Welcome to the portfolio of NYC based Senior Interactive Developer Jens Fischer.
Please feel free to contact me for all inquiries.
National Grid Floe
Launch Site
Firstborn and Mullen built this informative online experience for National Grid's "Power of Action" campaign. The website is an interactive arctic landscape that educates users about the environmental effects of their daily routines.
Agency: Firstborn, Mullen
Year: 2008
Role: Flash Development
Team: Myself + 2 Backend Devs
The Bears
The emotional part about this campaign definitely were the polar bears. A thing like letting the water run when you brush your teeth becomes that much easier to understand, when you literally see the ice floe melting underneath a polar bear's feet. In order to bring the ploar bears to their full life, we had a couple of emotional behaviors rendered out as video sequences, that are loading in the background. That way, as the user stays on the site, the bears show more and more emotions.
Mini Games
The part of the site that was meant to attract the younger generation was a series of little mini games you could play with the young polar bear cub. Their gameplay was built around a question-and-answer game about environmental impact. In true 'infotainment' style kids are being educated, with the mini games serving as an entertaining reward for the knowledge they showed.
Impact Calculator
The 'scientific' part of the site was the 'Impact Calculator'. The client delivered a huge document of several impact measurements to us. Those measurements would range from
»Eating one cheeseburger increases your impact by 8.6 lbs. of CO².« to »Driving a car with a dirty air filter for one year increases your impact by 800 lbs. of CO².«...
I then normalized all that data and put it into one giant XML. The Flash application loads that XML and after applying the calculation logic can compare any of the original measurements to each other. Based on
which measurements you compare, the calculator spits out a fitting comparison sentence.
Community
In order to give people an incentive to come back to the site, you can register and save your pledges to take certain actions in your daily life. These actions accumulate and if you come back after a certain while the application will tell you how much lbs. of CO² you have saved since your last visit. In the 'Community' section, you can see how many other people have made pledges, what the most common pledge is and also compare the positive impact of different regions of the US and UK to each other.
Array Grid
One of the difficulties of the community section was the placement of the individual little 'impact bubbles' on the screen. Placing things on a stage in seemingly random positions, with the requirement that nothing overlaps each other is usually a fairly processor intensive task. I created a unique placement method, that basically is a grid which works with a 2 dimensional array. This way I was able to dramatically reduce the redundancy of the placement calculations and improve the performance of the community section.