Behind the scenes at Vivid Image

WD: When working on the project, how much interaction was there between the agency and the client? Did Vivid Image have to give the client regular updates on progress?
DK: This was an important portfolio piece for us, so I made sure I was the first point of contact for keeping Idea Generation up to date. As well as fortnightly progress reports, I was on the phone regularly getting amendments on the designs.

WD: Did Vivid Image design the site from the ground up? Or did the client provide design assets to work with?
DK: VI started from scratch and, using a combination of our own photos, sketches and graphic design and Flash elements, we built up the homepage design.

WD: How big was the team working on the project, and what were their roles?
DK: A team of six men put the production sides together under my supervision at each stage. The group was only complete with Vivid Image’s ever-meticulous project manager Jenny Yeung taking the reins of the process. The project’s art director Rod Santos was the one coming up with the interface layouts, and ensured the vast ideas that our brainstorming sessions produced could become live. Dave Freeman and fellow motion graphics designer Al Gotsis were in charge of most of the moving elements and 3D concept. The credit for illustration aspects of the site should go to Matt Kempton. The ‘mechaniser’ of the system that feeds the pages with searchable data was our head of development, James Mitchell. And finally, providing the all-important bridge between creative concept and technical solutions, Peter Halasz was busy with visual development of the project.

WD: Flash is the core technology throughout the Vauxhall site, which uses a lot of hi-res imagery. How did this affect the design and development of the project?
DK: Well, it affected the development in almost every possible way. We had to find a workaround for pretty much every initial solution. The site is built of mostly pixel-based graphical elements, which are, in general, the biggest enemy of loading times and the ability of applying sophisticated dynamic effects. It contains more than 50 animations and most of them interact with the car as it goes around the map. Around half of these animations are coming from external software and they take time to load. Also, if all the animations and effects were not properly controlled, the site would not function at all because of its processing requirements. Without the huge effort that we put in optimisation and unique solutions, this website wouldn’t have come alive.
We were really conscious about the speed of the site, and it became a genuine struggle between what was put in and what had to be left out. Since then, one of the things we’ve learnt is that we need to work on the technology behind Flash sites to ensure that ease of use is not compromised. A project with video-streaming company Vusion had us working on a player that could stream with almost no buffering time at all. I think it’s our job as creatives to constantly push our tools to the limits. Vauxhall was really supportive of this, and allowed us to experiment with everything, pushing things to the max within the time we had.

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