New Life

Bristol studio Fiasco Design explains how it approached a new way of telling stories online, as part of a week-long, in-house project

- Nick Lewis, Marjorie Newnham, & Ben Marsh

BRIEF

A few members of the Fiasco Design team were given a week away from client work after a particularly busy period to flex their creative muscles and design something entirely for themselves. With the aim of creating something original in the digital space, they set themselves a brief of applying simple web-based technologies and 3D animation to bring a short story to life online.

CLOSE UP

(1) The user is guided through the story following interactive hotspots. These are timed to appear after an animation has finished playing or a snippet of text has been revealed. (2) We were able to set the pace of the storytelling by controlling the speed at which text animates into place and using audio cues, something that we spent quite a long time finessing. We wanted to emulate the use of silence and pauses that you would typically find in spoken word. (3) We used a simple progress bar to show the user how far they are through the story. We had initially intended for this to be interactive but had to strip this functionality out due to the project’s time constraints. (4) Each of the completed animations run as MP4s in the background of the site. (5) We overlaid rain and particle effects using JavaScript. This ensures there is always some form of looping movement on the screen when each of the videos ends.

Client work may be necessary to pay the bills but every now and again you need to do something a bit different to stretch your creative muscles and get a fresh perspective on your work. That’s exactly what award-winning Bristol studio Fiasco Design was aiming for during a “mini creative sabbatical” last year that spread over five working days.