Monday 30 Oct 2006
London-based Hi-Res worked with Diesel’s online ad agency Airlock to create an interactive rock ’n’ roll alternative to heaven on the Web.
For a concept that its designers admit was created in a single night, Diesel Heaven takes some beating. It delivers astounding full-screen animation and video, angelic imagery that pushes the Diesel brand skywards, and a clever online campaign revolving around fallen angel wings.
“We created the concept for the site pretty much in one night,” says Florian Schmitt, artistic and founding director of Hi-Res London.
It clicked when we thought: ‘If Diesel have been creating guides to successful living for years, how will it pay off when you get to heaven?’ Thus Diesel’s first guide to successful afterliving was born.
“It was a simple, yet strong concept with lots of possibilities, so we just ran with it. Casting and scripting was next, getting a crew for the shoot together, while at the same time creating the backgrounds for the site.”
The Hi-Res team had won the brief following previous work on Diesel’s Stylelab brand as far back as 2002, with other Diesel work including SS06 in 2005, and the creation of the Diesel Jewellery site in March 2006 to its credit.
For this project, Hi-Res worked with Airlock to develop a broad campaign that refreshes over several months with new content.
Take these fallen wings “Diesel asked both of us to come up with concepts that could evolve,” says Schmitt.
“Airlock’s concept was based on fallen angels, and angels losing their wings as they fall to earth. The aim was to create lots of what appears to be user-generated content and upload it to YouTube and other blogs. The hub was a site called fallenwings.org, which tracked this strange activity.
“Our concept was firmly rooted in the Diesel Heaven narrative and we created a character called Delis H Evens (anagram for Diesel Heaven), who has her own blog, tracking similarly strange events, caused by Diesel’s new venture.
Her blog was at markofthed.com and features messages you can send from the campaign site,” adds Schmitt.
Various unique aspects adorn the site, including full-screen video and a presenter who takes you through the site and introduces elements and sections.
“I am quite obsessed with creating borderless Web sites without the need for pop-up windows that you cannot resize. I love sites that you can resize without destroying the layout or exposing forgotten borders,” reveals Schmitt.
“We developed a few scripts for Flash that adaptively reposition elements on the stage when you resize. They move completely independently of each other, which allows us to align one element to the bottom of the screen while another will always stay centred and yet another will always stay in the top left.
“The only obstacle is that you need to create your backgrounds in a size that allows you to use them in this way without the need to resize them, which is never a good idea.
We created pretty big backgrounds (1,200-pixels wide) and then cheated by mirroring them if you made your browser wider than 1,200 pixels,” he says.
Adding video-based presenter Delia proved a large part of the project, according to Schmitt, with the team resorting to live actors and a greenscreen shoot to capture and place the video.
“Casting was our main issue,” says Schmitt. “I had a very specific character in mind and we needed to find a woman who not only had model looks but could also deliver a script.
“We had 17 scenes to shoot in one normal shoot day, which is an insane amount and it was crucial that we found someone who could perform well under such time pressure.
“Finding Siri Svegler, who plays Delia, was a blessing. She was absolutely perfect and brought aspects to the role I hadn’t preciously considered.”
Schmitt reckons that video can be tricky to deal with online – and so opted to capture as much detail as possible.
“We shot everything in 1080 HD, which is great to deal with in terms of resolution, but getting this material on a hard drive within a day so we could start working with it was almost mission impossible. The data is just immense,” he says.
“Making a site that is as video heavy as this one, without ending up in front of preloaders for hours was the next challenge. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning compression in Flash to get to a decent result.
On a 50Kbps line, the site streams pretty well with reasonable load times. We also created two cherub characters for the preloaders who we follow while we fly to the next cloud. Their conversations are really tongue in cheek and make the wait that tiny bit more bearable,” he adds.
The video was shot in a small studio against greenscreen using a Sony HD camera that captured at 1080p resolution – Schmitt reckons it’s a sin to shoot interlaced for Web sites.
The team turned to Metro to transfer the HD footage to disk, and they then did all post-production work in-house using Adobe After Effects to create the mattes.
Post production hell
“We were going to go for Ultimatte for the keys, but in the end separate colour keys provided better results. We then rendered out QuickTime files with alphas, which we then encoded for Flash using Flash’s video encoder,” Schmitt explains.
“Post production was the most painful part of it – especially creating mattes to alpha layer the video into Flash. The hot production phase lasted for about two weeks (considering the nights we spent working on it, it was more like four weeks), where all the interaction and site logic was put in place,” he says.
At the same time, Schmitt created the fictional band The Conks, whose lead singer Polly Ester is one of the guests at Diesel Heaven.
He even managed to write a track for them, which is downloadable from the site, or can be listened to at The Conks MySpace page (www.myspace.com/theconks).
Technical considerations aside, Hi-Res grappled with the creative direction as the site evolved, says Schmitt: “For us, each new project, especially projects for the likes of Diesel, should be a challenge. Ever since we created the lifeswitch.org Web site for Christian Aid back in 2004, we wanted to use the narrative approach of featuring a presenter who takes you through a site (and a narrative) again.
“This just proved to be the perfect project for it. In terms of art direction, we went through a long phase of discussions over what heaven should look like. It appears everyone had a slightly different idea, but clouds were a common denominator.
“The only strong colour apart from white (and blue skies) that we feature is Diesel’s red,” he adds.
“Our aim was to create a much more cinematic experience with the site, as much of the previous campaign sites were based on print ads and therefore were more static by default.
“I think everyone was very positive about it, maybe apart from people on dial-up. Diesel loved it and for them it was definitely a step forward from work they have done before.”
Diesel Heaven, www.diesel.com/campaigns/aw06/
Matthew Bath
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