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Pearl Quest

Our first theme park ride! Jason and I creative directed this ride at Framestore for Wanda Group.

The ride is in Qingdao, China and is based on an ancient legend about a young god called Nezha and his battle with the 4 dragons of the oceans.

It was a 3 year project, during which the team at Framestore designed all of the characters and environments, wrote the script, created many storyboards and pre-vis iterations, commissioned the original musical score and sound effects, and created all of the animation and VFX.

More information here: https://www.framestore.com/work/wanda-group

Immersive Cult: Voodoo

Friends of ours, Immersive Cult (an immersive/experiential/theatrical company), asked us to help come up with some concepts for a Voodoo themed event in a very exclusive London venue for Halloween. We had free reign to change every room in the venue, so we drew up a master concept that transformed the swanky club into a mix of a decaying New Orleans Voodoo underground, with a bit of a hot and steamy backstreet Blues bar.

The night had a cast of characters roaming the floor, which were part of an unfolding story. As the night drew on, Marie Laveau (The Voodoo Queen) summoned the Voodoo priest Baron Samedi from his grave. He slowly possessed the night dwellers, and led them all into a voodoo dance frenzy.

We laid all of this out into a presentation along with sketches and mood boards, and then (due to other commitments) left it in Immersive Cult’s hands to bring to life. What we experienced when we finally arrived on Halloween was amazing. They utterly surpassed any expectations. The set was spot on. The performers were eerily authentic. The story was effortlessly weaved into the night… and on top of that, everyone seemed to have a blast.

Immersive Cult is led by two brilliant dudes we met on a few Secret Cinema projects – Francesco Pastori and Garrett Moore. These guys know their stuff, please throw all of your immersive project briefs in their general direction, you won’t be disappointed.

Secret Cinema: Brazil

Since before we started working with Secret Cinema, we’d always come out of one of their shows after a great night and say “when are they going to man up and do Brazil?”. They manned up.

We were involved very early on this one (as usual collaborating with mega developer Stephen Emslie), we helped concept and create the pre-narative experience audience members take part in during the month leading up to the show. How they interacted with the system directly influenced their final show experience.

The moment any audience member bought a ticket, they became employees of G.O.O.D., a fictional company that mimics the bureaucratic and brutal themes of the film (remember we can’t blow the cover of what the film actually is yet). Employees are given access to the company intranet after filling a deliberately lengthy appraisal form. Here they can keep abreast of all company developments, as well as access a G.O.O.D. subsidiary division called D.R.E.A.M.S, a research company that all employees have to record their dreams with.

Employees are also tasked to form connections with their colleagues by collecting Social Identification Numbers from each other using the commenting system to increase their rank in the company.

A few days before the show, each employee is informed they have been transferred to a new department and given instructions of the proper dress code required for their new role.

On the night of the show, employees are instructed to report to G.O.O.D. HQ, a 13 story office block in Croydon (where some of Brazil was shot), and G.O.O.D. is revealed as the Government Office Of Data, a play on the Ministry of Information from the film. Depending on your transfer, there were 27 possible starting points to your journey through the show, each with a different story and experience.

We created 60 consoles for the Department of Records, which all employees logged into using their password gained from the intranet. They can then browse all manner of files, videos and games. Each rank of employee is given a different mission to carry out within the 13 story building.

The system referenced the shared office spaces in the film by splitting the screen in two. Pairs of employees shared each console, waiting for their side of the screen to burst back into life.

Of course, just as in the film, you can hack the system to watch a selection of classic films or TV shows, as well as access high level integration reports (as long as Mr. Kurtzman doesn’t catch you).

Hidden away on the top floor was a secret console where employees could ‘delete’ themselves, freeing them from the system. If they tried to log into the intranet after the show they would just see a rolling video of clouds… there was also a secret method to ‘undelete’ yourself, as you can never truly escape the clutches of G.O.O.D.

All of this was just part of an amazing show from Secret Cinema that spanned the entire 13 floors and basement, with countless adventures to be sought out or stumbled upon throughout the night, culminating in a stunning theatrical finale in the central core of the building.

More photos over on our Flickr here.

Fenton: 4GEE Remaster

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.

Secret Cinema: Prometheus

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.

More photos here.

Dogs in Sunglasses

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.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies

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:

Skype on your TV

Skype asked us to do a little promo film for the snazzy new feature that allows you to video call people straight from your TV. We decided to have a bit of fun with the type of things people might do with a giant Skype screen sat in their living room. Using a 360 degree set we created 2 rooms from the opposite sides of the world. We changed the lights from one scene to the next and had our actors run around like mad changing outfits and dragging on props. It’s a bit abstract, and you can see the camera track and crew (look really close in the TV’s camera view) but that’s all intentional. If it’s not real, we didn’t want it to pretend to be anything other than what it was, a promo.

Glastotag

It was the Glastonbury festival’s 40th birthday, and Orange’s 10th year of sponsorship. We wanted to do something special, something to capture that one moment in time. We created Glastotag. From the main pyramid stage, with a capacity crowd, we took one gigantic photograph that was detailed enough to pick out the faces of all 70,000 people in the crowd.

This was uploaded to a site that allowed people to zoom right into the very back of the field, find themselves and the new friends they’d made and tag them in Facebook. This turned out to be super popular and the site went on to win the record for the “most people tagged in one online photo” in the Guinness Book of Records!

Great Clock Animation (Big Ben)

Our touch screen guide to the inner working of The Great Clock (that’s Big Ben kids) has been installed into it’s custom built wooden paneled unit half-way up The Clock Tower. Wonderfully styled to fit in with all the pomp and tradition of parliament. Try out the animation below, or ask your MP for a tour. WARNING, it’s 394 steps to the top.

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