Here’s a music promo I created using some special rotoscoping tricks.
The client wanted some kind of painterly effect. So, after doing a few tests, we settled on a style and started treating the footage. The first step was to chroma key all the shots, since I was planning to composite some together, later adding particle effects in front or behind the various layers.
Once everyone was happy with the edit, I dropped it to 10 frames per second to get a stop-motion look and processed each frame with a proprietary image processing algorithm, to get the painted effect (After Effects plugins weren’t quite doing it for me). The result is rather pretty I think.
Back in 2002 some colleagues and I built one of the web’s first and most popular online multi-user Flash games, Dinky Bomb.
After the dotcom we were working for folded (NOW.com / Gamer TV), Dinky Bomb was apparently sold to EA and subsequently acquired by Atari, who have unfortunately done little with it. Gone for now, but not forgotten – there are a few YouTube videos out there, including this one, which features Dinky Bomb as part of a TV game show from way back then… good times!
A Dinky History
Dinky Bomb was an online multi-player Flash game, built for the converged service Gamer TV many years ago (2002). It was one of the first real-time multi-user experiences on the web in Flash technology (originally Flash 5, connecting to a Java socket server backend using Flash’s then new ‘XMLSocket’ capability).
It grew to become one of the most popular web games, with all of the Dinky Bomb servers almost always full! A special level was built for the TV game show ‘Hi-Score’ which you’ll see in the video above. Since then, Dinky Bomb has been redeveloped into ‘Dinky Bomb Deluxe’, using a different lobby system and a Java-based physics engine. This was shortly before Gamer TV closed its web arm to concentrate on TV, selling off much of its content to a third party. Subsequently, Dinky Bomb has been acquired by Atari, who have done nothing with it :/
The team at the TWI (IMG) run NOW.com / Gamer.tv converged services, which designed and built the original Dinky Bomb game were:
David Pharo – game design, level design, interface design, character design
Chris Reinke – character design
Tom Butler – logo design
Ciaran Tuohy – server backend
Stuart Law – server backend
Sungsoo Lee – additional graphics
Fran Atkinson – thought up the name Dinky Bomb (thanks Fran 🙂
It’s unfortunate that I was kept out of the loop about Dinky Bomb’s sale and redevelopment – not a lot has happened with it since, but you can read more about this here.
