DEATH TO THE FLIPPERS » poke

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. If you like what you see, keep an eye on orange.co.uk/moviemates for weekly shows, blog posts and of course there is the obligatory twittering @ow_moviemates

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:

That’s a Cappuccino!

flipper01 — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:10:16 +0000

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

flipper01 — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:13:18 +0000

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?).

Spooky Shitter II

flipper02 — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:51:05 +0000

Another year, another scary toilet instalation at Poke. This year we decieded to hit every toilet at once so there was no where to hide. Each loo is themed on a famous horror movie. Some are more subtle than others, but all are enough to make you mess your slacks. Lucky you’re already in the toilet. Guess the themes! (or just look at the files names)

Me and some friends murder Kids

flipper01 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:37:34 +0000

Poke recently released The Sound of Orange Rockcorps into the world (I did a little promo video for it a while ago). I used it to make this beautiful rendition of MGMT’s Kids using the voices of me and any of my Facebook friends who have used the site to record some notes.

I didn’t actually work on the site at all but I do sit on a desk where most of the development and design happened – you know that scene in Apollo 13 when they realised everything is knackered on the space ship and the geeks back on earth have to panic about trying to work out how fix it? It was basically like that, everyday, for weeks on end, I don’t think any of them slept. It really didn’t look like an easy thing to make. Well done lads.

Photos from the Quick Draw Saloon

flipper01 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:09:11 +0000

The Quick Draw Saloon at the last ever V&A Village Fete went down a storm, which had a lot to do with all the work that went it to making and running the thing by the guys and gals of Stuff Club (that, and the fact we were giving out shots of whiskey for 50p a go). I can gladly report that we were thoroughly badly behaved, and successfully encouraged others to do likewise. Some highlights include branding the word ‘LOSER’ over the face of a child, one of punters accidentally fall off the wagon after ten years of not touching a drop of the good stuff and comanding a baying mob to shout out obscene phrases until the wee hours while watching people try to draw naughty things (such as ‘syphilis‘).

Clicky here for more photos.

Quick Draw Saloon

flipper01 — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:10:14 +0000

Tonight it’s the V&A Village Fete grand opening, and us lot at Stuff Club (which is a gang of do-ers at Poke) have built the Quick Draw Saloon. Come along tonight or tomorrow and pit your speed drawing skills against another pen slinger. There’s a prize for the winner, and something else for the looser.