Poke Easter Bake Off 2013

hot cross bumsnails

We Won! Gav won the concept competition with some very tasty/tasteful ‘chocolate crucifixion nails’ out of dark chocolate dipped pretzel sticks, a chocolate button and silver spray. I tried to make ‘hot cross bums’. They didn’t look quite as bum like as I’d hoped but they won the taste competition. My personal favourite entry though was the NSFW ‘The Holy Reserection’ by Wooders.

Spooky Shitters 2010

We’ve haunted the toilets at Poke again, we might have gone too dark this time. Apparently most of the girls have to use toilets on another floor… women eh?

 

 

This year we’ve experimented a bit and tried some new tricks, each of the 3 toilets we’ve haunted is possessed by the ghost of a different family member, the Nursery is haunted by ‘baby’ and in this one we’re using chromadepth 3D glasses with UV lit fluorescent paint to make the whole room appear to be in weird ass 3D, you really need to see it in the flesh. It’s a trick that’s pretty old hat in American haunts but we’d not seen it before over here (thanks to Dave for showing us that).
Voodoo dolly

 

Mother’s room uses projection mapping to make it appear that the door is haunted. Take a seat and watch as the door opens again and again to reveal some bad things happening just outside the door, and sometimes in the door itself.
Skelvin

 

And Father’s room, well Father isn’t a very nice man at all. Look out for a cameo role in this room played by the latex face mask we had made for our film All The Time in The World.
Stabbed wall

 

More photos here.

Secret Cinema – Blade Runner


All kinds of awesome from Secret Cinema as usual. This time our shuttle bus taking us to the space port for our flight to the Off World Colonies was pulled over by some Blade Runner dude and diverted to a holding area as a Replicant uprising had caused all flights to be cancelled. We ended up in a  dystopian Los Angeles, circa 2019, complete with snake merchants, eye makers, noodle bars, strip clubs and everything you need to make a pretty damn believable slice of the Blade Runner world.

 

Jason took a Voight-Kampff test, turns out he’s human, who’d have thought? I was rather pleased with my home brew lighty up umbrella. A good time was had by all – except for that stripper replicant who got shot to bits as we filed into the cinema, down-town LA in 2019 is a rough area.

 

Here’s some pics we took, or just pour yourself some whiskey and watch the slide show below.

 

That’s a Cappuccino!

thatsacappuccino
Last week we had a Hack Day at Poke. We were split into teams of about 6 or 7 and given 24 hours to come up with a ‘working thing with a URL’ that’s something to do with the theme: FOOD. The team I was in came up with That’s a Cappuccino! – A campaign to put an end to people ordering a Cappuccino but receiving a Latte. There’s lots of ways to get a cappuccino wrong, but we narrowed it down to the basic ‘golden ratio’ of what it should be made of:

 

1 part espresso, 1 part steamed milk, 1 part foam.

 

With this in mind we’ve built a map, that anybody can contribute to, that simply labels places as “That’s a cappuccino!” or “That’s not a cappuccino!”. We also wrote an open letter to some major cappuccino venders (including Starbucks, Costa and, naturally, The Wild Bean Cafe) asking them how the ensure their cappuccinos are of the correct stanrd and if they’d like to get involved in the campaign and where. Here’s the letter.

 

Our film unit ran about all over over London interviewing baristas about what they think makes the perfect cappuccino, and they even got to meet Gwilym Davies, the UK and world champion barista who is a jolly nice champ and has officially backed our project:

It turned out to be a pretty massive project for 24 hours but we devided and conquered and… didn’t win in the end (The Holy Sandwich won, well done you lot), but there’s still a chance we can get a prize for the most traffic on our site, as well as improving your next cappuccino – so go check out our site, and get adding to that map.

 

Our team (the Golden Ratio) are: Me!, Chris Meachin, Iain Tait, Chris Reeves (the other one), Aina Ørebech, Kate Ducham and Nicky Gibson.