Atomised: the Web Design Co-operative

The Project

The Rosyth Garden City Millennium Project was started in 2004 by some residents of Rosyth who were keen to apply for the last tranche of Millennium Award funding to produce some historical records of the historic community of Rosyth. Rosyth was the first Garden City built in Scotland but in stark contrast to it's extremely well known English cousins Welwyn Garden City & Letchworth is more commonly associated with its Royal Dockyard & Ferry Terminal. The group of volunteers were determined to tell Rosyth's unique story in all its facets and in 2006 published "Rosyth: Garden City & Royal Dockyard" a book about 100 years of Rosyth History. Atomised's designer Al Macmillan had been commissioned to design the book cover & project logo.

In 2007 Atomised were involved in phase 2 of the project - producing an interactive cd-rom to enable the project to include many options unavailable to a book. For example, while the book utilised many photographs there was never space to include all that was available. Another concern was that purely telling the story of the history of Rosyth did not allow today's Rosyth children to understand in an interactive way the many issues and choices made in the conception and design of their city. The idea then came of a cd-rom multimedia project and that's where Atomised came in.

We worked closely with the group over many months as they sorted through 100s of photographs and produced material including cinefilm and audio recordings they wanted included. We built the cd-rom to work on the Mac, PC & Linux and it with the future in mind built it as a standards compliant website 'on a disc' to avoid as best as possible any future incompatibility issues. We designed a menu for the cd-rom that was inspired by the different sections of the Rosyth design plans and included Video, Audio, Image Gallery, City Creator & The Book. The Book was an-easy access PDF version of the 'Rosyth: Garden City & Royal Dockyard' book (so the text could be read along with the other md-rom material). Audio was an Flash-powered MP3 section of audio memories mainly recovered from the Carnegie Library archives and transferred from cassette tape to digital by Atomised in Cubase before editing and cleaning up. Video was archival cinefilm of Rosyth in the 1960's & 1970's including the opening of the Forth Road Bridge and one of the last sailing of the Forth Ferry. This had previously been transferred from Cinefilm to DV. Atomised converted the DV to Final Cut and performed the video edits before converting the files to .flv Flash video for use on the cd-rom. Over 600 photographs were captioned by hand by the Atomised team, placed in galleries by decade and edited in Photoshop to improve their quality and crop any rough scan edges. They were then accessed through a custom Flash interface. The highlight of the cd-rom was the inclusion of a web-based javascript game called City Creator allowing users to design their own cities from some simple building blocks in an isometric sim-city style interface.

The group were extremely keen to reduce any environmental impact of the cd-rom so we worked with MODO Productions to produce a 100% biodegradable packaging (also seen now on a Keane single). The cd-rom was given to each of the Rosyth schools to sell to the kids and parents at a small fee to raise funds for them. The remainder of the cd-rom run of 2000 was given to the Rosyth Garden City Association to help raise it funds. So a great project to be involved in, oh and Al Macmillan got his picture in two papers..