Responses by Christopher Wilcock, creative director, Outpost and Michael Vestergaard, front-end developer, I Like to Play

Background: Led by founder and entrepreneur Raffaello D’Andrea, Verity Studios offers groundbreaking autonomous drone technology in live entertainment around the world. To capture the “wow factor,” we needed to ensure the user experience was as rich and dynamic as possible, utilizing immersive techniques, subtle animations, thought-provoking imagery and an emotive yet authoritative narrative.

Highlights: The WebGL recreation of drone choreography on the home page through Three.js particle simulations and parallax scrolling video carousels. Parallax scrolling was also implemented throughout the site, as it was important for us to provide that sense of movement and flight.

Challenges: Trying to get the balance between a website that is feature-rich, and also robust enough to support the commercial needs of the business in the future. We were also very aware that the business is growing rapidly, so whatever solution we created had to support this growth.

Favorite details: To create a distinctive web experience, we replicated the drone displays while creating an immersive experience that didn’t kill performance. It was also decided very early in the design process that in order to fully appreciate the technology, we had to show the drones in action, which meant we had to incorporate a lot of video elements into the design. We also took visual inspiration from the atmosphere of the events and the dynamic light effects of the drones.

Technical features: We used Prismic to develop the back-end, as we felt this CMS would meet the short and long term needs of the business, while at the same time support the front-end design. The front-end grid was developed in HTML/CSS/JS with everything being loaded progressively through “lazy loading.” We also used Three.js particle simulations to recreate the drone choreographies on the homepage, while integrating simpler particle systems into the headers of the other site pages.