We Won! Gav won the concept competition with some very tasty/tasteful ‘chocolate crucifixion nails’ out of dark chocolate dipped pretzel sticks, a chocolate button and silver spray. I tried to make ‘hot cross bums’. They didn’t look quite as bum like as I’d hoped but they won the taste competition. My personal favourite entry though was the NSFW ‘The Holy Reserection’ by Wooders.
Author: flipper02
Knife & Pork
Our pal Dom is an excellent cook and generally a passionate foodie. Also, a top bloke. So when he asked us to help him brand his new restaurant we were delighted to lend a hand. We came up with the name ‘Knife & Pork’ – witty and meaty. The ever talented Cookie came up with the amazing logo and we built a little shadow puppet show to sit in the restaurant to entertain the diners. Cookie illustrated the pigs, Dom got them laser cut for us whilst we built the turntable and shadow box. We turned up for the opening night, set the pigs dancing and sat down for a smashing evening of posh food and great company. Go book a table!
Museum of Victorian Science
Over the new year we took a family break to the Yorkshire Moors near Whitby. By extreme good luck, we happen to be in the same village as Tony Swift and his marvellous Museum of Victorian Science! During our private 2 hour lecture, Tony took us through all the wonders of cathode ray tubes, radiation, x-rays and all sorts of things that create massive bolts of electricity. All the equipment was vintage and in perfect working order. A true master collector and knowledge fountain of all things SCIENCE!
Every photo I took on my phone in 2012
Does what it says on the tin really. I’ve popped a mobile friendly version up on Vimeo, in case you need it.
UPDATE: I’ve been asked how I put this video together. Well, prepare to witness my geekness…
I love little photo projects people do. Martin Parr (a hero of mine) has many collections, including parking spaces, people on mobile phones, or even the simple self portrait. His sense of humour tickles me.
I’ve never found what I wanted to collect, at the end of each year I regret not having set myself a witty brief at the beginning of the year. So this year I thought what if I’ve sub-consciously collected everything? Which I have, on my phone. Just as a silly experiment, I wanted to see what would happen if I dumped all the photos I’ve taken in a year into an image sequence, no editing or cutting bits out. Would it be a mess? Would it be kinda OK, I think it’s… kinda OK. It helps that I tend to take many photos of the same thing, so the object is allowed to hang for a fraction of a second over a few frames. I was inspired by this excellent time-lapse of a road trip… I’ll be ripping this idea off soon.
To do this, first off, I have an app called DropSnap installed on my Android Phone. It automatically backs up every photo I take to Dropbox. You can do this using the official Dropbox app (on iPhone too) but DropSnap gives me some more filtering options, which means I can sync more than just the regular camera roll (Instagram, Snapseed, etc). So that’s been busy stuffing photos up into the clouds like a weird hoarder’s heaven. This made it easy to find every photo I took in 2012 and dump them in one big folder.
The tricky bit was preparing them for the video. All the landscape and portrait photos needed to sit central and have the extra black space on the top and bottom or the sides (depending on their orientation) to make up the space in the video. In steps the work horse that is Photoshop Image Processor! After a bit of head scratching and swearing I created a workflow that did the job. First, I made an action that puts any image into the middle of a black 1080p sized canvas. You can download mine here if you like. Then I ran the Image Processor to resize everything, combined with my action to centre them on the black background. The settings should look like this:
Then I opened my old friend After Effects. To create an image sequence you just drag the image folder directly into the project window. I dumped the sequence into a 1080p composition, added some Tom Waits and Bob’s your Mother’s brother! I hope that’s of some help if you want to try it out yourself. It’s a nice collecting project you can do without having to even think about it. Which is good for me as I’m very poor at thinking.
Poke Hack Day 2012
We tried a new approach to Hack Day at Poke this year. Rather than building something digital, we wanted something a little more hands on. So the brief was set to “build a board game”. Everyone was given a box, some dice, counters etc, and 24 hours to build a complete game. There would be no judges, and no opportunity to pitch your game same with one of the games played in casino which can be viewed at this site https://www.casinospil.net/mr-green. Instead every team plays every game and scores them on a how fun there are, how well the instructions are written and how good does it look.
My team created “Watch Out! Willy!”. All set in Will’s very opulent manor. You play the part of some thugs trying to rob the place, and at the same time, you control Will roaming the hall in his glowing hot pants trying to catch you all. If you’re caught in the beam of light, you’re in for a punishment.
Gav’s team made “The Hand Job”. I think he may win the ‘most double entendre in a game’ award. Players take on the guise of a bank robber trying to nick as much loot as they can, both from the bank and each other. The tricky bit is they all have to physically ‘walk’ around the board wearing their cardboard characters on their knuckles.
More photos here.
Mappin & Web + Goldsmiths campaigns
And now for something rather glamorous we’re working on at Poke. As part of the work we have done for a jewellery brands; Mappin & Web, and Goldsmiths, we have created a few photography campaigns. Mappin & Web speak to an older more high end audience that just want to have fun (whilst wearing diamonds and gold). Goldsmiths is a MASSIVE high-street brand that we’re injecting a sense of fashion.
First up we have some shots for M&W Autumn. A really fun day’s shoot out at Port Lympne in Kent.
Christmas! We’ve tried to make things a bit more seductive and eccentric, rather than snowballs and eggnog. Mappin & Web just want to make their customers smile, which is a great brief.
Moving onto Goldsmiths, here’s their autumn campaign. Everything is much more theatrical and special. We created a fairytale setting based on The Secret Garden.
For Christmas we set the scene in vintage Hollywood. Beautiful elegant long dresses, holly and baubles set in a spectacular 100 year old mansion.
The photography was used throughout the stores across the UK. Even placed in products to help complete the picture.
Y.CO
Y.CO are a SUPER (yes, uppercase super) yachting company. They wanted a new site that challenges the current perception of yachting companies, their competition sell themselves on the size of their yachts, how much they cost and how many they can offer you – It’s all product and no soul. It might sound clichéd but Y.CO really are passionate about yachting, so we decided to focus on the experience of yachting and the adventures Y.CO can make real. Y.CO sell holidays to you, your family and friends, not yachts.
The site is full of jaw dropping stories from customers and crew and the yachts themselves are presented with individual character. To reflect the quality and service we’ve wrapped this all up in a pretty cutting edge tech build to give these very elite customers an extremely rich and fluid experience full of some amazing full-screen photography.
Firefox Add-ons
Created this lovely little animation for Mozilla to show all the neat stuff you can do with Add-ons for Firefox. An honour and delight to work with the extremely talented animator and illustrator Tim Ruffle. Please note the LOLcat homage at around 00:40. We couldn’t help ourselves.
Save Our NHS
A drastic reform bill concerning the NHS was being pushed through parliament that a lot of the UK felt very strongly against. So we decided to put our heads together and come up with some way in which we could help stop this bill going through. The idea conceived by the smartest member of our group (well done Chris) was to create a different kind of on-line petition. Rather than simply collect thousands of signatures and hand them in to 10 Downing St, we wanted to empower people to get their own MP’s to speak on their behalf in parliament. If you write a letter to your MP, they have to act.
The idea was simple, sign up to the petition and we send every MP of every constituent individual petitions signed by their own constituents. The idea was a run away success with over 40,000 signatures covering every constituency of the UK. We introduced a little bit of a competitive edge by publicly ranking all the constituencies. We had people campaigning the site for us when they saw their area was in the top 10 rank. A little healthy competition never hurt anybody.
SaveOurNHS.org
Skype Group Video Calling
Skype wanted to launch group video calling with a lot of fanfare. So we made this short video with loads of examples of how people might use the technology. A very hectic shoot over 3 days with about 17 sets to be built and struck as we went along. Hectic, but fun!
