Blogs

A New Website for Invertigo Dance Theatre

Jun

Invertigo Dance Theatre has been a long standing client of StirStudios. Invertigo first came to us for branding, filming of their show and a website. Since then the dance company has flourished and with it their web presence. As time progressed Invertigo needed some upgrades performed to their site including: greater site width, social media implementation, better project presentation, cooler integration of images which Invertigo are well known for, streamlined view for the artists, more striking site background and some other smaller things.

DancePlug rebranded and ready to rock

Apr

StirStudios recently relaunched DancePlug's website along with a new marketing strategy. The main goals at the top of the list for the rebuild were speed, theme optimization, simplicity and focused. If you take a look, I think you will agree we achieved all of the above! DancePlug is such a creative client to work with and we wanted to help them showoff some of the changes we made:

New interactive homepage
The new homepage says it all giving the viewer what they need to know on their first impression. In one hit viewers can now understand what makes DancePlug rock in their career profiles, online dance classes, the Dish - your news-flash channel for all things dance and lastly their awesome demo reels.

The DancePlug Dish

Nov

This week DancePlug released their latest service called the DancePlug Dish. A fun web show produced by us.

What's new? Who's busy? What's happening?

Find out on DancePlug's new creation: The DancePlug Dish, hosted by choreographer Benjamin Allen, your weekly news-flash channel on ALL THINGS DANCE.

Every week, DancePlug will release a fast paced episode that sums up the latest news in the dance world, such as dance celebrities, and shows or movies in the works. Each show will also include our featured events, classes and pluggers (circuit breaker!). And of course you do not want to miss the Dirty Dishes, a little piece of goss on something good, bad or just plain ugly!

You can leave your comments for each show, like or dislike! And don't forget to spread the word by sharing the episodes:

Simply click on the "share" button located on the Dish page, and choose how you wish to share it (through your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, conventional mail, ...)
Or you can grab the link and embed it to a webpage, blog, forum...

Be entertained and in the know with the DancePlug Dish! Watch the first episode now!

Cheers, Glyn

Busy Month for Stir - Reels, Websites and More

Nov

Been a busy couple of months but loads of success. Below is a recap from:

Wrapped a new dancer reel for Sharona D’Ornellas

Stir provided Sharona, a successful New York performer, with marketing tools including, demo reel and custom label and DVD menu.
view work

Site updates for Terpsichore Entertainment Fixed some bugs in the homepage, added a new sidebar to feature artists, testimonials and quotes.
view work

Created a new logo for Wildcard Dance Company
Wild Card Dance is a new dance studio, looking to establish their identity before opening their doors. Two parallel logos were created, with a playing card elements theme.
view work

Pre-production commenced for Synergy Dance Academy’s new site
A dance studio site that will be designed and built by StirStudios.

Pre-production commenced for Blue Pet’s new site
A site dedicated to animal owners who need help and support when their pets become ill designed and built by StirStudios.

Produced and conceptualized Global Dance’s new site and videos
Utilizing DancePlug’s Lights, Camera, You service the main faculty of Global Dance were photographed and filmed on location. All LCY demo reels for each instructor were then edited by Glyn Gray to showcase their talent and also add his flair. The final Global Dance Trailer was designed to promote the convention with all the necessary facts, copy while passing the energy of the faculty throughout.

Site designs by Anh Dillon were based off white being the background so as to give a very spacious yet seamless connection between graphics, videos and information.

Behind the scenes the Stir dev team (Jorge and Glyn) crafted a nice slick way for convention participants to register online.

Over all this was a fun project to be a part of in which the team had loads of fun doing.
view work

This wraps the Stir Production recap, stay tuned for more exciting news to come in the many months.

Cheers, Glyn Gray

DancePlug Progresses

Oct

We have had a busy month fine tuning DancePlug and refining where necessary. This project has come along nicely and been well received from the already established dance community. Some of the new details include:

The ability for users to share class previews to all their contacts via email
User videos now have higher quality compression so in full screen they look loads better
flv and mp4 formats are now uploaded as is, which gives yet another quality bump to users footage
Private messages now quote the message inside the email notification
Faculty members can now promote their classes when promoting their profiles

Of course there has been many a bug to fix but all in all the site is now stable and users are enjoying the new experience.

The creators of DancePlug Glyn Gray, Anh Dillon and Adam Parson are very thrilled with the new site and response from the dance community. “We now have a platform to really build upon” says Adam Parson “there are many new and exciting things to come”.

DancePlug really does take dance seriously and helps in so many ways and one way I would like to point out is “Lights, Camera, You”. With this service you get 1 hour (or more) studio space to film all your current choreography in HD and if desired edited up and then uploaded to your profile. For more information follow this link: www.danceplug.com/lights-camera-you

Another great promotional tool is DancePlug’s professional promotional email. Users can send a cool looking email to all their contacts which includes a personal message, their main photo, direct weblink to their profile and some brief profile information. Such a great way to promote yourself through the site.

A feature I think that is quite cool is the resume. As you you may or may not know, as a performer this is one of the most important things you need to “show off” what you have done. DancePlug offers this as a very simple tool to update and maintain within your profile. Add your entries, delete and edit as you go, reorder, move to different categories and so forth. It gets better once you are done you can just print out your resume with a designed layout including your main photo, contact and agent information and then all your credits. No need to worry about setting up a word doc and the hassles of aligning etc.

Be a part of the dance craze and signup today: www.danceplug.com/user/register

Cheers, Glyn

Danceplug V2 Released

Sep

We have been super busy rebuilding the new DancePlug V2 platform. So many great improvements and the biggest being speed and usability. We are all very proud of the end result and hope DancePlug receives all the benefits they deserve.

Let's move into some of the details so you can really know what we did:

The UI: has been overhauled giving an even greater user experience than before. Custom icons, themed buttons along with loading animations, great visual ads and more, thanks to Anh Dillon's designs.

Development Wise: we have focused on pluggers not having to deal with so many page refreshes with sections like the community, comment board, insider tips, dance classes and profiles. We have also implemented a brand new way to edit profiles through an overlays system, Pluggers can now edit their info from any page on the site simply by using the fusebar located at the bottom of their browser. This gives pluggers a clean, easy way to navigate where they want quickly.

Online Dance Classes: let's get to the fun part. This has been completely revamped and with huge improvements. New features include: no refreshing, instant load of all videos, low and high quality video delivery system (High Definition), streaming - no more waiting, instant filtering and searching, latest, most viewed and featured lists as well. You have to check it out!

Featuring Your Event: on DancePlug has never been easier. All you have to do now is signup or login and enter in your events and when you want them featured, select the events and all will be taken care of. Your event will appear in the events calendar and throughout the network.

Your community: is far stronger, welcoming a much better way to make connections and uphold communication. You now have an easy way to be friends or simply be a follower. The best of both worlds. You can monitor activity through the custom pulse (old name Live Feed) located on a Pluggers homepage keeping up with all their goings on. Write messages and accept requests all from quick and simple overlays. Best of all you can now search for a friend/follower right away.

Mail: has taken a bold step forward full of improvements. Pluggers now have the ability to search, filter and perform multiple actions. Threading is now possible within messages to keep communication nice and clear. Pluggers can also send to multiple friends, a much awaited feature!

Working Status: we added this as a nice way for Pluggers to promote what they are currently working on. This is displayed on their profiles for everyone to see.

Watcher: is a nice new tool as well. You can now stay updated on forums and blogs by receiving email notifications. Through your account you also have an easy way to view all your content you are watching with the abilities to delete, stop notifications and more.

DancePlug has been very rewarding and our whole team has had a lot of fun working on it.

This pretty much wraps up the new and improved DancePlug V2. Be sure to check it out, promote yourself and learn all the new dance moves!

Cheers, Glyn

StirStudios has a brand new look

Jul

StirStudios finally found the time to refresh their look and rebuild their own website. New logo, new website, new ways for showcasing their work. This upgrade has been a long time coming but now that it is here, we are very happy. To look through our portfolio click here, you will find our setup to view our work nice and easy to navigate through. Each client has a set of tabs to quickly flow through their projects as well as a brief description of what was involved. Stir has also built a nice new system for clients to collaborate and sign off on concepts logging into our site. Clients can easily find their most recent projects, review designs or media, give comments for changes and adjustments, with an emailing system to keep everyone in the loop and finally an approval setup to sign off on the project. A nice way to work with clients anywhere in the world! If you would like an evaluation/quote from StirStudios, then click here, fill out the form so we can better understand what is involved in your project. You can also contact us for any other enquiries you may have. Stay tuned for all our updates through our blog.

Cheers, Glyn

DancePlug V2 Progress

Jun

The StirStudios development team has been powering through the development process for the new streaming system that will be implemented for DancePlug's Online Dance Classes. We will be implementing two different quality levels, as you would expect low and high. Obviously lower quality will give greater speed to the videos, the downside will be quality and the high quality videos will look super, but will take longer to load. The major difference will only affect the full screen feature as at normal size the quality difference will barely be noticeable.

As we are now streaming, DancePlug's users will also be able to jump to any spot in the videos, no more buffering. Luis, our head developer, is the master mind behind all of this and Jorge's hands have done an outstanding job. This step is the most important part to the application we have created, the rest is the functionality and eye-candy (theming). Theming throughout the entire site has been implemented and refined. Certain areas like insider tips have taken shape for speed, organization and optimization. Both Anh Dillon and myself have worked very hard working on design and functional elements for the new version. Some great improvements are coming the DancePlug way.

Cheers, Glyn

Terpdance.com Reality TV Series

Jun

I have been working with Thomas Flagg and Francesca Harper in bringing together some great new pitches for dance related TV series. Inside the life of a dancer and all the challenges they encounter along the way. We are lacking in footage so we are using a lot of titles and images to help keep the pace and flow alive. Tommy is a great client and always has some challenges to accomplish!

This project requires a blend of Final Cut Pro and Motion. Photoshop is used for optimizing the images and when completing edits we use episode to compress and then upload to a protected page within the Terpsichore Entertainment website.

Thomas resides on the East Coast and StirStudios is here on the West Coast. Thank goodness for the internet as this gives us the ability to mount edits from anywhere in the world for notes to the final edit. Terpsichore's site is built on Drupal so we have plenty of tools to utilize for communication and power.

For any dancers/choreographers that need direction and help in their career, Thomas Flagg is your guy. He has helped many up & coming dancers/choreographers get their careers off the ground. DancePlug.com is also another awesome recourse to showcase your talent across the globe.

These pitches should be finished this week will give you an update if anything changes.

Cheers, Glyn

Body Blog - Make A Point is Now Live

Jun

StirStudios just wrapped up another website. A tremendously cool design from Anh Dillon really showing off Laura Fremont's new clothing line "Body Blog - Make a Point" and her great T's. It's exciting to see the finished site in action. After one day of being launched her first T-shirt was sold :) Body Blog is using PayPal for all transactions and this made the setup rather easy to keep everything simple.

Check out Body Blog now and of course buy a rad T while you are at it.

We used Drupal as our CMS system to build the site and Ubercart was used for the store. Nothing too fancy here as this site needed to be fast, slick, unique and easy to use.

Cheers, Glyn

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