After getting in from work my rss reader Snackr revealed to me that Lee had posted up the London dead drop. After reading up his Amsterdam dead drop I was determined that if he ever came to London I would try my hardest at it, so I got straight on the case with looking at what was the first clue. Not knowing what I got myself in to I jumped to source code view.

After finding the hidden .wav file and giving it a quick listen I knew it would be some sort of hidden message in the audio. I tried a couple things to the .wav such as playing it really slowed down, playing it backwards I even tried converting it to Morse Code using Morse Mania. Problem was that Morse Mania wasn’t quite working as I planned but it did reveal to me the .wav file header.

After giving it a quick google I then tried throwing the .wav file through text edit to see whats going on. This is when I found the rdf xml structure which told me that Lee had created the file in Adobe Soundbooth CS4.

This as well as the fact that at about the same time he laid down an extra clue on his Twitter account led me to download a trial of Soundbooth. After getting the .wav in to Soundbooth I pretty much nailed the first clue by opening every panel I could find stumbling on the secret message painted in the .wav.

This led me to the url and got me to the 2nd clue. When I got the clue I pretty much downed my dinner, got on the tube straight away and then ran around like a headless chicken with an Iphone until I ended up at the Starbucks the longitude and latitude pointed at.

Catching my breathe inside I sat down to have a look outside but couldn’t really see anything, at first glance ( like others I spoke with at Flash Camp London ) I thought it had something to do with the bus stop conveniently placed right outside Starbucks but none of the routes/bus numbers worked. A couple minutes later I did spot the to-let sign out of the corner of my eye across the street which after ringing my brother Sean Freeman with the contact number on the sign, manged to work like a charm.

Another clue… but this time it was even less descriptive than the first, just a flatliner .aif tone. I wasn’t too happy about this but after looking around at Starbucks I was confident that I was one of the first here. My failed attempts at trying to get my brother Sean Freeman to do exactly what I did with the .wav file over the phone lead me to get back home.

Getting home I threw the .aif in to Soundbooth and looked at it again, pretty much trying everything I tried on the .wav it started to dawn on me that I might not be able to crack this one. Hours passed as I listened constantly to this .aif file on repeat, even trying SoundCoder to see if Lee had encrypted a secret message in the .aif, but nothing. Although using SoundCoder I did send Lee a secret message myself though.

After trying to convert the .aif file to morse code by equalizing the .aif until it was just beeps I realized that this debris around the beeps was actually Lee speaking. I boosted the volume loads and got rid of the main bars of sound to reveal another url to a picture this time.

Playing around with the image in the levels I spotted the longitude and latitude nestled in the grass. ( fyi Lee that little logo in the bottom right did’nt fool me )

I put the longitude and lattitude in to google and had my destination, It was the side of the A2016 near Belvedere.

It was quite late and I realized to get the prize before work tomorrow I would have to get up early.

After going to bed about 3am, I woke up 3 hours later and was on my way to Belvedere to go look for this bush, now here’s where I make a big mistake.

Reading the longitude and latitude of the clue in the bush I mistook a negative for a positive on the latitude. This of course sent me two very different places roughly 1.4 miles the wrong way out of London when I was meant to be going to St James park.

(It was only when I couldn’t find the bush along the A2016 near Belvedere that I realized that I had got the latitude wrong)

After pulling thorns out of my shoes from climbing a fence in to farmland alongside the A2016 near Belvedere, I managed to get back in to central from my jaunt in zone 5.

By this time paranoia had set in and I was sure someone had beaten me to the bush. Running around St James park at 9.30am not only amused passer by’s but I manged to run in to Lee.

Thinking the end was near I got to the bush to find that actually it was another clue, a small envelope hidden at the top of the bush. Opening the envelope it gave yet another url for me to go to now this is where the Iphone failed me as browsing to the url came up with the missing plugin icon.

So I got on the phone to friends at work Keith Rogers and Chris Clarke. After asking Keith Rogers to check out the url, he explained to me it was an apache forbidden page but it seemed to be a picture of it inside a swf.

I instantly thought like any other flash developer would, lets decompile it and see under the hood. So I got Keith Rogers to get Chris Clarke to run it through his decompiler. The result was 2 pictures, one of which was not on display which gave me another latitude/longitude and the final location of the dead drop.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that was it because I then spent another hour trying to find it in a hedge behind St James park toilets whilst getting some pretty odd looks from park officials and passer-by’s but I eventually found it.

Big shout out to Lee Brimelow for organizing the very cryptic London master collection dead drop and a big thanks to everyone at adobe that makes this happen, really appreciate it. Also at Flash Camp London I spoke with a couple people that were hot on my tail with the dead drop ( some actually ahead, just not realizing it ) well done for very nearly beating me, it was your competitiveness that made me stick at it.

And Lee Brimelow’s video explanation as well.

The Flash Blog