HYATT NORTHSTAR

A luxury destination resort, the Northstar Lodge-Hyatt Residence Club is a unique new gem in the heart of North Lake Tahoe. We were proud to join forces with Tahoe Mountain Resorts in the concepting and delivery of a rich online experience that would engage prospects and convey the exquisite amenities offered by this new development. Interested in the result? Check out hyattnorthstar.com (launched this week!)

Webby's

It's Webby season again. Looks like Nike Golf's apparel site made the cut in the Marketplace Retail category. As the People's Voice Award winners are determined by the online voting community, time to explore the candidates and shout out your favorite nominee here.

BANFF FILM FESTIVAL IN HOOD RIVER LAST WEEKEND

Aimed at promoting understanding and appreciation of the world's mountain places, the Banff Mountain Film Festival provides a collection of awe-inspiring adventure films from around the globe. Lucky for us, Hood River fell on the map of World Tour stops this year.
Impressive and thoroughly amazing to say the least was this year's selection of films. Jens Hoffmann's 20 Seconds of Fame was arguably one of the most exhilerating and moving. The feature length documentary film offers incredible insight into the life, the fears, and the career of Base-Jumper Karina Hollekim. It depicts many emotional moments and explores the complex psychology of extreme sports, namely why someone would risk their entire life for a brief moment of adrenaline.

TWO PEAS IN A POD.

Loud. Witty and hilarious. Hockey junkies (yes, one wears a Flyers jersey to the office on game day). Sickly creative. Sickly good mountain bikers (have to close your eyes when he commits to a jump). Adventure-seeking (with more knowledge about the area than any guidebook despite their recent western migration from Philly just over a year ago). They are quite the team and they're making it official this summer. Tom and April (Summit's creative director and designer) are tying the knot in July!

TINY TOONES FUNDRAISER AT THE GREENWOOD COLLECTIVE

photos courtesy of Charles Peterson

I headed North to Seattle this weekend to attend a pretty unique fundraiser event at the Greenwood Collective. Inspiring, entertaining and educational, the event featured performances by World B Boy champs, the Massive Monkees, and showcased work by legendary Seattle photographers, Charles Peterson and Stuart Isett. Stuart has been documenting the Tiny Toones movement since their infancy, and his imagery truly celebrates the strength, hope and vibrant spirit of an incredible group of Cambodian children. Check out some of his photography here.

Tiny Toones was born in the Bassac slum area of Phnom Penh, Cambodia and provides free HIV/AIDS, health, drug awareness, performing arts and language education to underprivileged youth. It also serves as a community center where hundreds of children have a positive environment to channel their energy into learning and performing arts. The group, 600+ strong, was founded by Tuy Sobil, originally from Long Beach, who brought his b boy dance talents to the streets of Cambodia to help the country struggling to rebuild after 30 years of war.

All in all, it was a spectacular evening. Met interesting people. Checked out exceptional art. Witnessed mind-blowing break dancing and dedicated speakers. Heck, I even exposed my breakdancing talents (or attempts) to the crowd. The energy was consuming and contagious, and it was exhilarating to see such a diverse group of people being brought together via art and dance with a common mission and goal to raise funds for such an inspiring cause.

-Kate

Nike Team launches new Custom Fitting microsite.

Interested in a digital tour of Nike Golf's innovative custom fitting technology? Check out the most recent addition to their innovative microsite collection. Summit designed and shot video components in Florida, edited footage in Avid suites on the Nike campus, worked with a 3rd party animator for the flash movie files and architected the rest in-house (oh, and don't let us forget the rich photography assets provided by Nike Golf's image design group). The result is pretty sweet interactive representation of Nike's program offerings.

Neal attends Papervision3D workshop in Vegas

Recently, Tim and myself where lucky enough (literary, we drew straws with the rest of the flash team) to attend a Papervision3D workshop in Vegas hosted by John Grden, one of the developers of Papervision3D. Papervision3D is an open source 3D engine for the Flash platform, and in my opinion one of the most exciting things happening in the flash world today.

While John was not the man behind most of the code (Carlos Ulloa is the lead developer), he was a super friendly guy who was probably more appropriate for giving presentations. You could just feel his child-like excitement as he revealed his Papervision3D creations, the first one being an Xwing fighter game, of course! While Tim and I commented later that we wished he would have been more thorough about the details of the code, John doesn’t consider himself to be a hardcore programmer – but that didn’t suppress his passion for Papervision3D, and in some ways made his explanations more approachable for non-programmers, or those just new to 3D.

At the end of the 2 day workshop we both left very inspired. I believe that using Papervision3D tastefully in our future projects will really push our work to the next level. Flash has come a LONG way since the days of mainly vector sites and splash pages. With the combination of the AS3 code base, video, bitmap effects, filters, blending modes, and now 3D we can pretty much do anything we want!... within reason.

A couple of my favorite interface examples:

www.nike.com/nikeacg/index-en.html
www.whitevoid.com/application
http://www.nitrogroup.com/

- Neal