Falter – Creating An Interactive Online Story
An Innovative Twist On Charity Campaigning
The Falter is a long standing weekly Austrian newspaper focusing on investigative journalism, critical analysis, and the arts and social life. They came to us wanting to create a conceptual online experience designed to hold a black mirror up to modern society – much like the paper itself.
In sharp contrast to Falter’s text heavy format, this immersive mobile and desktop journey uses stark interactive visuals to depict nine layers of hell as a reflection of modern society.
The site ultimately won three Gold Cannes Lions in digital categories, Site Of The Year on awwwards.com, and a Webby for Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics on a website.
The core idea was to tell a story visually, so we worked with visual storytellers Salon Alpin to breathe life into motion graphics.
The modern dystopian landscape, designed under the influence of Dante’s Inferno, evolves as the user clicks and scrolls through the experience. We maximized the hellscape’s impact utilizing a variety of animated layers and particle systems to make each scene respond intuitively to user interaction.
We developed a custom navigation concept to make descending into hell just that little bit more interesting. We chose WebGL as our go-to technical platform, and put heaps of attention into tinkering with and fine-tuning all of those sonic and visual details.
We feel it shows in the final (multi-award-winning) product! Falter Inferno is a deeply affecting and visceral online experience, which takes users on a devastating journey straight through hell and out the other side.
Setting up a custom build and asset pipeline was really interesting, as was making the assets as small as possible. In the end, completing the whole look with custom geometry and shaders was extremely rewarding.
Stefan Kernjak Developer
-
00Won in total 18 awards
-
01260k organic unique visitors
-
028 layers of hell
We were fortunate to have amazing motion graphics to work with and a lot of creative freedom from the client. In the end, all the fine-tuning, animating and tinkering paid off and we think it really shows the amount of enthusiasm we put into this work.
