 and 2.1), and other data-driven Flash sites and applications.

The idea is that no longer will you use remoting, xml, loadvars or whatever method you have been using to load dynamic data into your Flash projects; instead you will just load a swf that already has all of the data you need. The swf is dynamically generated through a database or any data source you can provide via a server side script. The push is very strong towards using existing open data sources like Flikr or Technorati currently, but there are much greater implementations! I believe the project is still in it’s early phase but there is a pretty robust php version of the software.

Aran (the developer) states that he was inspired by his Mac and the simplicity of it. He’s right, I came back after the session at Adobe Max 2007 and installed both a local version of the software with a functioning apache server, php, mysql database and a version on my server all within 20 minutes. It took me longer to download then it did to set up!

SWX is not unlike a format that we currently use at Disney called JavaSWF. Which is a somewhat abandoned open source project created by a developer working in our division. He has recently moved on however… I’m excited about this new format for the potential it provides. Our latest version of JavaSWF publishes to Flash 6, which seems to be fine because we are only accessing primitive objects, arrays and name value pairs. The problem arises as Disney moves it’s framework to AS3, where the virtual machine in the Flash Player basically runs either AS3 or AS2/AS1. There are ways to communicate between the two virtual machines within the player but it requires another procedure (localConnection()). It may not seem like a big deal to create one extra step in loading but when you have millions of visitors a month on a website it certainly slows down the overall performance!

I look forward to seeing the progress of this open source solution for dynamic data integration in Flash! Definitely check out SWX and try it out! You’ll be amazed!

Instead of creating a great Flash website that I will likely not update, I’ve decided to create a blog. This way I can talk about my recent learnings in Flash, maybe help some people with script and Flash in general and have a place to at least post links to new projects.