David Emery Online

I don't really do web design so much any more - I firmly have a marketing hat on these days (and it's a pretty snazzy hat, let me tell you...).

Below is an archive of previous sites I've worked on.

For the Super Furry Animals we ran a month long campaign building up to the release of the their new album – ‘Dark Days / Light Years’ – direct from their website. Each day we put up a new video episode that they shot from their studio while they were recording – these weren’t throw-away little clips, as most were 15-20mins long and featured little snippets of the new tracks as they were recorded.

The culmination of the build-up was the simultaneous direct digital release of the album (you could buy MP3s or a bundle of MP3s combined with a pre-order of the CD which came out 3 weeks later) with a live streamed gig where they performed the whole album start to finish from their studio.

From a web-dev point of view the site was relatively simple, although it did feature a couple of interesting bits of polish – the day-by-day videos were scaled (via the power of JavaScript) so that they would keep their aspect ratio but be as large as possible on the screen, with the other page elements (navigation, countdown to the album release and a couple of other things) shifting to fit. Also, the band wanted the day-by-day videos streaming on a loop – we didn’t really want to do them as ‘real’ streaming as that would be too costly, so we faked it using on demand flash video and time-stamps so that everyone who went to the page at the same time would pick up the episode at the same point.