https://www.downloadfestival.co.uk/airbourne-free-track-giveaway

After the success of my Hugh Laurie tweet to unlock campaign, I let Danny Corr and Ian Dickinson from Roadrunner Records know that the code could be repurposed fairly easily. We started discussing possibilities and they came up with a genius plan.

Airbourne’s singer, Joel O’Keefe, has a reputation for climbing on speaker stacks and scaffolding during their gigs. The idea was to make a virtual version of him climb to the top of Download Festival’s stage as more people tweeted #AirbourneClimb. We decided that the idea would be even more impressive if it was presented as an old school video game.

Kate Brighouse designed an awesome 8bit stage and created mini versions of the entire band.

Despite writing the code with scalability in mind, I had to rework a lot of it for this campaign. Instead of just moving an object from left to right or down to up, I now needed to animate Joel’s avatar across the stage, up the scaffolding and into the center of the lighting rig. There was a fair bit of maths involved in making that happen while also stopping him if there weren’t enough tweets.

The project allowed me a lot of creative freedom and I possibly enjoyed working on it a little too much. I added a tweet box to encourage comments on the page, displayed those comments in real time and also ended up animating the other band members as well as the crowd. The crude jQuery animation was the perfect fit for the 8bit design.

I used a combination of technologies. PHP and MySQL to power the back-end; counting tweets, setting the target and keeping the download secure until the target was met.

The front-end used CSS & jQuery animation as well as ajax requests to update the page without refreshing it.

Download Festival came on board to support the campaign and hosted it on their site. All the rock media got on board to help promote it and Joel started climbing. The campaign was very well received and helped create plenty of hype for the band’s new album and their performance at Download.