Web Design , Video Production Bristol | Mentor Digital Blog

Shaw Trust appoints Mentor Digital as key digital agency

October 15th, 2010

Mentor Digital's team delivered a winning pitch

Mentor Digital has just been confirmed as the chosen web partner for Shaw Trust, one of the UK’s top charities. The win builds on Mentor’s strong charity credentials.

Shaw Trust supports disabled people and those in disadvantaged circumstances to help them to prepare for work, find jobs and live more independently. Every year they work with over 75,000 people who face barriers due to disability, ill health or social circumstance.

Niki Torkington, Head of Corporate Communications for Shaw Trust said “I am very pleased to be working with Mentor Digital on the development of the new website. While our demands for the agency are broad, we also have specific user needs, particularly around accessibility, so we looked for an agency who could demonstrate a good understanding of the complexity involved, and Mentor’s experience in this area is a clear asset to the project.”

The website will be a challenge due to the high level of accessibility demanded by Shaw Trust, but it is a challenge we are looking forward to, says Mentor MD Holland Risley, “Shaw Trust is a fantastic organisation, who we are thrilled to be working with. As soon as we received the brief we felt sure that this would be a very positive working relationship, and look forward to creating a well-designed, accessible new site, which will really deliver on all Shaw Trust’s key needs”.

Mentor Digital has started working on the website immediately and hope to have a completed site early in the new year. For more information on Mentor Digital’s Web offering please visit the web design page.

Posted in Web Design

Mentor launches new Cobalt website

August 5th, 2010

Mentor Digital is proud to announce the launch of the new Cobalt website. Cobalt, a leading medical charitable trust supporting the NHS with £millions worth of equipment and services to enhance the lives of cancer patients and help the relief of sickness and other diseases.

Mentor Digital has designed and built the new Cobalt website and we have provided a cutting edge CMS for the charity to update all their own web content.

For more information on Mentor Digital’s web design services click here: Web design Bristol.

Tags: charity website design, web design bristol, web designers, web designers in bristol
Posted in Web Design

Mentor Digital Creates Virtual Tours DVD of Oldbury Nuclear Power Station

August 5th, 2010

Oldbury Power Station virtual tour DVD image

Mentor Digital has just created and delivered 250 DVDs of Oldbury Nuclear Power Station. The DVDs contain 10 interactive virtual tours of various areas within the power plant and written descriptions. They will be sent out to local schools to give them a taste of the workings of a nuclear power plant. The communications team at Oldbury were so pleased with the result that they submitted the DVD to the regional CIPR Pride awards 2010.

Amazingly the Oldbury station was built in 1967 and has produced electricity around the clock since then. On a typical day it will supply 435MW of electricity – enough to serve a city one and a half times the size of Bristol.

Oldbury is due to enter its decommissioning programme shortly and to ensure staff are kept informed about decisions involving decommissioning for the last 6 months Mantor Digital have been producing regular intranet vodcasts for Magnox North (the company who run Oldbury Power Station). These online videos aim to maximise internal communications between Magnox North management and their 480 odd employees on the Oldbury site during the transition to the power station’s defuelling phase and the start of its decommissioning programme. The videos enable managers to address staff in an honest, frank and engaging way, there is also the opportunity for staff to offer their feedback through the microsite Mentor built to host the videos. The vodcasts have enabled a greater level of communication and staff interaction across the whole site and we will be continuing to produce them throughout the year.

Oldbury Power Station virtual tour DVD image 2

Despite the high levels of security and rigorous safety measures in place at the site as part of the filming process we have been able to access many areas of the plant that the public normally wouldn’t be able to see including getting on the pile cap of the two reactors. The control room looks like something from the original Star Trek series, a schoolboys dream with knobs, levers and buttons on every available surface. The Turbine Hall is huge and really noisy (we all had to wear ear protection), it contains a 70 tonne, cylindrical electro-magnet – rotated by the steam at 1500 revolutions per minute! The cooling ponds area is not an employee spa but where the used fuel elements are stored in water to allow any short lived radioactivity to decay before they are taken off site. This is not a pond you would like to swim in!

To get a better idea of the inner workings of Oldbury nuclear power station you can see the virtual tours on their website or by clicking HERE

Posted in Uncategorized

Filming at Avonmouth Docks, Bristol

July 21st, 2010

40m wind turbine blade

I have been told Mentor’s video department isn’t keeping its end up blog-wise so here goes, my first Mentor Blog …

Yesterday was an interesting day, we had a crew out on Avonmouth docks filming the arrival of 18 massive wind turbine blades that will be taken down to Cornwall and used as part of the modernisation of Goonhilly wind farm. The wind farm is based on the UKs most southerly point, The Lizard peninsular, and we have been filming the development of the site on behalf of Cornwall Light and Power for almost a year now.

We have certainly had some fun filming this project, when the initial trenches were dug they discovered an un-exploded world war two bomb and had to get the bomb disposal squad to do a controlled explosion. The site was actually used as a airship (blimp) base during the war and occasionally enemy bombers would try and target the station which is probably how the bomb ended up there. After that discovery every inch of the site had to be scanned for any other explosive devices before work could begin, the scanning team found a few horseshoes but thankfully no more bombs!

Ironically, the main structures on a wind farm can’t be erected if there is even the slightest bit of wind and as the site was chosen for it’s windy location this has, as you can imagine, caused a few delays to the build. Bad weather has also badgered the crew during the filming, wellington boots now form part of the standard kit when shooting at Goonhilly and the Helston horizontal rain seems able to find the gaps in even the most resilient waterproof camera case!

The blades we filmed arriving yesterday are a gynormous 40 Meters long and weigh 6.5 tonnes, when they make their way down to the Lizard some of Cornwall’s smaller roads will have to be closed to ensure their safe arrival. There were also 3 Nacelles on the boat, these sit on top of the mast and serve as the control nucleus for each turbine, each one weighs approximately 69 tonnes and will have three blades attached to it. I’m looking forward to filming the turbines being erected, as we should be able to get some great shots to show off the scale of this project.

Mentor film crew on the boat

Our fearless crew did a fantastic job of covering the blade unloading from all angles, even climbing to the top mast of the ship which cameraman Dan described as “a terrifying experience during which the sound man was shaking so much he nearly knocked me off”. Dan will do anything for the perfect shot, I’ve seen him and his camera hanging out the back of the a car boot, jammed in a postal trolley and inside a 40 foot freezer all in the name of getting the right shot.

When the work is complete it is expected the resulting wind farm will generate enough electricity to power the whole Lizard peninsular – graceful, green energy at it’s finest!

Becky

Producer/Editor for Mentor Digital Video Production Bristol

For more information please see www.greenhillygreenpower.co.uk

Posted in Corporate Video

HTML 5 versus Flash – The future of web video

May 22nd, 2010

html 5 versus flash HTML 5 is the one of the current buzz words in the web design world and is set to become the standard that all our web browsers work to in the future.

In this article we will be looking at HTML 5 support for playing video. HTML 5 contains a ‘video’ tag which allows developers to embed a video player into their pages with a single line of code. This means that playing videos will be handled by the browser not by third party plugins.

HTML 5 video is already now being supported in the new generation of browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE9.

Flash Player has done a stand up job for the last 5 years as the video player technology of choice, filling a gap and providing a cross-platform solution for delivering video. But with HTML 5 the browsers will take over this core functionality. For many users Flash will continue to be required for playing video for a long time to come, until everyone is on next gen browsers, but this transition is starting now. HTML 5 video will be supported in all the next generation browsers and, as web designers, we have to start adapting to it now.

Apple have publicly announced that they will not support Flash on their mobile browsers which has a high impact when you take into account that Apple owns 25% of a mobile browser market which is due for huge expansion over the next few years. We will therefore be recommending that we should start delivering video in our websites through HTML 5 in addition to the current Flash video format for people on older browsers. This is quite a quick adaptation and a few lines of HTML 5 code and a quick JavaScript check can can immediately make our videos play on Apple mobile devices.

The next chapter of the story is video formats. Which is a whole other issue. There are currently 3 key formats of video emerging which are supported natively in the next-gen browsers:

H.264 – The only video format supported by Apple devices (proprietary format, with potential royalties to be paid for it’s use)
OGV – Ogg Vorbis video is the only format supported by Opera (and Chrome I believe). This is an open source and free format.
VP8 – Supported only on IE9 (which also supports H.264)

This means that we will have to be encoding all our videos in both H.264 and OGV formats for the foreseeable future, in order to support all browsers. This sounds a little bit like a return to the dark ages of WMV, QT and Real, but at least we will not be having to deal with multiple third party plugins. Our encoding machines will be working overtime though!

There is another issue here. The most highly rated modern streaming video is encoded in H.264 codec and wrapped in an MP4 wrapper. With many sites hosting thousands of these videos.

H.264 is not an open or free technology. Each video which we encode and publish in H.264 should have a royalty payed to the owners of the technology (MPEG LA group which includes Google, MS and Apple). We are currently enjoying a royalty holiday (for free video sites) until 2016, when the organisation may or may not start charging royalties for the use of H.264 videos. Something video site owners and builders should certainly be aware of.

Holland Risley

MD – Mentor Digital – Bristol UK

Posted in HTML 5, Web Design

Mentor launches the new Digital Vision website

April 19th, 2010

Bristol web design agency Mentor Digital is proud to announce the launch of the new Digital Vision website. Digital Vision create award winning grading, post-production and restoration software for clients including the BBC, Disney, Pixar and many other Hollywood studios.

Working alongside Digital Vision’s branding agency Freeman Christie, Mentor Digital designed and built this new website under a tight deadline for exhibition at NAB 2010 in Las Vegas.

Digital Vision praised Mentor Digital’s web design and FCs new DV branding saying the look was “cool and professional”. Martin Bennett, VP World Marketing said “The NAB show here was great, everyone loved the new look/feel of DV along with the visual branding, and all our customers love the website”.

Posted in Uncategorized

And breathe…

March 29th, 2010

It’s been a hectic few months here at Mentor with barely enough time to work on client projects let alone attend to our blog. We’ve been putting our web development skills to good use creating websites for several new clients, if our schedules anything to go by then it looks like the recession is very much over!

We hope to be showing off several new client websites soon but in the meantime I’ve just seen this fantastic viral game spoofing the BA strike. Willie Walsh

It’s a great example of opportunistic, attention grabbing fun by the agency (T-enterprise based in Scotland) and I’m sure it’ll send plenty of work their way.

For further info on the ways in which your business could make use of flash games, 3D flash and viral marketing, pop us an email we’ll be only too glad to meet up for a hot beverage of your choice.

Tags: 3d flash, digital, flash, flash development agency, game, News, viral, Viral Marketing
Posted in 3D Interactive Flash, Flash Animation & Design, News, Viral Marketing

Mentor Digital win Cobalt web project

March 8th, 2010

We’re extremely pleased to announce our appointment by Cobalt as their web and digital partner, and will be working on a new website for them this spring.

Cobalt are a leading provider of MRI and Scanning services both on a charity basis and also supporting the NHS nationally. They have a hand in some extremely laudable work and provide a service which I know is much appreciated not just in their Cheltenham base but also nationwide.

Niky Sykes, Head of IT, Business & Marketing for Cobalt said “We’re really excited to be working with Mentor Digital on our new website. They backed up a fantastic pitch with a real understanding of Cobalt’s work and a clear passion for the project. This is an important next step for us but we feel in thoroughly safe hands and can’t wait to get started.”

The win builds on Mentor’s strong representation within the charity sector including Flash and email campaigns for Emmaus and the Soil Association, corporate video for the Meningitis Trust and web design for SITA Trust.

Mentor will be working on the site throughout March and April and are looking forward to a great relationship with one of the Southwest’s leading charities.

Tags: New Business, News, Web Design
Posted in New Business, News, Web Design