Check out this Chrome experiment at bravestman.com on your mobile phone or tablet.
This Mobile Chrome experiment features musician Bobby Womack’s title track ‘The Bravest Man in the Universe’ and demonstrates the amazing possibilities of mobile browsers.
We wanted to combine a technology showcase of Chrome for Android’s capabilities with a mainstream music appeal to increase the reach of the project and change people’s performance expectations of the mobile web.
Working with Bobby Womack and XL Recordings gave us a great story to build an experience upon. To bring the experience to life visually, we developed a distinct visual style that was beautiful, yet built with performance in mind.
Our story narrative and user interactions were created hand in hand to support each other. The interaction were built to take advantage of the multi touch input of the mobile devices. The user is able to tap, pinch and drag various black holes, rotate and navigate an asteroid field, planets and stars throughout their journey, all via simple gestures.
From a technical standpoint, the project was a great learning process. Our challenges included breaking down what tasks were processor intensive and how we could optimize the animation. In the end, we used a mix of canvas rendering, DOM elements, CSS animations and transitions and JavaScript to get the best results.
To make all of this come together we built a custom workflow, that allowed us to animate the scenes in a timeline-based animation editor and export the animation into CSS, which was then processed through custom scripts.
Client: Google Chrome / XL Records
Agency: B-reel
Roll: Art direction / animation
(full credit list coming soon)