Bluish

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 dynamic 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.