Hamburger Hummus

Case Study

Extending a Comedy Series into an Interactive World

Hamburger Hummus was a seven-episode scripted comedy series designed to introduce a younger audience to contemporary life in Israel through entertainment rather than conventional tourism advertising. Our digital challenge was to extend that fictional world beyond the episodes and create an experience with a personality of its own.

The series followed a group of American bloggers attending the fictional Blog-O-Con conference in Tel Aviv. Their interests became a vehicle for stories involving technology, environmentalism, nightlife, relationships, and other aspects of contemporary Israeli culture. The cast included Angela Kinsey, Jillian Bell, and Marque Richardson, with the series directed by Jay Karas.

Instead of building a conventional promotional site or episode directory, the digital experience became a side-scrolling world surrounding the series. Each episode occupied its own environment, combining editorial context, video, handcrafted visual storytelling, and manually curated social content.

Leading Development Across Los Angeles & Halifax

I primarily managed the digital development effort from Los Angeles while the development team was based in Halifax, Canada. My responsibilities centered on technical direction, development delivery, quality, infrastructure, stakeholder communication, and keeping implementation aligned with the larger creative production.

A producer managed the overall production schedule while I managed the development portion and reported on progress, requirements, risks, and technical needs. I participated directly in stakeholder meetings, presentations, requirements discussions, and reviews as the experience moved from concept through production.

I remained technically close to the work without serving as the primary application developer. I developed prototypes and contributed code when needed to augment the team, but my principal responsibility was directing the development effort and helping different disciplines turn an ambitious creative concept into a functioning digital product.

Connecting Physical Production to Code

A defining part of the experience was its three-dimensional paper-craft world. The backgrounds were physically constructed from paper and designed to work as moving, looping environments rather than static illustrations. That created an unusual relationship between physical production and interactive development: decisions made during the shoot would directly affect what the development team could accomplish in the browser.

I reviewed production dailies and provided feedback on how shots would ideally need to work once brought into the application. I was looking at the material through the requirements of the interactive experience, including how imagery could move, transition, layer, loop, and ultimately function within the side-scrolling implementation.

I did not lead the creative concept or direct the physical production itself. My role was to help bridge production and development, prototyping aspects of the experience and providing technical feedback so that the handcrafted source material could translate effectively into code.

Building the Interactive Experience

The handcrafted environments became the foundation for a continuous side-scrolling interface connecting the individual episodes. Rather than separating video, editorial material, and community content into conventional pages, the experience integrated them into the visual world surrounding the series.

The Halifax development team had significant experience with TypeScript. Its object-oriented approach aligned naturally with my own OOP development background, making it an effective foundation for collaborating with the team while I managed technical delivery and contributed implementation support where useful.

The broader front-end implementation combined TypeScript and JavaScript with HTML5, CSS3, responsive behavior, animation, and transitions to translate the physical environments into an interactive browser experience. Social content associated with the series was manually curated by members of the team and incorporated into the experience rather than automatically aggregated by me.

Quality, Infrastructure & Launch

Quality assurance was part of both my management responsibility and my hands-on work. I participated directly in QA while managing the testing effort, working with the development team to identify issues, evaluate fixes, and keep builds moving toward release.

That validation was particularly important for an experience combining responsive layouts, animation, looping imagery, video, social content, and handcrafted visual assets. The relationship between those elements meant that quality could not be evaluated solely as a series of isolated features; the entire experience needed to hold together as users moved through it.

My responsibilities also extended to the systems supporting the application. I owned the infrastructure, hosting, and deployment side of the project, helping move the experience from distributed development into a stable production environment.

As builds progressed, I reported development status into the larger production, managed technical and quality issues with the team, and maintained the path toward release. I ultimately handled deployment and launch support, carrying the development effort through its transition into the live experience.

A Digital Extension of the Series

The finished experience gave Hamburger Hummus a digital identity beyond the episodes themselves. The paper-craft environments connected the physical and digital sides of the production, while the side-scrolling interface brought video, editorial material, and curated social content together within a single visual world.

That made the website part of the storytelling rather than simply a distribution point for the series. It also reflected the subject matter of Blog-O-Con itself: a story about bloggers and digital creators surrounded by an experience designed around the culture of online content creation.

Recognition & Coverage

Hamburger Hummus received CSS Design Awards Website of the Day recognition, was selected as an Awwwards nominee, and attracted coverage across entertainment, advertising, cultural, and digital-media publications.

The recognition was particularly fitting for an experience built at the intersection of several disciplines: scripted entertainment, physical paper craft, interactive design, software development, social content, and digital storytelling.

Featured

• Hamburger Hummus Gives One of the Most Accurate Representations of Our Digital World
• WATCH: Hamburger Hummus!
• Hamburger Hummus - “Room 420: Ep. 3”

For me, the project was another step toward broader digital delivery leadership. I managed a distributed development team across Los Angeles and Halifax, worked directly with stakeholders, connected physical creative production with interactive implementation, participated in and managed QA, contributed prototypes and code when useful, and owned the infrastructure, deployment, and launch responsibilities required to bring the experience live.