Give yourself a MAX Unaward
If you follow me on Twitter you probably saw my tweets about a new secret project. Today I can finally reveal it to you.
I actually started this project somewhere mid-June. It all started with working on a widget for the Cannes Lions festival. I realized that it was probably a good idea to start thinking about a new widget for MAX. With close to 1 million views, last year’s MAX widget was a huge success (I was just checking the number before posting this and it actually passed the 1 million mark and is still generating views every day) and I thought it would be cool to try and match that number this year (although I realize that that’s a pretty big target). I knew I wanted to do something with video and more specifically do something with personalized video… and it had to be related to MAX. Once the storyboard was approved we recorded the video in a studio in Hilversum in The Netherlands. That was right before my trip to Japan. When I came back I started building the app and have been working on it for the last 3 or 4 weeks.
So… Without further ado… I present you… The Adobe MAX Unawards!
There are a couple of people I really need to thank for their help.
First and foremost: Wim Vanhenden. I think Wim is one of the most talented Flash developers in Belgium… but I decided not to use his Flash skills for this project. Wim is actually the host of the MAX Unawards show. Don’t ask me why but when I started working on the storyboard for the application, I almost immediately thought of Wim for the role of the host. I think it worked out great and we had a lot of fun recording this!
I also want to thank Klaasjan Tukker and Ton Frederiks for helping out with recording the video in the green key studio.
Big thanks also go to Paul Burnett. Paul worked on the personalized text pieces in Flash CS5.
This project would also not be possible without the help of Influxis. Thank you, Jerry, Grant, and Noe! If you ever need any Flash Media Server hosting you have to try these guys. Their custom admin panel alone makes it worth every penny.
UPDATE: Obviously also a big thank you to all the beta testers who gave me a ton of valuable feedback.
I just realized that this blog post is now starting to sound like an acceptance speech for an award… ;-) I should have just created a video for it! ;-)
I hope you guys enjoy the application. I’m looking forward to seeing what awards you give yourself and the creative acceptance speeches you create for it. Oh… and… Hope to see you at MAX!
2 Comments
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Very cool and well executed idea! The only thing I would possibly change is the have more “introduction” clips (different takes with Wim) so the dialog isn’t exactly the same for every video submission. Fun idea though and I’m sure there will be plenty of laughs.
Serge,
The award application is truly inspired. Wonderful!
Three things, with all the hard work you’ve put in:
1. Can you sketch the ideas of how you produced the pieces with the inserted text and videos?
2. It would be great if you could have the award title along with the name, or instead of the name, so one could figure out which one wants to watch. Once there are more than a dozen of these, it’s going to get tiring clicking and trying to find the interesting ones, and eventually viewers will give up I think.
3. How about starting a discussion thread on adobe.com where people can comment on the various videos? I know you want people to embed their awards on their own pages, but there ought to be a spot to visit that lets people know and discuss the good ones (or the really bad ones!), especially as you get more and more entries.
Again, superb job!