In our first time-lapse of one of American raodtrips we stuck to our guns and showed the whole thing warts (boring bits) and all. This year we deliberately shot things from different angles and at different speeds so we can make a more entertaining edit, which I think we achieved? What do you think?
This trip took 17 days and when through Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Nevada and California. Stick around for the thrilling 360° finale – which is a journey to and from Disneyland, of course.
Created this lovely little animation for Mozilla to show all the neat stuff you can do with Add-ons for Firefox. An honour and delight to work with the extremely talented animator and illustrator Tim Ruffle. Please note the LOLcat homage at around 00:40. We couldn’t help ourselves.
Just over a year ago we went to visit Tim Hunkin, a lovely chap who builds amazing machines to display in his arcade, The Under the Pier Show, on Southworld Pier. After a behind the scenes tour of the pier, we went back to his workshop for a cup of tea and a special preview of his new machine: Pet or Meat? We shot this video then, but decided to keep it secret until the machine is on display. Well guess what? It went on display months ago!
When you stumble over one of these in a deserted playground somewhere in Wales, it’s rude not to have a go.
Using the same mount I built for the video of my foot walking around America, here are our hands shooting a series of progressively larger guns.
Watching the video, the journey you take will start at cute little Ruger .38 then you’ll wander past a Beretta .45. A Desert Eagle .50 will loom into view briefly, don’t be afraid, not yet. Oh look, a P90! My how fast you fire! OK, you know I said to not be afraid just now? Well now it’s time. The great big Barrett M82 .50 was, by any definition, a beast.
All this happened at the surprisingly friendly Get Some Guns and Ammo – just south of Salt Lake City, Utah. Shot on a Contour+.
Here’s a video we made for Skype about their home phone product. It was a tricky one to concept, you plug this bit of kit into your router and your phone line and you can then make normal phone calls over Skype using your normal phone… so it’s just like making a normal phone call… how do we make that look fun? We cut off the front off a house that’s how.
It was a bit of an evolution for us for the Skype videos – we chose to tell the story with a family rather than a big cast of characters, and used the occasion of moving into a new house (they just need to repair that missing wall and it’ll be lovely, honest) as it gives us a good setting to make lots of phone calls.
It was a pretty technical shoot, we only built a one story house, dressed at as the ground floor for one day, then pulled out the stairs and dressed it as the top floor on day 2. With some tricky camera positions, and a fair amount of computer graphics we plonked the 2 shots on top of each other, added a roof and made a house. Watch out for the slowly tidying house and lighting changes throughout, to help tell the one over arching story of the family’s first day in a new house.
So I built a little mount thingy and used it to strap a camera (Contour+) to my knee, then walked around various places in america filming my foot. This is what it looks like:
Places featured here include Devil’s Tower, the toilets at Devil’s Tower, the wilderness near Casper in Wyoming (look out for the shot gun shell cameo!), a chuck wagon, the hotel Wild Bill Cody used to stay in Cody, Bonneville salt flats in Utah, a massive old steam train in Nevada and Lake Tahoe in California.
For Poke’s 10th Birthday, they asked us to come up with a way to celebrate all the things they’ve done without being too chest beating about it. So of course we threw a proper 10 year old’s birthday party, with cake, presents, sweets and everything. To show some of our work we commissioned the great Emma Cakehead to create a series of cakes themed around some of our favourite projects and clients. My favourite was probably the 2 Skype cakes we had at either end of the party Skyping each other:
… amongst many others there was the Spot The Bull cake with edible mud and cow pat, and the Cock-a-Doodle cake with edible ink and many many drawings of cocks:
Of course no 10 year old’s party is complete without a balloon sculptor and face painter on hand:
(these 3 photos are by Ollie Wright, a jolly nice chap and very good photographer)
More photos here.
We also built a showcase of (almost) every bit of work Poke have ever made and put into a microsite themed around a kid’s growth chart. Collating all the content for it was no trivial task.
check it out here: www.pokelondon.com/10
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:
