Generating personalised portraits online to support Sky Arts 'Portrait Artist of the Year'.
Scope
Campaign
Design
Digital Marketing
Web Development
Sector
TV & Film Production
Choose from Da Vinci, Warhol, Cassatt, Seurat, Klimt and Cezanne. Take a quick photo, apply your filter and you're done!
Supporting the new Portrait Artist of the Year on Sky Arts 1 HD we were tasked with creating a tool to generate awareness and push traffic through the new series.
The Sky Arts project allowed our technical team to push the boundaries, compared to previous projects which required a TV show or film to have an online presence. In this case, we allowed users to create portraits based on 6 popular artists.
Based on the type of artist, users could either upload a photo for automatic generation into an artist impression of a portrait or have the freedom to rotate, resize and move their photo for added personalisation.
One of the main hurdles we had to overcome was getting the right technology and logic in place for a portrait to be as close to an artist impression as possible. Taking into consideration that a user's photo could be taken in different lighting conditions and textures. In addition, ensuring the site was built with performance in mind to allow many simultaneous requests for generating images on demand.
Through the use of graphical interfaces provided by the .NET Framework and the development of in-house custom logic and filters, we were able to achieve a very close representation of an artist portrait.
Due to the high demand experienced in users uploading and sharing their photo's, selfieportrait.co.uk is hosted on Azure Cloud platform to give us the flexibility to create additional server instances on demand.
