lorem ipsum

lorem ipsum is the working title for a film in development from the same people we worked with to build Finding M.  It’s billed as an “unconventional romance” and has a lot in common with the kind of mind-bending proto-realism as films by David Lynch or David Cronenberg.  This was an interesting project to work on.  We were given fairly free creative reign within some set parameters and working from a plot synopsis and some visual references like movie posters and photography as visual inspiration.  Whereas often I will add some creative or experimental effects to a site design only to remove them later for being too extreme or experimental for the site, it seemed to me that the more experimentation I made with the design, the more the site felt complete and fit with the themes and visual style of the coming film.  As such, this site was almost like a site I would do for myself in terms of the amount of time and creativity poured into it.

We built a single page template with a series of if statements to change the reflected image on the windshield of the white limousine on the interior pages.  The images chosen were a collaborative effort — some were specific images chosen by the client and some were chosen or created by us based on images or suggestions they sent us.  Such was the process for many aspects of the site.

This site was a redesign of the previous site which was originally designed in iWeb.  One of the features of the existing site was a short teaser video in Quicktime format.  However, since it was embedded as a Quicktime .mov, I was unable to actually watch the video in Chrome on my Windows computer, and I suspected a similar case would apply to other Windows users.  After getting a larger resolution video, we re-encoded the movie into Flash Video format and used the awesome FLV Embed WordPress plugin by Yaosan Yeo.  In addition to just simplifying the process of embedding Flash video on the site, FLV Embed also enabled us to apply an overlay to the video.  Typically this is used to put a logo in the corner of the video as a way to identify the site and brand the video, but in our case, we used it to add additional effects to the video itself, to add grunge and give the impression of the image being projected onto an actual drive-in movie screen.

This is also one of the first sites for which we started adding various CSS3 techniques, applying a text shadow to links and headings (not compatible with Internet Explorer, yet), using @font-face to embed free, custom fonts, and using a mirror technique to reverse the link graphics on a mouseover purely through CSS (as opposed to using an alternate hover image).  The intent was to make the site appear surreal and dreamlike, in some cases to make it seem as though the text was emerging from obscurity.  The type we used for the main copy, in contrast, was Lucida Console — a clean, monospaced font that was intended to contrast the broken and hazy titles and links.  We’re anxious to read about the process in the director’s blog, and to see how the final cut works with the website.