| Firearms Buyback Program | |
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When we (Bruce Mackay, then MD of Grey Interactive and I) pitched for the Buyback site, we knew we were doing something worthwhile. I didn't know then that it was to become a daily part of my life for the next year. Daily Hand-in tally's were collated and posted to the site, and the two self refreshing screens at left were my suggestion to add some urgency (and a sense of immediacy). As well as the Public site, I also administered the secure Media site and created the contact database and passwords for access to that material. This site was to affect how the media portrayed the scheme (favourably) and gave them all the current and background material that the public site held back (mainly from reluctance to give the pro-gun lobby easy material). We created an automatic fax and email notification of changes and were even preparing individual 'local area reports' for journo's (these were stopped because the information on what weapons were held at police stations was a sensitive issue). After the scheme ended, we lost control (FTP access) and there was no maintenance as the site was moved around Govt. servers. I can remember absolute frustration when I'd be posting something urgent at 5.00 Friday, and find the govt. web administrator had gone home at 4.00. (Years later I still insist that we have after hours access for any site hosted by a government agency, before accepting the job.) The design was very simple, 640x480 but distinctive enough. I've loaded a sample of the pages here, but the full site with its catalogue of banned guns is quite large. It is now archived as part of the National Library's electronic document project. |
AV material |
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The ABC produced a short 3 min 'history' (1,240k), and it still has an impact. We had it on the site as two file sizes in Quicktime, I've made a Windows media file here for the record. It runs at about 10fps. There was also a series of TV commercials that I found quite strange and disturbing. There were also Radio
Commercials (60k), and a multipart radio
documentary (Part 1, 1,160k) that we added later in Real Audio. |
