Thomson – Holiday Open Day
Client: Thomson / TUI
Agency: BMB Agency
Technology: Flash, ActionScript 3, JSON, Responsive
Thomson / TUI needed to let customers know just how great their product packages and range really are. BMB had the idea of a Holiday Open Day. This is where a customer can “test drive” a holiday through an immersive first-person video experience. The user can pick activities as they go through the experience and are shown holiday results that match once complete.
The site has been nominated for the Drum Digital awards for the travel & leisure category, a finalist in the Travolution Awards for ‘Best Content Marketing’ and has been awarded ‘Mobile Site of the Day’ by the FWA.
Role: I was responsible for the Flash build while another team focussed on the HTML build for mobile. Initially Flash was planned as a temporary measure for speed but soon became the superior option for desktop and is still being served.
The site is dynamically driven by a JSON data feed. Everything from button colour, copy, images, etc, is all served through the feed. Just one SWF controls the lot. Currently there are three languages being feed through; EN, DE and NL. All having their own copy, imagery and colourscheme.
A sequenced loading system has been used to limit preloading the video and keep interruption of the experience to a minimum (if at all). Each time a video is playing, the next two hotspot videos are loaded in. Once these are loaded in the two fullscreen video options are buffered. Then once a pathway is chosen the unused video is discarded and preloading is repeated for the next decision point. Bandwidth is also tested during the preloader to pick an appropriate bitrate for the video.
One issue I needed to resolve was the bitmap ripple effect. Initially I was drawing the last frame of the video and applying the effect to that. But I soon noticed any resolution over 1280×720 the bitmap would sometimes fail to draw or the ripple effect couldn’t function. To resolve this I split the screen in half and now draw two bitmaps and apply one ripple to each.
To allow for various desktop resolutions the build is responsive. It can go as low as 800×600 and as large as you like. Please see screenshots in the gallery below.
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