The Random Lines uses Adobe Flash Player 9.
I'm Ashim D'Silva. I make shiny things that do stuff on the Internet.
Here's a whole bunch of stuff I've worked on:
Shaheen Thaha
Shaheen is an immensely talented photographer. From his technical/studio roots, he's grown, experimented and gone where his camera has taken him: it goes without saying, his range is vast and his specialities many. So, given the opportunity to build his online folio, I jumped to it.
Portfolios are one of my favourite site types to design: the understated art of getting out of the way and letting your content do what it's meant to. I put in as little as I could into this site, wanting the images to flow about and do a little dance.
Owl Of Eden
Selling online has, without a doubt, become incredibly easy. Classically, with the gateway to be setup and banks to be dealt with, it meant some investment and understanding of the process and I stayed clear away. The magic happens, especially for smaller businesses, with paypal. Owl Of Eden needed to sell online, and although you use the site for all the shopping, as soon as you check out, you're led away to paypal, which takes care of everything: safe, secure, and big-company responsible.
This being my first cart, I wanted to think it through carefully and use all the responsiveness that I had at my disposal with Flash. Everything interlinks well so, as a shopper, you have full control over your cart, and it responds to you instantly without breaking up your shopping process.
The cart is saved to local storage every click, so it's there when you return, and feedback within the product text reminds you of products already in your cart.
As always, in the back is a file-system based, truly grassroots level CMS, and the press section works on Wordpress.
Nathaniel School
Jason Zachariah, a friend of mine from high school, and possibly one of the best keyboardists India has, decided to start a music school. In the truest, most literal sense, music is in his blood, going back generations. He's got all the best musicians he knows together (and this is a Who's who of Indian Rock), and the school is up and running. He got me to help out with the website, and although I began only intending on designing it and handling that over, I got more involved, and I've now done something I never would have expected: made a complete HTML website.
That being said, this is my first, and even getting it to validate was quite exciting. But the thing functions, and it taught me HTML (which I now have a rough appreciation for), and introduced me to jQuery, which ever website should use.
Fantastic first experience, and I'm definitely looking at doing more HTML stuff in the future.
Leviathan
Leviathan is a forward thinking robotics design and manufacturing company which is the kind of industry that turns any of us into little boys looking at the big shiny robot with glee and intrigue. On top of that they wanted a website that looked specy but was, at the same time, usable and simple. Most importantly though, it had to seem technologically 'futuristic'!
The simple shapes and large button area try to mimic a touch screen interface feel and we threw in gratuitous amounts of subtle 3D panning and sliding as if the whole thing was floating in front of you in real 3D. I tested doing the panning following your face, using facial tracking - this worked, but efficiency was a large concern and alchemy was a bit out of reach considering deadlines/costs.
I'd love to see how this functions on a touch screen anyway.
In the back, hidden away from all the shinyness, is a very powerful XML based control system for content. It's based around the nine panels and allows different kinds of panels to be created, locations and sizes set, and links to pages connected. It's a fairly vast amount of possibilities stemming from a very modular build.
The Artist
PDG Corporation is a large development company in Melbourne, and they got Bliss Media to develop two websites for their two upcoming apartment buildings: The Artist and Zen Harmony. Each had their own character and were not simply buildings. They were individually designed by two designers at Bliss, and I had the job of putting them both together on a 6 week crunch deadline.
This is the Artist: sophisticated, state-of-the-art, elegant and stylish. The home of the avant garde artist, featurring a studio and an organic garden no less. The site exhudes simplicity in style and movement.
Zen Harmony
PDG Corporation is a large development company in Melbourne, and they got Bliss Media to develop two websites for their two upcoming apartment buildings: The Artist and Zen Harmony. Each had their own character and were not simply buildings. They were individually designed by two designers at Bliss, and I had the job of putting them both together on a 6 week crunch deadline.
Zen Harmony is about peace, familiarity and finding yourself: a functional paradise. The site uses large images and the pragmatism of division and lines in almost a Zen garden way.
Nissan
After months of production, Nissan Australia is finally live. Brian O'Neill was behind the Alfresco wheel again so the teething with Nissan Finance paid off. Things turned out well and the site has a lot of features tied very closely with the CMS allowing Nissan incredible control over their website; something they're greatly appreciative off.
The showcase features a comparator for price, fuel economy and seating which dynamically adjusts for values and is modular and extendible.
XZone
This has been my most adventurous project so far. It is a new field and a relatively new sport in India so we wanted to show users the world through the eyes of someone on the field.
What resulted was a 3D panorama of the field driven by the fantastic Papervision 3D engine. The interface and content is simple with all the focus on the field.
It's been a good long ride for this one, and I got to experiment with a lot, and have a solid site come out of it.
Nissan Finance
Car manufacturing giant Nissan's Financial Services division needed a web presense. And with a lot of their international counterparts moving towards Flash for increased interactivity, they decided to take this step as well. An important part of this move was also the use of a very powerful CMS: Alfresco. Brian O'Neill was the man behind getting Alfresco working and generating XML, which I then used to build the Flash.
The site also features a Finance Estimator helping you figure out what cars you can afford, taking into account the interest, term and frequency of payment.
This job also ended up landing us the contract for Nissan's main site for Australia, which is now live and my biggest project to date.
William May
Brooklyn-born producer, director and composer William H. May got Bliss Media to develop his personal website. He is behind the Broadway adaptation of BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs among many others.
The site, run off Bliss Media's CMS, is driven entirely through XML. It also featured my first detailed use of SWFAddress, which enables back button support and bookmarking of individual pages.
Little Man
Over the last 4 weeks, I got together with the talented Alexandra Lester and James Bailey to build a flash game for a uni assignment. It's finally up after much battling and confusion. The engine is a lot more powerful than it looks, thanks to Mr. Bailey, and we did some solid stress tests on it. It's still a little iffy on Mac browsers though. Either way, its good fun, so give it a go. And this is my first complete flash game so I'm pretty excited.
The game itself involves much swinging and many a goat. It's a platformer and you spend time collecting an immense amount of food until you fall to your imminent death. There's no better way to spend five minutes.
Gabriel Lynch Band
The Gabriel Lynch Band is an exciting indie-pop band on the Melbourne Circuit. They do really energetic live shows and on the release of their new album Something like Twilight, they got me to do up their website. The center of the website here was the music and the photo shoot by Mr. James Bailey. The basic idea for the look comes from the ironic playfulness of their album When Balloon Animals Attack. It's very hand-made, quickly constructed and humanly imperfect, with a lot of heart.
The photo gallery and the music player are the main features of the site. Photographs coming from Flickr, and the music getting drawn straight off the server by PHP. Both exciting little classes to build and practically completely automated to update. All content comes from Wordpress so that's easy to edit as well and serves as a broadly effective albeit largely imprecise CMS.
Alexandra Lester and I later also designed the cover art for the album Something like Twilight.
Eleisha Gray
Eleisha Gray is a Stylist and Graphic Designer who's worked for the likes of Uncle Toby's, RACV, Myer, and a whole lot more. She's got a simple bold style and quite a subtle but vivid image. From the outset her site was to be one central image and simple navigation. All controls went right in there and the site is incredibly uncomplicated.
The site is organised by a set of PHP scripts that read folder structure and generate the contents of the site directly. Which means she simple makes folders and throws images or videos in, and the site reads over them and generates the menu by folder names and displays images from there. It's a really effective, albiet basic, CMS system and can easily be plugged into a more comprehensive system if needed.
Bliss Media
I've been a part of a real fun company called Bliss Media for the last
Here that meant two pieces for the site: the portfolio, and the studio page. The portfolio, was my first useful foray into 3D in flash. I used papervision, and a technique off Mr. Doob for creating depth of field blurring. The whole thing is driven by XML and completely dynamic and extendible. Flash then simply had to talk to Javascript to make the bottom half change. The studio page is a collage panorama of the office and shuffles the different images around to look around the main room.
Princess Pictures
Princess Pictures are behind the likes of Chris Lilly's Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes and The Way We Speak, Stuff, and more. Their website is built around an environment as twisted as their shows.
Green Layers
Green Layers is the World's Largest Alpha Video Library. They have a massive range of clips shot in incredible HD quality, pre-matted and ready to use. With the range of clips they have, and the rate at which the library grows, it was really important to give customers and way of previewing clips that showed off their possibilities and really proved you could use them in your environment. From this need, grew The Green Room.
The Green Room is a live, online video compositing Software that runs straight off your browser. It has multiple layers, each with blending options, opacity and blurring, not to mention transformation tools. You can even upload images of your own to use in multiple layers. This effectively allowed buyers to play with clips using their own backgrounds, logos and environments to mock-up a preview of their project before even buying the clips.
Winequest
Winequest believes that a true appreciation for great wine, and great food comes from the ambience you're in. So, they take you straight to the vineyard: to have have massive parties, all year round, with eclectic and diverse music to boot.
The site's homepage features countdowns to all their events is a larger than life mix of colour and movement.
Mark Seymour
Mark Seymour is an Australian musician probably best known for being the frontman and songwriter of Hunter's and Collectors, the guys behind Throw Your Arms Around Me and Holy Grail among many others.
This was my first website with Bliss Media, and the first time I firmly plugged Flash into a fully featured CMS. News, Photos, Discography and Media, all gathering content from databases and displaying in a dynamic, lively environment.
Sidera
Sidera deal in premium imported cider. The website is simple and elegant, with bold photogrpahs of the bottles, promoting their range. This website depended highly on clear but effective movement and use of depth of field.
Pocketwatch
I started writing and putting together a Graphic Novel with Ashish Avin It's on a bit of a hiatus, pushing a year now... but we started on environments and story so the images are from there. These were done using a basic 3D render from Maya as a base and over painted in Corel Painter. Someday, I can only hope, this project will see the light of day.
James Carrick
James Carrick is a photographer who really intrigues me: simple, real images and an almost painterly sense of colour and form. James was looking for a simple way to showcase his work and got me to make that happen. With portfolios I usually start with the idea that the work should be the center piece and really drive the look of the site, and the site be as incedental as possible. So the look came from wanting to break the lines formed by a regular grid of images most commonly used everywhere.
The animation on top of that was very simple; movement dividing image sets and creating shapes almost at random depending on the proportions of each image. The images are all fed in dynamically, which makes changing them incredibly easy. Because we didn't have the the resources to use a full blown CMS, we used a simple file naming system to categorise and organise the images; which seems to have turned out great.
Nirvana Films
Nirvana Films produces possibly some of the best advertising films in India. They have a diverse portfolio of great campaigns and are at pretty much the fore-front when it comes to quality. This website was an absolute pleasure to produce, and continues to be a increasinly amazing portfolio as they make new stuff.
The simple menu Our Films Speak About Us formed the basis of an incredibly distinct and clear site and took little work on my side to get it feeling right.
Random
This is a small collection of random work. It's 3D, terragen experiments, print work, logos and anything else I felt like throwing in here.
For the most part, these are self motivated, but some are parts of projects for uni or things that didn't go anywhere.
For verbal rantings visit the blog: http://randomlies.wordpress.com/
Yuyutsa
Yuyutsa is a corporate training company that broke into the exciting world of paintball. Paintball was a new sport in India and therefore an important part of the site was to help people know more about it. Yet, when we went through what there was to say, there was no better place than the Internet. So instead of re-saying everything about the sport, we wrote specifically about playing at Yuyutsa, and led on the more information elsewhere.
This meant that the site could surround more of the experience of paintball, and what better way to do that than a first person video smack in the middle. We got a hold of cameras and went played some paintball. Still photographs were by Jegan.
Prathibha
Prathibha started out in Bangalore with a great ad campaign and some really striking photography. Fisheye designed and wrote content for their website and got me to put it together. This was one of my early websites developed with editability in mind.