Julian Opie dot com launched

julianopie.comJulian Opie's new website, julianopie.com has been a while in the making and has incorporated a whole host of fresh (for me at least) techniques. But I think that this makes it a very different and exciting site.

The main objectives were to have something very different that made you play with the site, have a completely unique experience. At the same time I was determined that the site would be based on a CMS - be infinitely expandable so it could incorporate the thousands of artworks that Julian has made. It also had to work for non-flash browsers, each page should have a unique URL and be able to be crawled by search engines.

On the front end we've used stop frame animation with a full size set to make all the objects you see and interact with. Dave Farnham (an artist and special effects guru) made the video come alive in After Effects, helped with the set building and more. The After Effects side of things got fairly complex, with more masks, alpha channels and craziness than you'd believe.

On the technical side the site uses Drupal for the backend, SWFObject to display the flash SWFAddress to deeplink and the DrupalSite framwork, AMFPHP and the Services module to hook up the AS3 and PHP.

I'll get into more depth on the techniques sometime soon.