This Halloween we threw together a quick home haunt for the local trick or treating kids… there may have been a few nightmares.
Here’s some photos, with a few shots of the competition as well, we’re actually starting to get a little bit of a Halloween scene going on in our neighbourhood!
We’d like to proudly present the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies online store. Here you’ll find all your monster supply needs, from fang floss to a range of tinned fear (now in 10 flavours).
The store on Hoxton Street, London (yes, it’s a real place) actually hides a secret door, that (if you can work out the password) leads to the Ministry of Stories – a child literacy charity that hosts imagination flexing events for kids to write fantastic stories (much in the same vein as 826 Valencia with their pirate store in SF, Super Hero Supplies in NY and the Time Travel Mart in LA).
There’s a gang of us involved in The Monster Supplies site, Me n Jas did the design, concept and product photography, UX was by Mike Towber, Simon Pearson built the thing, Alistair Hall directed the art, and Chris Meachin held the reins and ran the whole project. We also designed the launch party for the site, along with some brilliant monster animations from Julian Frost, and monsterous food by Emma Cakehead. Here’s some photos of the party:
We made this video to announce the new integration between Skype and Facebook. We used a much more realistic feel for this one, and told the story from footage shot actually in the Skype the client…. Well, it looks like it’s sure in the Skype client right? We actually shot most of the scenes across Skype, so the actors can perform with their fellow characters, which helped us get much more believable conversations.
Hurrah! Scareworld Magazine (“Europe’s Premier Publication Covering the Scare Attractions and Entertainment Industry” don’t ya know) has done a double page spread all about our show, Machine. Jolly good.
For years I’ve been noticing frames from some of my favourite films look like could have come from a Wes Anderson film. Whack on a more Wes Anderson style title in the correct font (he always uses Futura in various guises, normally bold in yellow or white) and the idea tells itself. I’ve made a few up now and put them here: WESIFIED.com.
The first film I ever noticed this on was Ghostbusters, and I’ve been wanting to do something with it for years. I’ve made up a fair bunch of films now and plan to keep adding to the blog whenever I spot a another frame that looks the part.
The Flickometer is a tool we made for Orange BAFTA that shows you at a glance what the internet (ie: Twitter) is saying about anything related to this year’s BAFTA nominated films, and how much buzz is surrounding each one, in real time. You can filter the results by just films, actors, directors, or star your own favourite topics and compare their results. You can even look at results from the past to see how the buzz has changed.
Just dusted off the photos we took behind the scenes of Machine. We’ve gone to town on the descriptions this time so if you really want to know how we did what we did, head over to the Flickr set, make yourself a cuppa and get reading. You’ll find a few abandoned prototype ideas in there as well, and some actual blood.
We’ve finally dismantled the set for Fangoria, The Machine now <sad face>, but we did take lot’s of photos of it all before it got trashed <less sad face>. We now have a nice empty garage except for a large steampunk time machine sat in the corner. We’re open to offers, it has some very minor dinosaur related damage, and a few thousand years on the clock.
Hurray! We made a book of some (well, quite a lot) of our photos from our road trips across the states. It’s a bit of a precursor to the documentary film we’re still editing so we’ve given it the same name.
If you like it, you can go see the whole thing on Blurb’s site, and if you *really* like it, you can buy it from them as well.
O man, we totally visited Roswell, New Mexico. It was never one of those ‘I MUST GO THERE ONE DAY OR I WILL DIE WITH A SAD FACE’ kinda places, it just happened to be on the way between New York and California, so we popped in. And boy were we glad we did, it’s silly, and a bit serious/mental, and then silly again. Here’s some things:
First thing we did was Alien Zone, Areas 51 – a place with about 20 alien scenes that you’re encouraged to climb about and take silly photos.. SOLD.
Then we thought we should get the ‘real’ facts and checked out the International UFO Museum and Research Centre just up the road, it was closing for the night so we ran about and took photos instead of actually doing any reading or learning (we’re on holiday, why would we want to do a thing like that?).
And the next day we had to go and see what all the adverts we kept seeing around town for the Roswell Space Walk were all about, they boasted a Paisley-Horvak TVG9000 (no, me neither), how can you refuse? Luckily it was silly, quite silly.
We organised a tour with some random dude of the ACTUAL HANGER where an alien may or may not have had it’s bit’s cut out by sinister looking military types. We got to the car park next to the hanger and looked for a car with a large inflatable alien tied to roof (as arranged) but our tour was a no show, damn it, the truth is still out there.
Here’s many more photos of our time in Roswell:
