Secret Cinema – Blade Runner


All kinds of awesome from Secret Cinema as usual. This time our shuttle bus taking us to the space port for our flight to the Off World Colonies was pulled over by some Blade Runner dude and diverted to a holding area as a Replicant uprising had caused all flights to be cancelled. We ended up in a  dystopian Los Angeles, circa 2019, complete with snake merchants, eye makers, noodle bars, strip clubs and everything you need to make a pretty damn believable slice of the Blade Runner world.

 

Jason took a Voight-Kampff test, turns out he’s human, who’d have thought? I was rather pleased with my home brew lighty up umbrella. A good time was had by all – except for that stripper replicant who got shot to bits as we filed into the cinema, down-town LA in 2019 is a rough area.

 

Here’s some pics we took, or just pour yourself some whiskey and watch the slide show below.

 

Skype: Know How Videos


Skype products come in all shapes and sizes. We were asked to create a bunch of videos to help people understand the basics on what they all can do, and which is best for them. With limited time and budget we came up with an idea using a simple set and concept that could be used over and over again to tell many scripts for many different products and still keep the creativity fresh each time. You can view all the videos here.

Glastotag


It was the Glastonbury festival’s 40th birthday, and Orange’s 10th year of sponsorship. We wanted to do something special, something to capture that one moment in time. We created Glastotag. From the main pyramid stage, with a capacity crowd, we took one gigantic photograph that was detailed enough to pick out the faces of all 70,000 people in the crowd.

This was uploaded to a site that allowed people to zoom right into the very back of the field, find themselves and the new friends they’d made and tag them in Facebook. This turned out to be super popular and the site went on to win the record for the “most people tagged in one online photo” in the Guinness Book of Records!

All the Time In The World at Pokexhibition

Our short film ‘All the Time in the World’ is finally (just about) finished, and we gave it’s world premier at the Pokexhibiton on Wednesday. The Exhibition is full of stuff by people who work at Poke who might not normally get to display this kind of thing. There’s work from developers, managers, directors, designers and strategists – and whadayaknow? It seems we’re all creative little makers. A real mixed bag of work as well; painting, film, embroidery, steam powered remote control tank, a wig, pop promo, animation, a tweeting typewriter… all sorts. The work will be up on display for another couple of weeks, if you’re anywhere near Poke (trendy Shoreditch) pop in for a cup of tea and a look round.

A few photos of some of the work

Pokexhibtion on the Poke blog

That’s a Cappuccino!

thatsacappuccino
Last week we had a Hack Day at Poke. We were split into teams of about 6 or 7 and given 24 hours to come up with a ‘working thing with a URL’ that’s something to do with the theme: FOOD. The team I was in came up with That’s a Cappuccino! – A campaign to put an end to people ordering a Cappuccino but receiving a Latte. There’s lots of ways to get a cappuccino wrong, but we narrowed it down to the basic ‘golden ratio’ of what it should be made of:

 

1 part espresso, 1 part steamed milk, 1 part foam.

 

With this in mind we’ve built a map, that anybody can contribute to, that simply labels places as “That’s a cappuccino!” or “That’s not a cappuccino!”. We also wrote an open letter to some major cappuccino venders (including Starbucks, Costa and, naturally, The Wild Bean Cafe) asking them how the ensure their cappuccinos are of the correct stanrd and if they’d like to get involved in the campaign and where. Here’s the letter.

 

Our film unit ran about all over over London interviewing baristas about what they think makes the perfect cappuccino, and they even got to meet Gwilym Davies, the UK and world champion barista who is a jolly nice champ and has officially backed our project:

It turned out to be a pretty massive project for 24 hours but we devided and conquered and… didn’t win in the end (The Holy Sandwich won, well done you lot), but there’s still a chance we can get a prize for the most traffic on our site, as well as improving your next cappuccino – so go check out our site, and get adding to that map.

 

Our team (the Golden Ratio) are: Me!, Chris Meachin, Iain Tait, Chris Reeves (the other one), Aina Ørebech, Kate Ducham and Nicky Gibson.

Naughty or Nice


This year, for Christmas, Stuff Club made a Naughty or Nice detector. It works by re-creating the special magical sensors Santa has in his lap which tells him if the children in his groto deserve a lovely gift or a piece of coal. In our version we’ve stripped it down to just a massive over-sized lap (to help create that terror you felt as a child), which deals out a reward or a punishment and sends that result, plus a photo, to naughtyornice.tumblr.com for all to see.

 
This is all made possible by some back-end cleverness by Mattias Gunnerås, some Arduino tinkering by Tracy Tsang, and some wood cutting/screwing and painting by me, Jas, Badger and Martin Rose. It was a bit of a mammoth task as we had to get the whole thing done from scratch over the weekend so we could keep it a surprise from the rest of Poke, but we managed it – well done gang!

 
Here’s some construction photos (have you ever wanted to see under Santa’s trousers?).
naughtyornice