julianopie.com is a new site for the artist Julian Opie using Drupal 6. The site uses Flash throughout, incorporating complex animations. It showcases thousands of artworks and exhibitions.
The site was built with a Flash front end, using Services and AMFPHP to interact with the Drupal backend. SWFObject displays the flash, SWFAddress ensures that each page has a unique URL. The Flash front end incorporates a large amount of stop-frame animation and AS3 code to tie it all together. After Effects was used to prepare the animations for flash.
Julian Opie is an internationally renowned artist and as such has a big web audience, he was keen that the new site was very different from anything he'd seen before. It made sense to use Flash to build the site as it would allow complete freedom to design the site with an immersive other-world feel.
The Drupal back end means that there is an HTML alternative page for every Flash page which is great for SEO and mobile browsers, SWFAddress is used to ensure that the unique URLs for any Flash/HTML page is the same.
The Services module is used throughout supplying the Flash front end with views and nodes to display. A few custom service modules fill in some gaps, these are very easy to create - the whole Services thing using AMFPHP is great and works very fast.
The whole still life scene at the front end of the website was built, life size, in the studio. Each individual element was animated using stop-frame animation with a digital stills camera. The zoom into the book was done in the same way using a custom rig and stop-frame animation. After Effects was used to piece together the animations and alpha-mask them back into the scene.
Design - Julian Opie / Alistair McClymont
Coding and Animation - Alistair McClymont
After Effects and Animation - Dave Farnham
Comments
Fantastic work. One of the
Fantastic work. One of the best Flash+Drupal integrations I've seen so far.