Our chum Tom Hostler was organising his mate’s stag do as a boat trip along the Thames and he asked us to put on a little surprise for the party. While they were all merrily floating along the river somewhere, me, Jas and Chris can-do Meachin built a surprise cinema and pub on the bank of the river down near Henley. When the boats arrived all was set, the playlist started with Rambo, Cannonball Run and American Werewolf in London, the pub tent (complete with antique pub sign and working optics from Tom) was flowing, and many fine steaks gave their lives gladly on the BBQ. A good (and astonishingly cold) time was had by all.
To show how much better watching YouTube videos is on 4G from EE, compared to 3G, we took Fenton (the UK’s favourite viral video), and remastered it.
We worked with Passion Raw and David Allen, an Emmy award winning wildlife director. It was a full 2 week wildlife shoot across 3 locations with a huge range of wild and trained animals. Then another month of post production work back in London to add in some of more fantasy special guest stars for the big ending.
Last year we went on an American road trip (again) with a more of an outdoorsy angle. It was awesome. Starting in Colorado, then all over Wyoming, a brief dip into Idaho, then down through Utah, across Nevada and finishing up in good ol’ California. See the whole set of photos here, or scroll on down for some choice cuts.
We worked with Secret Cinema on their show for Prometheus. To say we were excited to be working with them is an understatement, it was pretty much a dream project. Our main role was motion graphics and 3D animation that was viewed all around the event (as seen above) which we gots lots of help from our pals at Framestore.
The show was huge, the biggest Secret Cinema had ever staged, and we only had a month to pull it together. In a massive disused building (195,000 square feet – the size of a city block) near Euston station, London, we helped them build the space ship Prometheus, complete with cockpit, hydroponics lab, loading bay (with actual vehicles from the film), upper class quarters, a secret restaurant, hyper sleep chambers, medical lab, mess hall and an android production line as well a chunk of the alien planet surface ready to explore. On top of this they also had to build 3 top of the line cinema to screen the film in Dolby 3D – all of this was completed in about a month.
We helped out in a few ways, firstly we helped tour the building in the inception of the show and helped work out how some of the sets could be built and what was the best way to move 1,000 people through the story we wanted to tell in the show. We then moved on to helping with everything digital. We edited a promo video for Brave New Ventures – the fake company we were using to theme the event around (the actual film was kept a secret right up until the titles roll on the screen).
We also designed and built a website (enroll.bravenewventures.org/) which kicked off the narrative of you becoming an employee of Brave New Ventures once you have your ticket, with a system to allow you to choose your occupation along with instruction about what your uniform should look like and information of pre-flight missions you could attend – all of the back end programming (the hard stuff) was done by the brilliant Stephen Emslie.
It was great to walk around the event and see our animations weaved into the ship, and especially odd/awesome to have people cheering at our work as they all crowded in to the cockpit to watch the ship land. The brilliant work from the actors really bought it all to life.
We also built a laser scanner prop that was used on the missions to the planet surface by a member of the audience.
We very much hope to be working with these guys again.
Diesel asked us to promote their new range of sunglasses, so we put them on some dogs and filmed them. We had our reasons though – there are 4 hero styles in the new range, each is designed for a different type of lifestyle, we thought it would be a bit cheesy to show these lifestyles with humans, so … dogs then. This project is part of our work to help shift Diesel’s brand to be more female orientated and a higher quality experience, so with this in mind the video was shot with all the production values of a high end fashion shoot, including a sweet Phantom camera shooting at speeds of up to 2,000 fps for maximum water droplet and fur flowing action.
So our stars didn’t have to stand around on set for too long (they told us the Doberman would savage us if we laughed at it, his sister is an attack dog), we used stunt dogs to set-up the lights, they were my favourite dogs.
The old “never work with kids or animals” thing seemed to be a bit of a myth, when working with human actors there’s a lot more explaining and directing and sobbing between takes – with dogs it’s all about the frankfurters.
A Facebook app to promote Diesel’s new sunglasses range. They have 4 hero styles in the range, all with very different styles and designed for different lifestyles – our app lets you preview how each of the sunglasses would style your summer by taking any photo you upload to Facebook, and making a styled copy of it in your own ‘Sunamatic’ photo album. We’re using lots of effects like adding a multiple exposure of an older photo, which are randomised each time, so like taking a roll of film into the chemist you never really know how they’re going to turn out. Check back in every now and then to see how your summer is being styled, and if you don’t like it, try on a different style of shades. You also use the app to manually style older photos or re-style and new ones.
A microsite to showcase Diesel’s new spring/summer 2012 collection of eyewear (or”sunglasses”). To fit with Diesel’s new more feminine high quality brand values we gave the site a very elegant and contemporary feel while still keep it as minimal and easy to browse as possible. All the glasses for each gender as visible on one page, in all colour variations, to allow you to browse them all as if they were laid out in a store in front of you.
We directed this short film back in 2008 and finished editing it in 2010. It was written by a friend of ours, Richard Johnson, and is all about what would happen if a great discovery lands in the lap of somebody who doesn’t know what to do with it. Starring another good friend of ours, the comedian, writer and actor Neil Edmond, and co-starring Rosemary Smith.
It picked up third place in The Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival 2011 (part of The Seattle International Film Festival), and the EMP Museum in Seattle are now screening the film daily on the largest indoor LED screen in America… which is kind of amazing.
We shot it in our garage with the help of many people including:
Colin Butler bought all his camera gear and was our director of photography
Paul Parsons was an extremely patient sound man (it seems a summer weekend is a popular time to get the lawnmower out)
Nathan McLaughlin spend an incredible amount of time and talent on the make-up for the end scene
Andrew Barnabas made it all sound great with his sound mixing
The Boob was our voice of reason during the editing
We made a little website to house the short films we made the other week and list all the people who helped us make them (cheers gang). We’re going to do some more, not sure what or when, but this is the place to watch:
We made this little video for the Monster Supplies Store working with excellent Terry Saunders who wrote and performed as both heads of the 2 headed presenter. It’s a short excerpt from the Monster Supplies shopping channel, viewed by many bored monster security guards working the day shift, or insomniac vampires.
