Emeli Sandé – Our Version of Events Number 1

We recently worked on the iTunes LP for Emeli Sandé’s “Our Version of Events” album, and great news, it’s number 1 in the UK album charts. Congratulations to Emeli and Virgin Records.

Pink Floyd iTunes LPs

We’ve just finished developing iTunes LPs for almost all of the Pink Floyd studio album catalogue. Three of the albums – Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall – were given special treatment, and a series of visuals developed for them. They’re available on the iTunes Music store here.

All of the deluxe LPs feature Memorabilia sections, which build upon the work done for Papa vs Pretty, allowing you to zoom in and out of assorted Pink Floyd historical items.

Each deluxe LP also feature ‘Marbles’ – as each physical equivalent box set product came with a custom designed marble, the challenge was to incorporate this into the digital LP somehow. The Marbles visual is an area of optical distortion that warps the underlying image, so it looks as if marbles are rolling across the screen. it’s all done in canvas (webGL isn’t an option in LPs, yet), the challenge was to make it run well, so it’s highly optimised in what it does. We’ll try and write a more detailed post about this optical distortion at a later date.

Wish You Were Here featured a water ripples effect, again done using canvas.

The Wall is our first public use of the Three.js library, which powered the 3D brick wall constructed for use on the menus.

Papa Vs Pretty

We were asked to develop an iTunes LP for Australian band Papa Vs Pretty. The singer (Tom) had assembled a large scale collection of drawings, and sketches, that told a whole story along an irregular arc. The hope was to somehow work this massive image into the 1280x720px fixed dimensions of the iTunes LP. The original image was 20,000px across by about 10,000px high. Instead of cropping out selected areas and using those as backgrounds, we instead developed something to traverse across the whole image as a seamless whole, overlaying song/context specific information depending on current location. similar, in some limited respects to Google/Bing Maps. There’s a video of it in action here – they’ve dissolved between songs to give more of a taste to the album, but the LP itself traverses without any such fades. Hats off to Tom, and the EMI AU team for wanting to do something so interesting and different.

deadmau5 LP, referenced by Web Audio API

a while back (feels ages ago now), we developed the deadmau5 iTunes LP. There’s a blog post about it earlier. Thrilled to see it used an an example use case for the Google derived Web Audio API. Web Audio, and Mozilla’s audioData are two specs we’ve been experimenting with, and hopefully we’ll have something to show soon.