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.
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).
Today, we at Poke bid a fond farewell to TV’s Chris Boardman. During his year break from uni here at Poke we have worked him to within an inch of his life. Which is of course how all student placements should be handled. He’s heading back up north to finish his learnings (see: slacking). We dearly hope he graces our door again, so we can work him even harder. He’s responsible for the speedy development of the interactive map we created for the Design Museum and various other behind the scenes development breakthroughs. We put together this video installation down in the mess hall to honour the chap. See you soon Boarders!
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.
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.
Revolution Magazine just published their top 10 of augmented reality campaigns. Rubberduckzilla makes a new entry at number 2! Chuffed to bits to be standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the best AR sites out there. Thanks Revelotion. Read the article here.
Us chaps at Poke have launched the third augmented reality game for Rubberduckzilla. This time we partnered with The Sun, and what jolly fine people they were to work with too (cheers Mike!). The AR marker was printed in a double page spread all about Rubberduckzilla. Punters the bought The Sun simply had to visit www.rubberduckzilla.com hold the paper up to their webcam and all hell broke lose. You can also play News Splash by printing out the AR marker from the site. Here’s a quick video I shot to demonstrate what happens for those poor people that don’t have a webcam.
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.
O HAI, CAN I HAS MEME?
Another joke at Poke made flesh – LOLFATCATS.COM
Just finished this site for Oasis. If you have a webcam, you can turn yourself into a giant rubber laser blasting duck and blast the crap out of the city! Just print out this marker, hold it on your head and hit spacebar to start the burninating! Developed by the amazing code monkeys at LingoBee. More games coming soon to www.RUBBERDUCKZILLA.com
