So I built a little mount thingy and used it to strap a camera (Contour+) to my knee, then walked around various places in america filming my foot. This is what it looks like:
Places featured here include Devil’s Tower, the toilets at Devil’s Tower, the wilderness near Casper in Wyoming (look out for the shot gun shell cameo!), a chuck wagon, the hotel Wild Bill Cody used to stay in Cody, Bonneville salt flats in Utah, a massive old steam train in Nevada and Lake Tahoe in California.
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
This Halloween we threw together a quick home haunt for the local trick or treating kids… there may have been a few nightmares.
Here’s some photos, with a few shots of the competition as well, we’re actually starting to get a little bit of a Halloween scene going on in our neighbourhood!
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:
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.
Hurrah! Scareworld Magazine (“Europe’s Premier Publication Covering the Scare Attractions and Entertainment Industry” don’t ya know) has done a double page spread all about our show, Machine. Jolly good.
For years I’ve been noticing frames from some of my favourite films look like could have come from a Wes Anderson film. Whack on a more Wes Anderson style title in the correct font (he always uses Futura in various guises, normally bold in yellow or white) and the idea tells itself. I’ve made a few up now and put them here: WESIFIED.com.
The first film I ever noticed this on was Ghostbusters, and I’ve been wanting to do something with it for years. I’ve made up a fair bunch of films now and plan to keep adding to the blog whenever I spot a another frame that looks the part.
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.
Just dusted off the photos we took behind the scenes of Machine. We’ve gone to town on the descriptions this time so if you really want to know how we did what we did, head over to the Flickr set, make yourself a cuppa and get reading. You’ll find a few abandoned prototype ideas in there as well, and some actual blood.
We’ve finally dismantled the set for Fangoria, The Machine now <sad face>, but we did take lot’s of photos of it all before it got trashed <less sad face>. We now have a nice empty garage except for a large steampunk time machine sat in the corner. We’re open to offers, it has some very minor dinosaur related damage, and a few thousand years on the clock.
