Wild Animus
www.wildanimus.com
Objective
When Silicon Valley publishing company Too Far wanted to re-brand owner and experimental storyteller Rich Shapero's family of web sites including the Wild Animus project web site, they contacted PERSONE for recommendations about site strategy, design for the various media players involved in the site, and technical direction and expertise while integrating the many team's involved in the re-design process.
The site redesign was to play a key role in updating Rich's image and standing in the artistic community, as well as a marketing platform for his unique work which combines a book, fine art collection of art brut paintings and three audio CDs of musical collaborations with several rock and folk musicians.
Approach
We decided to base the media player designs around a Flash interface to maintain user-interactivity with the site and add animation to the pages. Because of the volume of media associated with Mr. Shapero's project, we determined the best way to minimize excess production of media files was to create an interface and integrate externally linked data with .xml technology.
We designed and built custom modules to highlight the various media involved in Rich's project. For example, we built a streaming, scrubbable mp3 player with links for his three albums, the album lyrics, and the CD's liner notes. We also designed a gallery that combined Francois Burland paintings with quotations from his novel, Wild Animus. We also built another audio player for the 9-cd audio book version of the novel.
In addition, we developed a video player that pulled videos from a database and could be used to preview videos, play them entirely, or be embedded into web pages as well as being shared via an internal form script. We worked with a North Bay company called IMA to integrate the videos and database into the site structure.
We also worked with Fathom Online, an SEO company, to integrate best practice recommendations and specific targeted solutions designed to increase the visibility of the site to search engines.
Summary
Rich Shapero and his publishing company Too Far Independent Media now have a powerful infrastructure for each of their project web sites, including a high-resolution zoom tool and Flash-enabled full-screen image viewer to promote their multiple image collections