ESPN

Dunk Dynasty: Zion’s astonishing slam index

Duke freshman Zion Williamson is among the most explosive dunkers the game of basketball has ever seen. We cataloged the best and most impactful of his 52 dunks during a scintillating season in Durham.

BACKGROUND

Working with ESPN

It’s always a real treat to get involved with anything ESPN hands me. This time, ESPN reached out to build a featured article that demonstrates the amazing talent of Zion Willamson. They delivered all the assets, and a very organized Sketch file, and I handed back the developed feature.

Fun Tech

SwiperJS

The article consisted of 5 sections, and each section had a range videos. SwiperJS was utilized to create the carousel resulting in a smooth cross platform transition from article to article.

For the lazy viewer

Video on demand

ESPN requested to have the videos autoplay as the user scrolls the video into view. The code below demonstrates how this was executed.

window.addEventListener('scroll', throttle(() => {
    // get current section
    const columnIndex = Navigation.swiper.realIndex;
    const column = columns[columnIndex]
    // get dunks from current section
    const columnDunks = [].slice.call(column.querySelectorAll('.dunk'));
    // check position of dunk 
    columnDunks.forEach((dunk, index) => {
        const {
            top,
            bottom,
            height
        } = dunk.getBoundingClientRect();
        const centerY = (bottom - top)/2 + top;
        // if its within range, play it
        if (centerY < 0.75 * window.innerHeight 
            && centerY > 0.25 * window.innerHeight) {
            const dunkIndex = columnIndex * 5 + index;
            activateDunk(dunks[dunkIndex]);
        }
    }); 
}, 200));
The Result

Dunk Dynasty: Zion’s astonishing slam index

Launch Project
The Tech

Loading up the toolbox

Considerations and Reccommendations

As project manager, I chose tools that help the team organize tasks and assets. For ESPN, I recommended Trello and created a board that borrows features from agile planning.  This provides visibility to the client for the work that is outstanding, in development and completed.

Google Sheets

JSON

Nunjucks

HTML5

FEED ME!

Content Management

ESPN has their own CMS to handle article content, however developers do not have access to it. In order to get the copy deck into HTML markup, the content team at ESPN edits a google sheet, then I export it to JSON, and use that to compile the markup (via Nunjucks). When updates are required, the team makes the changes in google sheets, and I export a fresh JSON file, compile it and then they can copy & paste the markup into their CMS.

Related Work