Artgig Studio and ESI Design Launch Flag of Faces Website for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation

Artgig Studio (http://www.artgig.com/), a full-service interactive agency located in Westchester, NY, in partnership with Manhattan-based experiential design firm ESI Design (http://www.esidesign.com/), announces the re-launch of peoplingofamerica.org (http://www.peoplingofamerica.org/) for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.

NEW YORK, March 24 /PRNewswire/ — Planned to open in 2011, the Peopling of America Center is an extension of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum whose purpose is to illuminate the experiences of immigrants across the entire breadth of American history. Among the various planned multimedia installations that will comprise the Center will be the Flag of Faces.

The Flag of Faces will consist of a large video exhibit containing portraits of individuals and families who have made America their home throughout the generations. The portraits themselves will be supplied by a database of images submitted by the public.

As part of the initial fundraising effort, Artgig Studio partnered with ESI Design to produce an online version of the Flag of Faces. Visitors to peoplingofamerica.org will now be able to add their portraits to the online version of the Flag of Faces — and ultimately the physical installation when they make a donation.

Constructed as a hybrid Flash/HTML website, peoplingofamerica.org opens with a waving flag of faces created in Actionscript which utilizes the Papervision 3D library to recreate realistic motion.

From the homepage, visitors are encouraged to add an image to the flag along with a donation. The image upload interface was built using an Ajax library, enabling users to perform basic edits such as cropping, rotating, red eye reduction and contrast adjustments prior to submitting their photo.

The Flag of Faces itself is a Flash module that taps into a Microsoft SQL database to dynamically generate the flag and apply red, white and blue color overlays to the individual user-submitted images. The result is an American flag that is a virtual mosaic of individual portraits, each of which can be clicked on and enlarged. The flag continues to populate itself with rows of images as the user scrolls horizontally. Alternately, users can search for images by name — several of which can be attached to any given image.

“Many of the projects we work on involve database-driven Flash sites, but ESI’s idea for the Flag of Faces was a new twist,” said Artgig Chief Engineer and Programmer Steven Grosmark. “I enjoyed the chance to construct a front-end that presents the data in an interesting, novel way. This is certainly not your average photo gallery.”

Artgig President Matthew Kicinski added, “ Ellis Island represents an iconic piece of American history, so we were pleased at the opportunity to work with the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. We believe that the online Flag of Faces will generate a lot of advance interest in the Peopling of America Center as well as provide a solid donation channel while the Center is being constructed.”

Other notable Artgig clients include Turtle Pond Publications, http://www.miza.com/, Thinc Design, http://www.thincdesign.com/, and In The Life Media, http://www.inthelifetv.org/

For additional information on the news that is the subject of this release, contact Matthew Kicinski at Artgig Studio.

About Artgig Studio:

Artgig Studio, LLC is a full-service interactive consulting and production company based in Pleasantville, NY. Founded in 2002, by Matthew Kicinski, Artgig is a complete development team, with over 15 years experience in creating custom websites, applications, games, and tools for a variety of clients and industries.

    Contact:

    Matthew Kicinski, President
    Artgig Studio
    914-769-5080

http://www.artgig.com/

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SOURCE Artgig Studio, LLC