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 steam-punk styled adventure through time in the Fangorium. With 18 months of building and preparation it was by far our most ambitious show to date. When you pick a theme like steam-punk you can’t do half measures. This has enjoyed some massive Internet fame when Cory Doctorow called it “jaw-dropping awesomesauceular” on Boing Boing, which was of course totally awesome.

As an added bonus this year we’ve made a behind the scenes video, we’ve called The Engineers’ View. It’s a complicated beast to watch, but I guess that’s kind of the point… good luck.

Here’s the invite video:

…and some photos (more here):

…or check out all the behind the scenes production photos - here’s a few now:

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.

So it turns out the best instrument to accompany an orchestra playing Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory (also known as the Battle Symphony) is a set of 193 live cannons.

Easily the geekiest thing we’ve ever done.

Thanks to the Boob for the loan of his snazzy little camera.

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:

… and The A-Team:

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.

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.

Finally got round to doing some back-ups at the weekend and found this timelapse video we shot ages ago on a jolly ’round Romford. It’s been on Vimeo for a while but I don’t think we ever blogged it. So now we have – hooray! It’s got my favourite sound effects ever in it (play with headphones on, hit the full-screen button and press your nose to the screen for maximum enjoyment).

Today, we at Poke bid a fond farewell to TV’s Chris Boardman. During his year break from uni here at Poke we have worked him to within an inch of his life. Which is of course how all student placements should be handled. He’s heading back up north to finish his learnings (see: slacking). We dearly hope he graces our door again, so we can work him even harder. He’s responsible for the speedy development of the interactive map we created for the Design Museum and various other behind the scenes development breakthroughs. We put together this video installation down in the mess hall to honour the chap. See you soon Boarders!

I made a little video thingy. It sits on the side of a taxi cab which is actually a mobile photo booth/sound recorder for something called The Sound of Orange Rockcorps. What these photos and sounds are going to be used for is a bit secret, and we’re still working on it a surprise!

There’s more information on the Orange RockCorps blog.