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.
Santa’s Lap has pretty successful with nearly 100 served so far, it’s even made it onto the Poke blog. Here’s an update on some of the fallout:
This year, for Christmas, Stuff Club made a Naughty or Nice detector. It works by re-creating the special magical sensors Santa has in his lap which tells him if the children in his groto deserve a lovely gift or a piece of coal. In our version we’ve stripped it down to just a massive over-sized lap (to help create that terror you felt as a child), which deals out a reward or a punishment and sends that result, plus a photo, to naughtyornice.tumblr.com for all to see.
This is all made possible by some back-end cleverness by Mattias Gunnerås, some Arduino tinkering by Tracy Tsang, and some wood cutting/screwing and painting by me, Jas, Badger and Martin Rose. It was a bit of a mammoth task as we had to get the whole thing done from scratch over the weekend so we could keep it a surprise from the rest of Poke, but we managed it – well done gang!
Here’s some construction photos (have you ever wanted to see under Santa’s trousers?).
So, some of us guys and gals at Poke have started up a little club we call ‘Stuff Club’, in which we make stuff, y’know – for fun. The first thing we’ve made was actually a request by the Poke elders to do some kind of alternate Christmas tree for the office. So, naturally, we built a 8 foot square Alpine village (known as the Black Forest Ghetto) featuring a totally sweet Scalextric set with tunnels, bridges, mountains and sound reactive lights in all the trees and lil’ houses (they react to the music thats pumped out of the amp and speakers hidden in the base unit). Mattias even built a working lap timing system that plugged into a website Nicky designed, but we ran out of time to install it.
It stayed up for about 3 weeks and didn’t burst into flames once! Something we’re all slightly amazed about. A massive thank you with bells on to everyone who helped out.
~>> Here’re pics of the finished thing <<~
~>> Here’re the production pics <<~
My first piece of work at Poke (yay we’re at Poke!) is about to close. It’s the last day to play with Topshop’s Christmas Zeotrope. It was a hell of an after effects job, but working tightly with the developers and illustrator helped make this little thing come to life. 90,000 plays so far, be great to hit that 100k level by midnight tonight. Go on, you could win some spangly belts!
