Gareth Jones

Last month I received a phone call from a recruitment agent asking if I’d be interested in working on a contract. I politely declined and said that I much preferred to freelance due to the unmatched level of freedom that it allowed. She then replied that it was for the BBC at MediaCityUK… how could anyone refuse that? So I went for an interview on the 14th, received a congratulatory phone call on the 15th and was given a starting date of the 28th.

I’ve been there for two weeks now, working on some very exciting projects in the Future Media and Technology department. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to discuss the work at all for obvious reasons but I just wanted to post something to explain why my freelancing output may be a little lacking for the next few months!

A few years ago I was commissioned by Music Teachers to develop personalised, animated greetings cards for their users. With Andy Quick providing the graphics, four cards were made in all as well as the supporting application which allowed users to create and personalise the cards in the first place. As you’d expect, recipients were notified of the cards by automated email and were also able to send their own in response.

I had forgotten all about the project until I received a related enquiry last week, so here are some screens:

My latest BFIG project is an application that allows parents to send personalised messages to their children from Santa, again on behalf of a large UK greeting card company.

Parents upload a photo of their child and enter information such as name, age, where they live and what they want for Christmas and a video is generated that shows Santa consulting his Naughty or Nice book which contains the child’s bio as well as their Christmas wish-list.

I developed the application in its entirety, working from nothing more than a flow diagram and few basic graphical mock-ups.

I’ve just finished developing Quak Avatar Creator. This little application allows webmasters to provide their users with a great way to create high quality avatars with a consistent look and feel.

The screenshots below show the app with some example graphics supplied by Andy Quick, but the point of the app is that it allows website owners to quickly and easily replace those graphics with their own so that the avatars that users create match their website’s look and feel, whether that be cartoon graphics, photo-realistic graphics or whatever.

Here are some key points:

• The avatar can be exported both to an image and to a database.
• For image exports, both the crop area and scale of the resulting image can easily be configured to generate images of any size and shape – ideal whether used for full-screen profile pages, forum icons or anything else.
• Webmasters can easily add new categories i.e pets, make-up etc.
• Webmasters can also pass settings to the app to force it to default to either gender (for instance in cases where the gender of a logged in user is already known) or they can let the user select their gender before getting started.
• If no previous avatar is found in the database or if database saving has been disabled, the app will randomly generate an avatar for the user to edit as a starting point.

To play with the app please click here.

Please note that for demonstration purposes the app has been set to offer your avatar for download. This setting can easily be disabled when the app is deployed on your website.

If you’d like to buy the app or would like to discuss the provision of new avatar graphics to match your website, please get in touch.

Another project I have just completed for BFIG is that of a video greetings service for a well-known greetings card company here in the UK.

The application allows users to either record a personalised message via webcam or to upload a video they have on their computer. A QR code is generated with the video’s location, and both the video itself and the QR code are then passed to BFIG’s back-end system for eventual insertion into a physical greeting card.

Again I worked from supplied designs, converting the graphics into vector form before developing the front-end Flash application.

This is a really exciting project that is going to change personal greetings cards forever!

I’ve just finished work on an interactive prospectus that was commissioned by BFIG.

It’s a Flash-based prospectus that allows students to learn about the many exciting opportunities available at the college through an interactive, media-rich interface. Some of its features include:

• detailed course information
• teacher and student interviews
• image galleries

My responsibilities included developing the application and reproducing the graphics supplied by BFIG in vector form. The content was supplied by the college itself.

Mononas is a South American portal for girls aged 9-16 which was commissioned by iPublicity.

My brief on this was pretty minimal and specific requirements were limited only to the use of certain colours, songs and the logo. The portal structure, breakdown, content, features and functionality is all my work while the graphics were all once again provided by Andy Quick, apart from the character graphics which were supplied by iPublicity.

The Mononas are a group of stylised South American girls who act as role models for kids, with healthy interests in education, healthy living, the environment, fashion and animals.

The Mononas portal is broken down into separate islands, each with its own purpose or theme:

• A home island allows users to customise their avatar and play dress-up games, while a built-in messaging system allows them to communicate with each other in a safe environment without sharing personal information like email addresses.
• A school island provides the means for users to earn points by answering questions on maths, languages, geography and general knowledge.
• A funfair island allows users to earn points by playing games that require quick reflexes and skill.
• A mall island provides learners with different stores in which they can spend these points to buy clothing, accessories and pets for their online avatars.
• A studio island allows them to play art- and music-themed games as well as create their own masterpieces to share online. They can also watch video content.
• A beach island provides games based on the environment.

There are several plans for further expansion in the near future, including tying the site to real-life Mononas dolls which are going on sale in certain parts of South America shortly.

I was commissioned to develop 5 SMS quizzes for a client in Mexico. These quizzes would ask the user a number of questions before asking them for their mobile number so that it could provide them with its response. Of course this is just a ruze to be able to send a premium text message, so the user also needs to enter a confirmation PIN number (which they get for free) before they receive the billed messages.

The quizes read their questions from an XML file before randomising the order of the answers to provide more of a challenge for repeat players. Of course usernames like the ones on some of these screens cannot be obtained from just a mobile number so where do they come from? They’re actually randomly generated and are designed to encourage participation. The list updates at random intervals for added realism.

The SMS communications is handled by mBill and the graphics were all provided by Andy Quick.

Secret Projects was commissioned by Fyza Hashim at FYHK8082. The brief was to convert Fyza’s PSD designs and choreography into a Flash website.

The site was designed for Joseph Katsaros, an accomplished music composer who has worked on a number of popular American TV programmes and Hollywood movies. The home screen displays a music composer’s desk and equipment and clicking around the navigation zooms in on the relevant areas of the room before transitioning to another screen that either displays more information or features some kind of interactivity.

The work screen displays a number of movie posters that Joey has been involved with on a billboard. The billboard displays 10 posters at a time with next and previous buttons allowing navigation between the different pages. Implementing this screen in Flash 8 was quite a challenge because for reasons known only to Adobe, Flash 8 doesn’t anti-aliase dynamically-loaded images and the randomised rotation of the images resulted in some unsightly jaggies. A potential workaround had been to take the rotation off and just play with the positioning, but Fyza felt too much of the randomness was lost with this method so instead I implemented a hack that made use of Flash’s BitmapData class and the fact that Flash can anti-aliase bitmap data quite happily. Such a procedure would have resulted in significant performance hits if the bitmaps were large, but thankfully they were small enough on this screen for the hack to deliver the desired effect without impacting performance at all.

The reel screen plays a video of all the different movies that Joey has worked on. This is an FLV that is streamed from the server.

The media screen is a music player that allows the user to not only navigate between the tracks with the controls on the bottom, but also by clicking on the keyboard’s keys. The current track is also displayed on the keyboard by way of a slight glow on the appropriate key.

The site is completely driven by XML to allow easy updating and maintenance which will allow Joseph to add new movie posters and audio tracks whenever he wants.

Screenshots removed by request.

Quak Wordsearch is an application that allows you to play a different wordsearch game every time you view it. Whenever you load the game it selects at random from a list of words that you have specified and places these words on the grid in random locations.

When specifying a list of words for the game to use, you can also specify the title and grid size for that list.

The application also allows end-users to create their own games by clicking on the Make your own button and filling in the three fields for title, grid size and words list. A new game will be generated at random with those parameters.

Once a game has been created, it can be played either online or it can be printed out and played in the traditional way with a pen and paper.

Click here to use the wordsearch.

Want this game on your website for free? Follow these 3 simple steps:

1. Post a comment below.
2. Send me a message saying you’d like the game on your website – and remember to include a link to your site!
3. If your site meets the requirements I will email the game to the email address you used in step 2 – so make sure you use a valid address!