Creation

From creationthemovie.com

In the world of Flash design (and Web design in general) there is this idea that one must always be on the cutting edge. If you want to make an impression on your audience you’d better deliver some form of bang-wow that they didn’t know was possible until you showed them, right? Software is in a near constant progression of capabilities and discoveries that compel the world of digital design to feel like it has some ever-changing high-tech image to live up to.

This happens all the time in the movie industry. It seems that every new mega-special effects project that comes along gets a whole new set of software designed for it just to try and make it the greatest yet. What happens though when you don’t push that boundary, but instead take the time to settle into a set of tools and really learn how to use them? The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, that’s what happens.

Being a decently devoted geek I have taken the time to watch all the extras on the  disk sets of the LOTR movies. In those extras I learned that the special effects creators were delighted to make the movies because for the first time in their careers they were allowed to use “last year’s” software. They claimed that all the time they normally spent just figuring the software out was freed up and granted them the space to actually be artists. Imagine that.

I am not knocking all the cool bleeding edge flash sites and ideas out there. I love those, too. But all to often a simple, artistic, elegant and old solution gets overlooked in an attempt to feel like one is part of the frontier. Which brings me to the case study for this post, creationthemovie.com.

Creationthemovie.com is a site for Creation, a movie about the life of Darwin.  The interface is as if you were looking at your own research desk, covered in samples, tools and a map. How you get around is by wielding the magnifying glass to zoom in on the little creatures in your collection and you click on their links. This elegantly widens the lens into a view port for the content of your selection.

What I love about this site is the overall period feel. It is a simple interface that really gives me the feeling of holding a magnifier over a table of samples. It not only gives me the impression of being in another era, but instantly puts me in the spirit of the role I am playing and makes me that much more curious about the movie. And how is this all technically accomplished? Why, that’s the same old little Flash magnifier technique that has been around since I got into Flash 8 years ago. Well done!

The funny thing is how close to home the design of this site hits. You can’t tell yet, but GLOPiLOT is undergoing a complete makeover and will have some style in common with Creationthemovie.com when we are done. We have been at work on this for the last month in our free time (which is Wednesday nights between 11pm and 2 am), so stay tuned…