Features

• A video and mobile phone based site enabling users to send love messages all over Europe.
• Over 50,000 mobile videos sent. Over 1 million views and love messages sent.
• Offline 2D rendering providing robust video compositing.
• Social Media sites and Panoramio providing location photos.

The challenge

To allow customers in Europe to send each other a love message in the sky. Users should be able to show their loved ones a video of a plane flying a message across a city of their choice.

The solution

Users were able to select a photo of a city scene, type their message and see a small plane flying across the skyline trailing their message.

Why it worked

Users could quickly and easily create a message for their loved ones. The site became extremely popular and generated over 1 million views.

The Cornetto campaign introduced an exciting challenge to us.

The client approached us with an exasperated, " We have this really cool idea - but they all say it's impossible... We want to film planes displaying dynamic love messages and send them to mobile phones around the world!".

We picked up the gauntlet and within a month created a prototype which showed it could be done.

The technology specialmoves developed lets a user select a photo from a social network site and automatically composites a flying plane and a banner into any sky there is in the photo.

To do this the user's photograph is split into foreground and background layers using advanced video algorithms and then a plane is composited flying in between these layers. This allows the plane to fly behind near objects in the flat photograph.

A CG message banner is also generated displaying the user's love message and this is dynamically animated to give the effect of it blowing in the wind behind the plane.

A virtual camera is then applied to the scene - mimicking the hand held motions seen in a mobile phone video. This virtual camera tracks the plane flying through the photo whilst moving and zooming to provide a realistic capturing of the virtual scene. The photograph is also processed with directional motion blur to copy the pixel blurring common in mobile phone cameras.

So, from a simple photo we produce a believable movie clip on the client's machine. Once the user is happy with this movie and message we send this data to our custom server architecture which then processes the video for use on mobile phones and sends it out via an MMS gateway. The custom server solution we produced allows us to run custom video compositing across many servers and this helped with scalability.

This project shows how a client can approach us with a technologically innovative idea and we can quickly work with them to build any software and hardware needed to match their imagination.

Technical Challenges

Outputting to Phones

Having developed a technique in Flash to present our "Love Message in the Sky" on the website, the next challenge was to find a method to distribute this to a phone. To compound the problem, our European mobile providers required different video formats including 3GP and GIF. We briefly contemplated mimicking the output using PHP or .NET drawing utilities but thought the overhead of duplicating the code on another platform too high. Our solution was to run the Flash application as a binary on the server. A modified version of the Flash file, using the same plane compositing algorithm as the site, outputted the individual frames of the animation as files. Once we had the frames, it was then a simple task to compile them to video formats of our choice, ready for dispatching.

The Challenges of Success

So our Cornetto webserver was successfully converting our Flash animation in to a video and sending it to phones across Europe. It worked well. Too well. The site was starting to get thousands of hits and many of those visitors had a Love Message to send (who doesn't?). The webserver was not only tasked with serving our site, but also doing on-the-fly video conversions and it was suffering. We could improve the server performance but that would only scale so far. The solution? Put it on the "cloud", our little Love Message cloud. We designed and built a distributed system that enabled any number of clients to take processing jobs from the server, process locally, then post back the converted video results for dispatching. We could remove or add clients as necessary as demand required and importantly, take the load off of the webserver.