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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

We’ve haunted the toilets at Poke again, we might have gone too dark this time. Apparently most of the girls have to use toilets on another floor… women eh?

This year we’ve experimented a bit and tried some new tricks, each of the 3 toilets we’ve haunted is possessed by the ghost of a different family member, the Nursery is haunted by ‘baby’ and in this one we’re using chromadepth 3D glasses with UV lit fluorescent paint to make the whole room appear to be in weird ass 3D, you really need to see it in the flesh. It’s a trick that’s pretty old hat in American haunts but we’d not seen it before over here (thanks to Dave for showing us that).

Mother’s room uses projection mapping to make it appear that the door is haunted. Take a seat and watch as the door opens again and again to reveal some bad things happening just outside the door, and sometimes in the door itself.

And Father’s room, well Father isn’t a very nice man at all. Look out for a cameo role in this room played by the latex face mask we had made for our film All The Time in The World.

More photos here.

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.

A short film to introduce the MCFC Hospitality suite. We wanted this film to fall into 2 halves (no pun intended). First, to show the exquisite set-up and pride the staff have in preparation of the flood of fans. Then, the fans having just an amazing day at the game. Using a mix of video and photography we really captured the emotions of the day.