The culmination of my three years at University was this final project which ran from December 2004 to April 2005. It was a website designed to go with a hypothetical television production of John Wyndham’s novel, the Midwich Cuckoos.

The brief was that the book would be split into six episodes, and my role was to do a website that would go hand-in-hand with the screenings – a website not for real world information about cast and crew – but acting as if it was real, and following the book’s main character, Richard Gayford, as he tries to unravel the mystery. I chose to concentrate on the second “episode”, giving me a chance to show how a new weekly website would be shown on the index page, and also to give more storyline to work from.

There was an HTML front-page that would be used to move into the episode site, which was done in Flash. I chose Flash because I could bring together both visual and audio (voiceover) elements, and bring in interactivity (using Actionscript) such as the map, where you can see different parts of Midwich. Locations in Kent and Essex were used, and friends and family did the voiceovers.

Hindsight being such a wonderful thing, the limitation of Flash player dimensions made the movement of the letters and map feel a bit stunted – the original theme was to mimic the idea of sifting through a dossier of information. It now being 2009 and this being produced in 2005 means that the lack of video could show poor effort on my part – but there was simply not enough time to add video amongst everything else. However looking at it now, i’m more than happy with it.

The music was provided by Richard Williams, a housemate (not one that starred vocally).

Please look at the screenshots now, or visit it here.