While we were in San Diego recently, we visited our pal Nat’s mum for a BBQ. Nat’s mum has an awesome view of San Diego Airport’s runway from her balcony, so we strapped a few cameras up there and proceeded to enjoy the most intimidating pieces of meat we’ve ever had plonked down in front of us. A good time was had by all, even the jets.
Author: flipper01
Poke Christmas Fireplace
This Christmas, we built built an animating fireplace in Poke’s lobby. Using the excellent Pixel Fireplace software by Ted Martins, the fire is a living pixely thing, that needs feeding with logs, and can do many things like roast pixel marshmallows or pixel hot-dogs. The pleasant sound of a crackling pixel wood fire echoed around the lobby all of December.
A few more photos here.
Secret Cinema: The Shawshank Redemption
For Secret Cinema’s production of The Shawshank Redemption we helped out with the pre-narrative and designed the digital system that led the audience from buying a ticket, to being in a court room having your life stripped away from you.
Weeks before you attended the show, our microsite for the fictional State of Oak Hampton, took your ticket number and delivered you your new life. This would be in the form of a FaceBook cover image detailing your new name and particulars. Everyone was from America, and everyone was male (as in the film). The system, developed by our always excellent pal Stephen Emslie, generated over 12,500 realistic men’s names and profiles. You could also use a Twibbon to style your profile photo so it appears to be stapled to your profile.
Extended versions of these profiles were then printed out and handed to you when you receive your sentence in court. Which we then used throughout the experience for example if you’re dragged before the parole board, or attend a work gang.
The site was a very non-nonsense institutional feeling experience, with a simple form for your details and links out to further news and information from the State of Oak Hampton. Learning from our work with the Prometheus show, we streamlined the options available to the audience to make it as simple as possible, but still a unique and mysterious experience for all.
The Big Sale
We entered this year’s 48 Hour Film Project competition, which, as the name suggests, means you have 48 hours to make a film. To make sure there’s no head-starts we’re all given a strict briefing on the Friday night at the Prince Charles Cinema before we deliver our final films on the Sunday night. This years brief said that we needed to include the following in the film:
– a character named named Charlie Cipriani who is a minor celebrity
– some sort of cream
– a line of dialogue”Let me tell you a secret”
– a randomly assigned genre, we got Romance
We worked with Eze Asnaghi, so this is an official Bingo Pictures production! It was a very hectic 48 hours and I don’t think we’d ever have attempted a film like this without the strict brief, but we’re all really pleased with what we got. We even won an award; Best Ensemble Acting! Which is due to our great actors Gavin Lennon and Caroline Roussel-Barucco (Caroline hadn’t even met any of us until the day of the shoot, what a trooper). Lot’s more people to thank, but you’ll have to watch the film to see their names in the end credits ;-)
Cinema on Thames
Our chum Tom Hostler was organising his mate’s stag do as a boat trip along the Thames and he asked us to put on a little surprise for the party. While they were all merrily floating along the river somewhere, me, Jas and Chris can-do Meachin built a surprise cinema and pub on the bank of the river down near Henley. When the boats arrived all was set, the playlist started with Rambo, Cannonball Run and American Werewolf in London, the pub tent (complete with antique pub sign and working optics from Tom) was flowing, and many fine steaks gave their lives gladly on the BBQ. A good (and astonishingly cold) time was had by all.
Fenton: 4GEE Remaster
To show how much better watching YouTube videos is on 4G from EE, compared to 3G, we took Fenton (the UK’s favourite viral video), and remastered it.
We worked with Passion Raw and David Allen, an Emmy award winning wildlife director. It was a full 2 week wildlife shoot across 3 locations with a huge range of wild and trained animals. Then another month of post production work back in London to add in some of more fantasy special guest stars for the big ending.
Great Outdoors Roadtrip
Last year we went on an American road trip (again) with a more of an outdoorsy angle. It was awesome. Starting in Colorado, then all over Wyoming, a brief dip into Idaho, then down through Utah, across Nevada and finishing up in good ol’ California. See the whole set of photos here, or scroll on down for some choice cuts.
Still want more photos? Go see the whole set.
Secret Cinema: Prometheus
We worked with Secret Cinema on their show for Prometheus. To say we were excited to be working with them is an understatement, it was pretty much a dream project. Our main role was motion graphics and 3D animation that was viewed all around the event (as seen above) which we gots lots of help from our pals at Framestore.
The show was huge, the biggest Secret Cinema had ever staged, and we only had a month to pull it together. In a massive disused building (195,000 square feet – the size of a city block) near Euston station, London, we helped them build the space ship Prometheus, complete with cockpit, hydroponics lab, loading bay (with actual vehicles from the film), upper class quarters, a secret restaurant, hyper sleep chambers, medical lab, mess hall and an android production line as well a chunk of the alien planet surface ready to explore. On top of this they also had to build 3 top of the line cinema to screen the film in Dolby 3D – all of this was completed in about a month.
We helped out in a few ways, firstly we helped tour the building in the inception of the show and helped work out how some of the sets could be built and what was the best way to move 1,000 people through the story we wanted to tell in the show. We then moved on to helping with everything digital. We edited a promo video for Brave New Ventures – the fake company we were using to theme the event around (the actual film was kept a secret right up until the titles roll on the screen).
We also designed and built a website (enroll.bravenewventures.org/) which kicked off the narrative of you becoming an employee of Brave New Ventures once you have your ticket, with a system to allow you to choose your occupation along with instruction about what your uniform should look like and information of pre-flight missions you could attend – all of the back end programming (the hard stuff) was done by the brilliant Stephen Emslie.
It was great to walk around the event and see our animations weaved into the ship, and especially odd/awesome to have people cheering at our work as they all crowded in to the cockpit to watch the ship land. The brilliant work from the actors really bought it all to life.
We also built a laser scanner prop that was used on the missions to the planet surface by a member of the audience.
We very much hope to be working with these guys again.
More photos here.
Dogs in Sunglasses
Diesel asked us to promote their new range of sunglasses, so we put them on some dogs and filmed them. We had our reasons though – there are 4 hero styles in the new range, each is designed for a different type of lifestyle, we thought it would be a bit cheesy to show these lifestyles with humans, so … dogs then. This project is part of our work to help shift Diesel’s brand to be more female orientated and a higher quality experience, so with this in mind the video was shot with all the production values of a high end fashion shoot, including a sweet Phantom camera shooting at speeds of up to 2,000 fps for maximum water droplet and fur flowing action.
So our stars didn’t have to stand around on set for too long (they told us the Doberman would savage us if we laughed at it, his sister is an attack dog), we used stunt dogs to set-up the lights, they were my favourite dogs.
The old “never work with kids or animals” thing seemed to be a bit of a myth, when working with human actors there’s a lot more explaining and directing and sobbing between takes – with dogs it’s all about the frankfurters.
Diesel Sunamatic
A Facebook app to promote Diesel’s new sunglasses range. They have 4 hero styles in the range, all with very different styles and designed for different lifestyles – our app lets you preview how each of the sunglasses would style your summer by taking any photo you upload to Facebook, and making a styled copy of it in your own ‘Sunamatic’ photo album. We’re using lots of effects like adding a multiple exposure of an older photo, which are randomised each time, so like taking a roll of film into the chemist you never really know how they’re going to turn out. Check back in every now and then to see how your summer is being styled, and if you don’t like it, try on a different style of shades. You also use the app to manually style older photos or re-style and new ones.
