Wallop
Update 9.28.06: Holy crap...Okay Samurai won 8 awards out of 20 in Wallop's "top mod" launch contest! The angry bunny was also mentioned in a BusinessWeek review, explaining, "First, I bought an animated bunny that gets angry when you mouse over him. Kudos to whoever designed him; he is adorable. Then I set him as my background. Periodically, the furious rabbit jumped into the background of my page and then disappeared. I squealed with delight." However, then the reviewer talks about how it can get annoying real fast. (Oh well, at least I got a squeal of delight.)
Wallop is a flash-based social networking site that just launched today as a venture capital spinoff from Microsoft. It's an interesting experiment in information design, combining blogs, photos, music, friends, and more. A few months ago, I was asked to create some stuff for the launch. That led to the development of a handful of mods, which are little flash applications that users can buy with micropayments to spruce up their homepages. OKSMM contributions include animated characters, short looping background movies, and a mini playable piano. The overall Wallop interface is visually rich and intuitive, creating a unique and engaging experience. The way they integrate music is probably my favorite part of the system...users can drag and drop songs as virtual objects to listen to, post, share, comment on and more. Anyway, this was a fun project to be involved with in a small way, and it should be interesting to watch how things evolve from here.
Monday, September 25 at 9:00 PM
250 Rupees Were Never So Well Spent
I pre-ordered the Wii with Zelda today at the Nintendo World store downtown. November 19th can't come soon enough.
Saturday, September 16 at 4:39 PM
Coming Soon in 2006 From Okay Samurai
"I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life." -Miles Davis
With that same sentiment, there are several personal projects I'm currently playing around with. More often than not, only a few make it past the sketchbook stage, but I'm hopeful that most of these will be finished by the end of the year. They're just fun little distractions that keep my short attention span happily content. Poesia Per Acoustica is an acoustic guitar + typography motion graphics piece that will attempt to mix Gnarls Barkley and Nelly Furtado into one song. Also slowly coming together is a short film/article for the Favorite Website Awards that plays like an okaydave DVD extra; a behind-the-scenes look at how the portfolio was created, including some footage and prototypes that didn't make it into the final version. An interactive Christmas Card is something I've wanted to do for a while...it will probably involve a snow globe, music, and penguins. An updated movie archive of all 43 OKSMM videos would be a cool little internal update as well, allowing visitors to find, play, and/or download anything in one place instead of jumping around multiple pages on YouTube or Google Video. Stay tuned...
Tuesday, September 12 at 6:19 PM
Monday, September 11 at 5:58 PM
Everyone has a story worth sharing about September 11, 2001. Most of you have probably seen it already, but this is mine.
Sunday, September 10 at 9:00 PM
Sketchbook 9.4.06: Purple
Sunday, September 3 at 9:00 PM
Illustration of "doom" for September's Word It at Speak Up. Click for a hi-res version.
Saturday, September 2 at 2:21 PM
Okay Samurai Multimedia is Dave Werner's personal site. I'm currently working at Minor Studios in San Francisco. Thanks for visiting! (more...)
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