DEATH TO THE FLIPPERS » poke

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.

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.

Spooky Shitters 2010

flipper01 — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:05:01 +0000

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.

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.

Movie Mates goes live

flipper01 — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:07:09 +0000

We just launched Movie Mates, a new weekly comedy show helping you work out which mate to take along on Orange Wednesdays. I won’t try to explain the whole thing, I’ll let Phil and Jacob do that in this first episode, they do a much better job than me. Here’s their take on Inception:

This is the fruit of nearly 9 month of concepting, casting, planning, writing, testing, building and a fair amount of pissing about making silly videos about films. It’s all turned out pretty nicely.

All the Time In The World at Pokexhibition

flipper01 — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:53:44 +0000

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

RFB&H Company Photo

flipper02 — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:55:46 +0000

We turned the clocks back to 1960 to have a Mad Men styled day at Poke. Lots of whiskey, lots of sexist emails, and lots of smart attire. Click here for a nice big hi-res version.

Presents and Punishments from Santa’s Lap

flipper01 — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:05:40 +0000

Santa’s Lap has pretty successful with nearly 100 served so far, it’s even made it onto the Poke blog. Here’s an update on some of the fallout: