DEATH TO THE FLIPPERS – Page 4 – Various stuff from the Flippers

Every photo I took on my phone in 2012

Does what it says on the tin really. I’ve popped a mobile friendly version up on Vimeo, in case you need it.

UPDATE: I’ve been asked how I put this video together. Well, prepare to witness my geekness…

I love little photo projects people do. Martin Parr (a hero of mine) has many collections, including parking spaces, people on mobile phones, or even the simple self portrait. His sense of humour tickles me.

I’ve never found what I wanted to collect, at the end of each year I regret not having set myself a witty brief at the beginning of the year. So this year I thought what if I’ve sub-consciously collected everything? Which I have, on my phone. Just as a silly experiment, I wanted to see what would happen if I dumped all the photos I’ve taken in a year into an image sequence, no editing or cutting bits out. Would it be a mess? Would it be kinda OK, I think it’s… kinda OK. It helps that I tend to take many photos of the same thing, so the object is allowed to hang for a fraction of a second over a few frames. I was inspired by this excellent time-lapse of a road trip… I’ll be ripping this idea off soon.

To do this, first off, I have an app called DropSnap installed on my Android Phone. It automatically backs up every photo I take to Dropbox. You can do this using the official Dropbox app (on iPhone too) but DropSnap gives me some more filtering options, which means I can sync more than just the regular camera roll (Instagram, Snapseed, etc). So that’s been busy stuffing photos up into the clouds like a weird hoarder’s heaven. This made it easy to find every photo I took in 2012 and dump them in one big folder.

The tricky bit was preparing them for the video. All the landscape and portrait photos needed to sit central and have the extra black space on the top and bottom or the sides (depending on their orientation) to make up the space in the video. In steps the work horse that is Photoshop Image Processor! After a bit of head scratching and swearing I created a workflow that did the job. First, I made an action that puts any image into the middle of a black 1080p sized canvas. You can download mine here if you like. Then I ran the Image Processor to resize everything, combined with my action to centre them on the black background. The settings should look like this:

Then I opened my old friend After Effects. To create an image sequence you just drag the image folder directly into the project window. I dumped the sequence into a 1080p composition, added some Tom Waits and Bob’s your Mother’s brother! I hope that’s of some help if you want to try it out yourself. It’s a nice collecting project you can do without having to even think about it. Which is good for me as I’m very poor at thinking.

Poke Hack Day 2012

We tried a new approach to Hack Day at Poke this year. Rather than building something digital, we wanted something a little more hands on. So the brief was set to “build a board game”. Everyone was given a box, some dice, counters etc, and 24 hours to build a complete game. There would be no judges, and no opportunity to pitch your game same with one of the games played in casino which can be viewed at this site https://www.casinospil.net/mr-green. Instead every team plays every game and scores them on a how fun there are, how well the instructions are written and how good does it look.

My team created “Watch Out! Willy!”. All set in Will’s very opulent manor. You play the part of some thugs trying to rob the place, and at the same time, you control Will roaming the hall in his glowing hot pants trying to catch you all. If you’re caught in the beam of light, you’re in for a punishment.

Gav’s team made “The Hand Job”. I think he may win the ‘most double entendre in a game’ award. Players take on the guise of a bank robber trying to nick as much loot as they can, both from the bank and each other. The tricky bit is they all have to physically ‘walk’ around the board wearing their cardboard characters on their knuckles.

More photos here.

Poke Christmas Fireplace

This Christmas, we built built an animating fireplace in Poke’s lobby. Using the excellent Pixel Fireplace software by Ted Martins, the fire is a living pixely thing, that needs feeding with logs, and can do many things like roast pixel marshmallows or pixel hot-dogs. The pleasant sound of a crackling pixel wood fire echoed around the lobby all of December.

A few more photos here.

Secret Cinema: The Shawshank Redemption

For Secret Cinema’s production of The Shawshank Redemption we helped out with the pre-narrative and designed the digital system that led the audience from buying a ticket, to being in a court room having your life stripped away from you.

Weeks before you attended the show, our microsite for the fictional State of Oak Hampton, took your ticket number and delivered you your new life. This would be in the form of a FaceBook cover image detailing your new name and particulars. Everyone was from America, and everyone was male (as in the film). The system, developed by our always excellent pal Stephen Emslie, generated over 12,500 realistic men’s names and profiles. You could also use a Twibbon to style your profile photo so it appears to be stapled to your profile.

Extended versions of these profiles were then printed out and handed to you when you receive your sentence in court. Which we then used throughout the experience for example if you’re dragged before the parole board, or attend a work gang.

The site was a very non-nonsense institutional feeling experience, with a simple form for your details and links out to further news and information from the State of Oak Hampton. Learning from our work with the Prometheus show, we streamlined the options available to the audience to make it as simple as possible, but still a unique and mysterious experience for all.

Mappin & Web + Goldsmiths campaigns

And now for something rather glamorous we’re working on at Poke. As part of the work we have done for a jewellery brands; Mappin & Web, and Goldsmiths, we have created a few photography campaigns. Mappin & Web speak to an older more high end audience that just want to have fun (whilst wearing diamonds and gold). Goldsmiths is a MASSIVE high-street brand that we’re injecting a sense of fashion.

First up we have some shots for M&W Autumn. A really fun day’s shoot out at Port Lympne in Kent.

Christmas! We’ve tried to make things a bit more seductive and eccentric, rather than snowballs and eggnog. Mappin & Web just want to make their customers smile, which is a great brief.

Moving onto Goldsmiths, here’s their autumn campaign. Everything is much more theatrical and special. We created a fairytale setting based on The Secret Garden.

For Christmas we set the scene in vintage Hollywood. Beautiful elegant long dresses, holly and baubles set in a spectacular 100 year old mansion.

The photography was used throughout the stores across the UK. Even placed in products to help complete the picture.

The Big Sale

We entered this year’s 48 Hour Film Project competition, which, as the name suggests, means you have 48 hours to make a film. To make sure there’s no head-starts we’re all given a strict briefing on the Friday night at the Prince Charles Cinema before we deliver our final films on the Sunday night. This years brief said that we needed to include the following in the film:

– a character named named Charlie Cipriani who is a minor celebrity
– some sort of cream
– a line of dialogue”Let me tell you a secret”
– a randomly assigned genre, we got Romance

We worked with Eze Asnaghi, so this is an official Bingo Pictures production! It was a very hectic 48 hours and I don’t think we’d ever have attempted a film like this without the strict brief, but we’re all really pleased with what we got. We even won an award; Best Ensemble Acting! Which is due to our great actors Gavin Lennon and Caroline Roussel-Barucco (Caroline hadn’t even met any of us until the day of the shoot, what a trooper). Lot’s more people to thank, but you’ll have to watch the film to see their names in the end credits ;-)

Cinema on Thames

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.

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.

Great Outdoors Roadtrip

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.

Still want more photos? Go see the whole set.

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.