Boffswana

Project: Optus Whale Song
Client: Optus
Agency: M&C Saatchi, Mark

www.optuswhalesong.com.au

Overview
Boffswana enjoyed collarborating with M&C Saatchi and Mark for their client Optus and their new brand campaign Whale Song.

Showing off skills in Realtime Papervision3D in Flash we were responsible for the creation of the underwater environment including the modelling, texturing and animation of the whale as well as the creation of the environment it lives in.

Boffswana created the interface to ‘communicate’ with the whale. By pressing various keys on the keyboard, orchestral music is played through the underwater speakers creating attraction points within the environment that the whale will want to swim too. The attractiveness of these points in the environment to the whale varies with user’s activity on the keyboard. The whale has a series of movements and levels of activity that are relative to the intensity of the user’s interaction with the keyboard and the composing of music for the whale.

Technical Achievements
The Whale environment was an attempt to create a simulation of the whale and its environment that was a realistic as possible. The user doesn’t directly control the whale, rather he/she can manipulate the environment by creating points of interest, by means of the speakers. The interest points alter where the whale is interested in going, altering its intended path. Also, once reaching the speaker points, the whale can pause and arch up towards the speaker, before moving on. The technical challenges were trying to get good performance from the Papervision 3D engine while incorporating several animated textures and a complex animated 3D mesh over a large movie size. There were some heavy modifications made to some of the Papervision code to create seamlessly merged mesh animations to simulate the range of whale motion, the particle field was also custom built and the background was an innovative 2d solution.