We didn’t have much time this year for anything too elaborate to decorate the house with for the local Trick or Treaters, so we bunged up a screen and projected Mark Gervais’ excellent Hallowindow animation, put some speakers in the window, stapled up some torn up black sheets around the door and set the smoke machine to ‘auto’. Job Done. Apparently we got over 100 of the little sods turning up, and none of them tried to kill us or burn the house down, which is a sign of gratitude I guess.
Author: flipper01
Driven By You
After a wet week in Devon, I’ve watched more TV ads than normal, and I’ve come to the decision: nothing is as good as Brian May’s love letter to Ford. Come on, find me a better telly ad than this, I dare you.
Quick Draw Saloon
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 – opening night!
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.
Light Speed to Endor
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).
Asploding Digital Design
The Design Museum is running an exhibition called Super Contemporary, it’s about the history of design in London. They kindly asked us geeks at Poke to make a map charting the history of the digital design scene from 1994 to today. So we made this map thingy in flash that you control with a proper real world knob that sits patiently under the big old plasma screen in the exhibit. The knob magic is achieved with some help from an Arduino.
Gathering all the data was not exactly simple, we needed to know staff numbers for most of the digital agencies in London (sorry, we couldn’t include them all) for each quarter of each year for 13 years, and a lot of them don’t exist anymore. A lot of favours were pulled, and many painful wounds re-opened. We thought about being respectful about when each company died during the bubble burst… but then thought ‘sod it’ and made them TOTALLY ASPLODE!!!1 instead.
Of course when I say ‘we’ did it, what I really mean is me n Jas designed it and animated some bits, the hard stuff was done by TV’s Chris Boardman. The data gatherer was The Hoss and Mr Zolty was the knob guy.
Here’s some photos of it being installed, and some mild panic of getting the damn thing working.
The Sound of Orange RockCorps
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.
Unto Others in Virgin Shorts
You’ve probably already seen this, but now it’s in the Virgin Media short film competition. If we win it we will be become the richer than our wildest dreams and shall eat peacock eggs for breakfast. So rate it 5 shiny stars and we’ll give you 7 million pounds each if we win*.
*actually we won’t, get stuffed.
LOLFATCATS
O HAI, CAN I HAS MEME?
Another joke at Poke made flesh – LOLFATCATS.COM
BakerTweet
Yey! We made a thing! Well, when I say ‘we’ I mean Poke, and when I say Poke I mean ‘mainly Zolty and Mattias‘, but we helped out, we even screwed the thing to the wall. Anyway, it’s a lovely device that hangs on the wall of the baker’s kitchen across the road from Poke, when something fresh comes out of the oven they just turn a dial to select what kind of fresh thing it it, press a button, and hey presto a tweet is sent out to hungry new media professionals int he Shoreditch area. It’s all made possible with the lovely Arduino.
We tried to keep it under wraps a bit but it kinda slipped out into the twitter land and news spread like hot cakes (pun very much intended), so we rushed together this promo video in about 2 hours. What’s super sweet is somebody over at Hidden Chemistry has already extended the idea with a bit of a hack – nice!
We’ve had great support from the people over at the Albion (our first test subject) who are chuffed to bits with thier new toy. It’s not many swanky, brand new, Conran designed cafes that let a bunch of geeks screw something weird onto one of their shiny tiled walls.
Get the full skinny at BakerTweet.com
Here’s some pics of the thing being installed.