I was recently asked to create some fullscreen video ads for Yahoo’s login page. The constraints were: dimensions of 1440×1024 but less than 500k file size, must loop seamlessly and no HTML5 blend-mode effects or plugins allowed – otherwise an overlay of the steam blended onto a canvas layer would have yielded an even smaller file size. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Microsoft’s Edge browser did not fully support blend-modes – hurry up Microsoft! I managed to create a few videos, such as the one below, all within these constraints, using After Effects and the amazing WEBM format:
Tag Archives: banner
Video banner
I created this animated banner for a client’s phone case giveaway competition used on their social media accounts.
A literally ‘gripping’ banner
Just looking through some old work and found a banner I had created years ago. So what, you ask? Well, as banners go, it’s pretty gripping 😉
I created this for the BBC, to advertise a game related to one of their TV shows. It employs some pretty clever maths to animate some creepy vines which actually reach out to steal your mouse cursor. It was built in Flash, now partially resurrected with Ruffle/WebAssembly, so certain things don’t work (such as transparent background and filters). Try it out here!
In the video below you can see what it originally looked like.
Synchronising animation across multiple player instances
I’ve been asked a few times how to create effects that require multiple instances of the Flash Player on a page to remain ‘in sync’, even with user interaction. Reading and writing to cookies frequently is inefficient and resource heavy. Also, when you have more than 2 SWFs, deciding which SWF updates who becomes tricky – especially if someone decides to change or remove an instance, or an instance which you picked as ‘master’ is not loaded, for some reason.
So, I came up with this solution, using LocalConnection with a twist, which works pretty well. But, if anyone has a better method, drop it in a comment below 🙂