DEATH TO THE FLIPPERS » work

Firefox Add-ons

flipper02 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:32:22 +0000

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.

Skype from your Home Phone

flipper01 — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:34:47 +0000

Here’s a video we made for Skype about their home phone product. It was a tricky one to concept, you plug this bit of kit into your router and your phone line and you can then make normal phone calls over Skype using your normal phone… so it’s just like making a normal phone call… how do we make that look fun? We cut off the front off a house that’s how.

It was a bit of an evolution for us for the Skype videos – we chose to tell the story with a family rather than a big cast of characters, and used the occasion of moving into a new house (they just need to repair that missing wall and it’ll be lovely, honest) as it gives us a good setting to make lots of phone calls.

It was a pretty technical shoot, we only built a one story house, dressed at as the ground floor for one day, then pulled out the stairs and dressed it as the top floor on day 2. With some tricky camera positions, and a fair amount of computer graphics we plonked the 2 shots on top of each other, added a roof and made a house. Watch out for the slowly tidying house and lighting changes throughout, to help tell the one over arching story of the family’s first day in a new house.

Poke 10

flipper01 — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:27:54 +0000

For Poke’s 10th Birthday, they asked us to come up with a way to celebrate all the things they’ve done without being too chest beating about it. So of course we threw a proper 10 year old’s birthday party, with cake, presents, sweets and everything. To show some of our work we commissioned the great Emma Cakehead to create a series of cakes themed around some of our favourite projects and clients. My favourite was probably the 2 Skype cakes we had at either end of the party Skyping each other:

… amongst many others there was the Spot The Bull cake with edible mud and cow pat, and the Cock-a-Doodle cake with edible ink and many many drawings of cocks:

Of course no 10 year old’s party is complete without a balloon sculptor and face painter on hand:

(these 3 photos are by Ollie Wright, a jolly nice chap and very good photographer)

More photos here.

We also built a showcase of (almost) every bit of work Poke have ever made and put into a microsite themed around a kid’s growth chart. Collating all the content for it was no trivial task.

check it out here: www.pokelondon.com/10

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies

flipper01 — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:08:34 +0000

We’d like to proudly present the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies online store. Here you’ll find all your monster supply needs, from fang floss to a range of tinned fear (now in 10 flavours).

The store on Hoxton Street, London (yes, it’s a real place) actually hides a secret door, that (if you can work out the password) leads to the Ministry of Stories – a child literacy charity that hosts imagination flexing events for kids to write fantastic stories (much in the same vein as 826 Valencia with their pirate store in SF, Super Hero Supplies in NY and the Time Travel Mart in LA).

There’s a gang of us involved in The Monster Supplies site, Me n Jas did the design, concept and product photography, UX was by Mike Towber, Simon Pearson built the thing, Alistair Hall directed the art, and Chris Meachin held the reins and ran the whole project. We also designed the launch party for the site, along with some brilliant monster animations from Julian Frost, and monsterous food by Emma Cakehead. Here’s some photos of the party:

Skype + Facebook

flipper01 — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:47:06 +0000

We made this video to announce the new integration between Skype and Facebook. We used a much more realistic feel for this one, and told the story from footage shot actually in the Skype the client…. Well, it looks like it’s sure in the Skype client right? We actually shot most of the scenes across Skype, so the actors can perform with their fellow characters, which helped us get much more believable conversations.

Flickometer

flipper01 — Sun, 22 May 2011 21:45:48 +0000

The Flickometer is a tool we made for Orange BAFTA that shows you at a glance what the internet (ie: Twitter) is saying about anything related to this year’s BAFTA nominated films, and how much buzz is surrounding each one, in real time. You can filter the results by just films, actors, directors, or star your own favourite topics and compare their results. You can even look at results from the past to see how the buzz has changed.

Save Our NHS

flipper02 — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:29:14 +0000

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

flipper02 — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:33:08 +0000

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!

Skype on your TV

flipper02 — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:49:59 +0000

Skype asked us to do a little promo film for the snazzy new feature that allows you to video call people straight from your TV. We decided to have a bit of fun with the type of things people might do with a giant Skype screen sat in their living room. Using a 360 degree set we created 2 rooms from the opposite sides of the world. We changed the lights from one scene to the next and had our actors run around like mad changing outfits and dragging on props. It’s a bit abstract, and you can see the camera track and crew (look really close in the TV’s camera view) but that’s all intentional. If it’s not real, we didn’t want it to pretend to be anything other than what it was, a promo.

Skype Connect

flipper02 — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:10:04 +0000

This was a tricky product to describe, so we came up with real life examples of how a business might use Skype Connect to save money and get more customers. Really enjoyed designing these big sets with things like a NY Cab cut in half and room full of printers, old servers and geeky stuff.