portfolio-flash « Benjamin Farrell

A History of Portfolios

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I was just going back through the archives and digging up screenshots of old portfolio sites and CD’s. Kind of embarrassing how bad things looked all those years ago, but it was in 1997, who can blame me!

My 1997 website hosted on my school’s webserver!

1998 – Same deal….still looks pretty bad even with the glassy effect!

A portfolio CD from 2000! I toted this one with me around NY and Boston for a few interviews as I was fresh outta college.

My year 2000 website – interactive breakfast themed!

I don’t even know what this was….no time? I had an idea for Yellow5Labs in 2003 – a take on the additive food dye. I killed it off, cause people thought I was really into labradore retrievers. But not before going through a few more iterations….

In 2005, I seemed to get my act together to make something good looking. The chemical compound flies across the screen with your mouse. Hovering over it will zoom into the hexagon and load up a section of the site on the right

This is the final iteration of Yellow5Labs from 2008 or 2009. As I said, I killed it off cause people thought I was into labradore retrievers. I couldn’t find a screenshot, but here it is as a comp without copy. The test tubes blow up as you mouse over (shooting up vertically). And the cloud is the header, while the lab technician is the footer, with the part in-between expanding vertically with the copy.

05Aug

Scholastic iRead UI Design

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While working at 360KID, we were hired by Scholastic for a project focused on interactive reading. For this project, I designed and planned the user interface for a series of activities. I designed and storyboarded, while my producer scrutinezed and criticized to come up with the best design and flow possible.

I remember visiting their NY offices and them being very impressed with the UI concepts, it was a very cool experience!

04Aug

Blastanova

A project still in progress. Blastanova aims to combine music and games. See http://blastanova.com for more details.

To support the project, I created a website:

And business card:

I also created and designed a music/beat scanning application (click on the image to try it out):

26Dec

Kid Care

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We did this grant based project for a company called Inflexxion through my then employer 360KID. The project was an interactive story that took kids through several playable missions to help them deal with all the emotions and troubles that come with having a divorce in their family.

There were many walkthroughs and interactive tutorials, a journal they could write in, and more.

The project was done with Flash and divided into many modules as the user explored and went through missions.

Mission Control with Hank the Superdude

26Dec

Sagwa: the Chinese Siamese Cat

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We at 360KID did a few games for PBS Kids with Sagwa. We did two similar style games. Counting Koi was a simple counting games where kids would count fish in a pond, and Exploring the Palace was mostly a click and explore type of game.

The logic and gameplay in these games aren’t incredibly difficult – though weaving animation/dialog clips together and fitting a particular narrative for the infinite number of possibilities can be hard. We did get it down to a science at 360KID for these click and explore games with characters that guide you through the experience.

Counting Koi

Exploring the Palace Game

26Dec

Cats Incredible Journey

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Cats Incredible Journey was a game created while I was at 360KID. It focused on helping kids with emotions if I recall correctly. In it’s prototype phase, it was a Flash game with limited interaction and awesomely designed animated sequences.

The reason behind the interaction and gameplay being so limited and lightweight was so we could port it to a straight DVD which could be played on your standard set top player using the arrow keys and menu buttons to initiate actions.

The Flash sequences were rendered to Quicktime movies which I brought into DVD Studio Pro. It was a pretty difficult to pull of, as I think I remember only being able to work with 6 variables throughout the entire application.

Was a frustrating thing to produce a DVD game, but we pulled it off!

Cat greeting us as he goes to collect jewels in the woods

26Dec

Backyardigans: Mission To Mars

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Backyardigans: Mission to Mars was a CD-ROM game we created at 360KID. It featured several games for this Nickelodeon show that were strung together by cut-scenes to create a great story where the Backyardigans journey to Mars.

The game was comprised of several Flash modules (cut-scenes and games). Multidmedia’s Zinc was used to package this as a desktop application.

Avoiding falling meteors on Mars

26Dec

Playground Discovery

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Playground Discovery by AT KidSystems featured a loveable robot named Cosmo. Cosmo led kids around through various activities as they popped bubbles, flew around in a jetpack, and jumped on springboards.

popping bubbles with Cosmo

flying around in a jetpack with Cosmo

The action was driven via a hardware device they called “Mission Control” which featured 4 large pressure sensitive buttons, and a microphone used for volume detection to encourage kids to yell and cause an action to happen.

the "mission control" device

AT KidSystems wrote a Director Xtra that we at 360KID used to take advantage of the hardware piece. As was common to do at the time, the game was written in Flash, and wrapped in a Macromedia Director shell. The shell handled writing to databases for gameplay analytics, hardware control, login/logout, and loading the Flash based game modules.

The game was geared towards kids with learning disabilities and for parents to monitor the kids gameplay.

28Nov

Bizkidz

Or should I say….BIZKIDZ.COM! The last site I worked on at 360KID finally went live (and out of beta even)! Its been a long time coming, I think we started a year and a couple months ago? I’ve since moved on and taken a new position at a video search company called Digitalsmiths here in RTP. The reasons are numerous, though 360KID is still an awesome company, but I just had to move on to new challenges and other people to learn from.

Anyway, where was I? So BIZKIDZ.COM is a site for kids to go and set up a storefront, and sell actual product from real online retailers. Lots of retailers in fact, at least like 400 of em last I checked. The idea was to create a virtual lemonade stand of sorts. As a child with an account, you’d populate your store with products and decorations, and send links to family and friends. If they buy anything through the store, the account holder gets commission!

It’s pretty cool – I ended up doing most of the front end. We got some help from a great contractor – Clint Little, and J2 Interactive did our server side architecture. What was great was that I got to touch every part of the project – I did 99% of the Flex (sorry Clint, but those initial designs we had you work on, I had to do them over when the client changed their mind, oh well….great job though!), and maybe 5% of the server side stuff, and most of the HTML. And of course our talented art team at 360KID did some wonderful designs and illustrations.

I got a lot of Flex training on this, how to make a Flex application NOT look like a Flex application – all in all I think it was a job well done – and if I know BIZKIDZ, they’ll be continuing developing their site with 360KID to make it even better than we imagined at the beginning.

20May

Budget Hero

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We just launched a new application at 360KID! I wish I could say I did all of it, or even most of it, but I did step in to help a lot during the final stages – just so I can say I took all the credit from the project’s real programmer Clint Little. I have a few Flex projects under my belt now, and they all look fantastic compared to most of the ones I’ve seen out there. This one is no exception thanks to the great animation and illustration my company does. I look forward to launching more and more Flex applications that have a fun look and feel. We’re so close to launching our other projects, I’d love to show them since I was the main developer – but this one is another one to be proud of regardless of who did it.

This game called Budget Hero was developed for American Public Media, and allows you to play cards to adjust the federal budget and see if you can balance it. Also allowing you to earn badges, you can see if you’re also doing your part to maintain the military, health care, etc. It’s up to you to make sure the stuff you think is important doesn’t wither away and STILL maintain the budget.

Click to Play Budget Hero

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