Back in the summer of 2006, Dreamscape Films approached us (the1stMovement) with a very unique idea: A drama-series broadcast exclusively online and furthermore, let the Internet users choose the casts. As Geert Heetebrij and Helmut Schleppi, founders of DreamScape Films, put it:

“Don’t scale the gates of Hollywood. Walk around them”

We were immediately hooked with the idea and after about a month of consultations, design and development, we launched the Interior Phase I in October 2006.

Along with that, we launched the world’s first completely open, online talent casting call for a drama series. For the next two months, hundreds of actors/actresses flocked to upload their audition videos online to The Interior YouTube group. And out of the hundreds of submissions, the top five were chosen by YouTube users and in December 2006, the 4 main actors/actresses for the drama series were casted online and off to shooting in the rainforests of Central America.

While they were in productions in rainforests, we launched Phase II of the Interior for the cast and crew to post blogs and behind the scene videos to share. And finally, after six months of preparations and productions, the first episode is available through invitation only on the Interior (http://www.theinterior.tv).

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Newsweek delcared 2007 as the Year of the Widget and fittingly so, G4 came to us to rework their existed embedded video player and further develop it into a widget that can be shared and linked to other social networking sites.

The original video player has a minimal user interface with minimal features, as you can see at the screenshot below

After a couple rounds of consultations with their in-house design team, we finalized on a new design and a list of functionalities that would include enhanced features such as “Share with a Friend”, “Embed this video player”, “Play List”, as well as the “Related Video” feature similar to what YouTube has. We delivered this enhanced video player in 2 different sizes (small, large) and 2 versions (on-site on G4tv.com with playlist, off-site) in February 07.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.g4tv.com/lv/15556″ height=”383″ width=”480″ /]

The project didn’t stop there and G4 came back and wanted to enhance the player even more to match their new redesigned official site and overall corporate branding. The new player will have a redesigned skin, the ability to not only have all the existed functionalities, but it will also be able to accomodate a vertical or horizontal play list, as well as the ability for G4TV to dynamically change the overall color of the player with an easy-to-update XML file.The large, on-site version can be seen now on the G4TV homepage and by the beginning of May 07, they will be replacing all the video players everywhere on G4TV with all the different sizes of the new video player.

Kudos to our Flash team for delivering a solid product and continued success with one of our longest standing clients.