Category: projects

Trick or Treat 2016: Toxic Ooze

We created a toxic ooze factory theme this time, and by handing out Chromadepth glasses to the kids all the crazy colours we used appeared to go a bit loopy in 3D depth. It took us months to paint all the scenic and props, and LOTS of luminous paint. Our garage was left looking a bit weird.

The whole thing was an intense impact on the sense, with industrial alarms going of, a ton of strobe lights and disorientating 3D effects. Fun for all!

We also collected for Cancer Research this year and found everybody really keen to donate, so a huge thank you for everybody who came along and dug deep.

Trick or Treat 2014: The Dungeon

As is always the case, we decided to up our game a bit for the Trick or Treaters this Halloween so we built a proper haunted house walk through maze in the front garden. I doubt any of the kids got the story of a journey through an old haunted mansion, out through the graveyard, a brief encounter with the ghostly family that haunt the place, and then into the secret hidden dungeon out the back (watch out for the mad monk!), but they seemed to enjoy it anyway. Except for the kids that either ran away or burst into tears – the sign of a job well done right?.
Halloween seems to have become a bit of a thing in our town of Collier Row, with families driving from all over to wander the streets in costumes looking for the many houses that make a real effort, and even build small haunts like ours. We had over 400 kids come through our doors alone.
Now… what to do next year?








A few more photos here.

Trick or Treat 2013

 
We upped our game a bit for this year’s Halloween Trick-or-Treaters. We put a canopy over the whole front garden which allowed us to create a spookier atmosphere with some new lighting and projection effects, added a load of new props and Dad parked the car on a Zombie.
 
People seemed to be really getting into it this year with packs of kids roaming the streets all in great costumes and lots of other houses in the neighbourhood putting on little haunts and effects. It actually felt like that scene from E.T. that I always wanted Halloween to feel like.
 
By counting the sweets mum gave out, we must have seen 340 kids, and at least 3 of them left in tears… our work here is done.

The Hill Valley Project

hvp_header
A few years ago, me and 2 other dudes (Martin Rose and Tom Hartshorn) had an idea that went a bit like this: “Hey, let’s run Back to the Future live on Twitter”.
It’s 2 years later and we’ve done it – www.theHillValleyProject.com.
We registered 50 separate twitter accounts for all the characters (and some of the objects) in the film, and starting on October 25th at 7.45am (the exact time and date the film starts), they all started telling the story of the film in real time. It takes 6 days for the whole story to play out.
Here’s a few choice tweets:

 


We took it all a bit further with things like setting up foursquare locations and having characters check in…


…and giving Lorraine an obsession with instagram selfies and hashtags:

We even gave Biff a match.com account:


One of the many reason we did this (most of them were around the theme of Back to the Future being awesome) was to raise awareness and encourage donations to The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. They’re trying to speed up the time it takes to get newly developed drugs to market by concentrating on one specific part of the process and helping to provide support and access to research when and where it’s needed.
So, how did we do it? Well, Tom had already done a very similar project a few years back running Home Alone on twitter over Christmas, so we had a rough idea, but working out the times all for the tweets was a massive task. There’s lots of times in the story you just have to hit, like the time the car first time travels, or the lighting strike on the clock tower, so we had those as starting points. The rest we worked out by events like the school day starting, or looking at the position of the sun and working that out for California at that time of year.
We then had to re-write the entire film in tweets, adding in any screen shots that looked like they could be Twitpics, links to YouTube videos for the soundtrack and just making the tweets sound like tweets with the odd #LOL, ;-), and the occasional #FML. We ended up with 1211 tweets, all hand written and all cross references each other with @replies.
We gave each account it’s own biography, background image, profile image and cover image.
profiles
We then entered the whole lot into a social media management system that was logged in to all the accounts and set each tweet to send at the desired time.
The system only went wrong once when I noticed we’d entered in all the dates a day out of sync when Marty wakes up on the first day before he goes to meet doc in the car park in 1985. I fixed this by using a technique of utter blind panic, and switching to manually tweeting all accounts for a couple of hours in the early hours of Saturday morning – I managed to get far enough ahead in the end to re-arrange and re-import the rest of the tweets. I felt a bit like this moment:

 


It all went down very well with Gizmodo calling us Brilliant Wackos.
giz
Questlove Jenkins become a bit of a super fan tweeting about the project and then re-tweeting some of the characters:

 


OK Go liked it as well, which was nice:

 


And I was interviewed on *THE* Back to the Future Pod-cast, the Flux Capaci-Cast.
Even though it’s all played out now, you can still witness it in all it’s glory here: storify.com/flipper01/thehillvalleyproject

By the way, if you’re looking for a place to stay in the UK with a large group, please try this site.

Making a Lego GoPro Time Lapse Dolly

 
We got a Pizza oven! …and this time-lapse film of us building the stand for it is made using a little dolly unit I built for our GoPro. We’ve always wanted to have a simple small unit to plonk on a table during breakfast and slowly trundle forward, but such a device simple doesn’t seem to exist. So making one seems to be the only option.
 
Here’s a few prototypes:
 

 
First I tried building a little winch with a super geared down motor, and a trolley for the GoPro made of Lego. It worked, but it was cumbersome, and tricky to set-up.
 
Then I put the winch on the trolley and used it to power the wheels. Much better, but it was too fast and a bit noisy.
 
For the final design (although I’m sure I’ll tweak it again), I rebuilt the motor and gears using an old Lego motor and all the cogs I could find in our Lego box that’s sat in the cupboard since we were kids. Now it’s super slow, and the Lego motor runs almost silent. Oh Lego, is there nothing you can’t do?
 
I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “But what does it look like if you strap an infrared filter to the GoPro and set it off on it’s jolly way down the garden path?”. Well it looks a bit like this:
 

 
Here’s the brave little soldier in action: