How did they do those effects in http://artofflightmovie.com/?

Question

I have been trying to understand how they did those effects in http://artofflightmovie.com/ with no success so far. I am not even sure what to google for for help. Could any

Answer 1

All of the answers here so far are spot on and cover various pieces of the execution. Joseph's post about how we 'contained' and 'maneuvered' the site are dead-on, and those mentioning jQuery accurately depict our heavy reliance on it :)

With that said, the other concept of moving along a non-linear path was probably the most difficult part. We literally used an Illustrator file that was setup like a piece of graph paper and drew a bezier path that reflected the movement we wanted from the scrollbar. Then we 'downsampled' the path by converting the curved lines into a bunch of straight lines that represented the curve (similar to downsampling audio waveforms) to keep performance/speed high. We took those coordinates, gave them to our designer, and he created a gigantic design file and literally designed each content section at the designated 'stop' points. Next we mapped each coordinate along the path to a percentage value of the scroll position. We stored these values in a JavaScript array. Lastly we wrote some JS functions that we pipe the scroll position through to determine how to offset the positioning of the site 'container'. (It basically 'tweens' between each coordinate allowing us very fine/precise values at any given scroll percentage) The scroll functionality is handled by a tall div that basically sets our document height to force a scrollbar, and we just read it's position during a Scroll Event and slide the container around to where it should be using the above mentioned functions.

The parallax effect is achieved by applying a percentage of the position offset (what we use to move the container around) and applying it to the sub-containers of the various content sections. This makes the subcontainers move slower or faster than the background, but on the same motion path.

Lastly, the little snowboarders and helicopters (which have CSS3 rotations in addition to x,y movement in some browsers!) are positioned by using a simliar array of 'start' and 'end' positions and tweening between them based on the scroll percentage.

I'll leave it at that to keep this from turning into a book, but I'd be happy to elaborate on specifics if you're interested.

Full disclosure: I was lead developer on the site. I'm not posting to 'toot my own horn' or anything like that, just to be helpful and provide assistance to a fellow tinkerer. I come here a lot to dig through and get insight from others. (many, many thanks to those who have helped us!) Also, shameless plug, but the film is breath-taking... go rent it if you haven't yet, you won't be sorry. :)