MCI One Day is Today

The MCI One Day Is Today mini-site is one of my most favourite projects of all time. It was such a challenge to pull off and I was rewarded with winning the Advertising & Design Club of Canada Silver Award in 2005 in the Innovate Website category. There were also some positive reviews for it in the industry.

There was a television campaign which drove people to our mini-site, which itself was just a simple Flash-based video player. The site first shows an intro video which picks up from where the TV commercial stopped. From a first-person perspective we walk in to see our “host” who then presents a menu of questions for the user to choose from. Each question is answered in video by the host as the user selects them.

The complexity in all of this is to remember that this was done in 2004/5. The ability to stream video was cutting edge and we had to be very clever about how the video was put together to save precious bandwidth. We had to target 128kbps! The video player itself is driven by configuration through a number of XML files so we were able to roll out new videos which matched the content of the TV spots.

The video itself is cut quite closely to the host and we seamlessly composited the video with a static background image. You have the appearance of a full-screen of video but it is actually much smaller. The only full-screen video is during the intro which we couldn’t avoid. This was the topic of many discussions as we exceeded our bandwidth budget but not being able to tie seamlessly with the TV creative was a show stopper for the Creative Director.

The next trick was to minimise the jumpiness of the video cuts. We used morphing between scenes to seamlessly (well mostly, you can see it if you look for it) blend the host back into his static start position. It was very difficult during the video-shoot to get the host back to exactly where he had started. In order to get it right I got to be the Director for the shoot while we did the web takes. I had to make a call if the take was good enough or not and ask them to do it again. For someone who normally worked with just a keyboard and mouse it was a bit surreal being in a gian studio surrounded by production crew. What made the experience even more surreal was that I had my appendix removed 4 days prior to the shoot and was still taking powerful pain-killers – I didn’t want to miss the shoot so I sucked up the pain and pushed on.

In the end, this was a very challenging project and the rewards were well worth it. Having to work far outside of my comfort zone and being successful at it really help build my confidence to take on bigger and bolder projects later in my career.