Bluish

Award winning digital boutique, specialising in the music industry

Working with my partner, we designed, developed and delivered 100s of projects using cutting edge tools across the web and CD-ROM.

Bluish's clients

We were trusted by some of the biggest brands on the planet.

Amaze (Liverpool)

Arni & Kinski

Bluepet

Capitol Records

Cartmell Holdings

Co3i

Codix

Eidos Interactive

EMI Records

Finlay Cowan

Future Publishing

NABS

Nestlé

Organics Direct

Peter Ashworth

Science Photo Library

Star Alliance

Stephen Jones Millinery

Storm Thorgerson

StormStudios Design

The Organic Delivery Company

Warner Bros. Music

Warner Bros. Pictures

Yeo Valley Organic


Agencies:

APL

EuroRSCG

James Walter Thompson (JWT)

Wunderman Cato Johnson

Notable Music Projects

We won our clients awards…

Pink Floyd

2002 BT Digital Music Award - Best Promotional Campaign

Robbie Williams

2003 BT Digital Music Award - Best Innovation*
2004 Apple Design Award - Best QuickTime: Promotion
2005 BT Digital Music Award - Best Promotional Campaign

The Flaming Lips

2003 Webby Award - Best Music Site (Judges panels)
2003 Webby Award - Best Music Site (People’s vote)
2003 Time Magazine - Top 50 Websites

Hell is for Heroes

2003 BT Digital Music Award - Best Innovation*

* Award given to both projects

Music

We worked directly with a lot of artists…

Aalacho

Beth Orton

Blonde Redhead

David Bowie

David Gilmour

Doves

Ed Harcourt

El Presidente

Fightstar

Hell is for Heroes

Iron Maiden

Jessica Lauren

John Cale

Josh Groban

Kate Bush

LCD Soundsystem

Sigur Rós

Starsailor

The Beastie Boys

The Blockheads

The Concretes

The Magic Numbers

The Vines

Movies

The Matrix was particularly interesting as it involved creating a bespoke cryptographic system to protect hidden media in the site from being discovered by hackers; life imitating art.

Dreamcatcher

The Animatrix

The Last Samurai

The Matrix

The Matrix Reloaded

The Matrix Revolutions

From the archives…

2000 Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here

Created for shockwave.com, Macromedia’s showcase site, it was both an homage to Syd Barrett and a showcase for Flash 2.0, which had yet to gain video playback features.

Back in 2000, broadband was rare, everyone was still on dial up and computers maybe had 256 megabytes of RAM. Video on the internet was still some way off and everything took an age to download.

Nevertheless, Storm Thorgerson had assumed he was making a short film and had already begun shooting video at various locations and he wanted to use it. For some scenes we used Finlay Cowan’s original storyboards, creating vector versions that Flash could animate. For the video, I devised a way to scan every frame of video and convert it to vectors using Adobe Streamline and build a frame sequence in Flash’s timeline. We would then sit there for hours, tweaking and tuning every frame to save precious bytes to ensure smooth playback. The border was used to help preload upcoming animations, but took on a narrative of its own.

The final movie was too large to be held in RAM, so had to be broken down into chunks to allow dynaimc loading during playback on the user’s machine. Even so, it could take as much as 30 minutes to download the 5.7MB on a 56k modem, though back then everyone was used to waiting.

It was downloaded and viewed over 2 million times, and stayed as ‘Shockwave of the day’ for two months.

Gallery

A dump of image files from Bluish's old website

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