The soon to launch mini-site allows users to navigate a map of downtown Chicago and the surrounding area that has spawned some of America’s greatest poets of the last century. When a user chooses a place of interest the map zooms into view and a narration guides the user through a rich visual experience of photographs, poet biographies, and of course the poetry itself. The music for the narrations was generously provided by Delmark Records which has recorded Chicago blues and jazz for over 50 years and the readings of the poems are wonderful to hear.

The site has a beautifully crafted feel, and the archival material in the narrated tours is outstanding.

Link: coming soon.

Detail showing the entire interactive map

Detail showing rollover animation of the Chicago Arts Center location

Detail: User begins the narrated tour of the Art Institute, each marker on the timeline represents a unique archival asset

Detail of poet Stuart Dybek’s biography. As the user passes each Marker, an icon representing the visual asset appears on the right side media gallery. At any point in the narration the user can click an icon to review the content.

Detail showing Gwendolyn Brooks “Primer for Blacks” poem

Detail showing a set of photographs

When the narration is over for each location the user can review media assets or continue to the next location in the tour or return to the main interactive map screen.

User has chosen to re-read Lisel Meuller’s biography by clicking her icon in the media gallery

We decided that was just not going to be enough, using a combination of Javascript and Flash we came up with a nifty Flash car driving around the screen chasing the user’s mouse. The entire package is very tight, usable, and fun for the end users which is how it should be.
Users choose from a variety of MINI Clubman cars and drive them all around the site.

Update: 03.06.08: It Looks like people are responding well to the campaign, check out this review from innonate.com. They’ve even posted a screencast to YouTube of a test drive!

Link: http://thrillist.scine.com/ (local testbed for the project)

Detail showing the main car selection interface

Choose your car and drive!

Detail showing how the cars show up on screen

The project pushed aesthetic and technical boundaries as we created a highly functional and custom content management system (CMS) for wild(child). With this system wild(child) is able to manipulate all the content in the Flash movie, upload new movies, update editors, enter new press articles, keep contact information up to date. Highly functional and branded the CMS suite is also easy to use which means Producers at wild(child) can quickly update site content to keep up with the often hectic pace their industry demands.

There is also an extensive client login / project retrieval system that was developed to run in tandem with the site, keeping their clients updated as their projects progress. But you can’t view that part of the site until you are a client of theirs; do you have a project that requires the finesse of their amazing lineup of editors?

Link: http://wildchildpost.com/

The tour combines efficient interface architecture with a rich collection of content designed to be non-intrusive and flexible to the user, ultimately creating a tour that allows visitors to feel that they can immerse themselves in the murals rather than feel “captive” by the device.

This is one of the first handheld museum tours to harness the potential of the new generation of robust portable media devices like the Nokia N800. The tour allows for interactivity and delivery of video, photos and audio that before now could not be delivered without a full-fledged computer and web browser.

Sourcelab once again enlisted the coding, animation, and technical expertise of Scine to produce the Flash application that ran on the Nokia device. This was Scine’s first ‘offline’ mobile application. Many technical challenges were presented as the implementation of the Flash player on the Nokia had some shortcomings.

We developed an online version of the application, it is shown here to give an idea of the experience but pales in comparison to actually interacting with the device itself in front of the Diego Rivera murals. All media files were located on the device itself so we had a lot of flexibility in creating large animations and including large videos which load relatively slow when seen in its online incarnation. Read more to see more images of the application.

Link: http://sourcelab.us/riveracourt/ (note: slow to load, shown only for reference)

Detail: Language Selection