I used the Friday Site exercise as an opportunity to develop the talents of my designers, and to push my creative relationship with them as artistic director. The result was three strong multimedia pieces.

Marie-Jacques wanted to push her Flash skills. Together we designed a playful visual portrait of our team, using a lot of Flash actions and vernacular imagery from our work space. MJ brought it all to life. By clicking on a series of numbers the user can activate draggable animation loops with sounds. The idea was to let users create their own audio and visual compositions. Original music was commissioned from composer Ned Bouhalassa.

Somsay found a program that animates text in Flash to explore. I wrote a text introducing the Friday site and got Ned Bouhalassa to write some music. Somsay put it all together.

With Mehdi we set up a more technical challenge. He was asked to adapt an old scholastic "multimedia" filmstrip presentation with an audio voice over into a Web experience using a SMIL interface. Visual Researcher Marc Pitre had brought forward a filmstrip on the Buffalo Jump in Alberta during the ECHO prototype and we were all excited about the possibility of giving this forgottem part of the NFB legacy a new life on the Web.

Mehdi succeeded in faithfully recreating the 18 minute, sound and image production using a file that is only 1.8 Megs. (note: I am presently trying to get ahold of a demo of the first few minutes of the slide show, and will post it here as soon as I can.)