Ok Go! This too shall pass. Music video on YouTube.

From the Ok Go! YouTube channel:

‘Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Syyn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.’

Although not sure why EMI has banned embedding of the video. I shall investigate further.

‘Bang. Bang!’ and other more enthusiastic and realistic sounding gun noises emanate from me as I triumphantly point the rifle at my obviously vanquished foe. ‘You’re dead! You’re dead!’

‘No! You missed! You missed!’

And on and on. Fun but frustrating times indeed.

Gunmen for the iPhone solves this age old dilemma of who has indeed actually shot who for the kids and adults of today. Yes, paintball has already accomplished this but you don’t always have the equipment to hand I’d hope and it’s a tad messy.

The basics of it are then that it is an augmented reality first person shooter that enables you to point your iPhone camera at your mate / enemy, line him up in your crosshair and shoot the scoundrel. And of course he can do likewise to you. Up to four iphones can be linked up at the moment via WiFi so that you can run around the office with your colleagues shooting the banjo out of each other. All hits and misses are recorded so no more arguments about who has been shot or not.

At the start of the game you pick the shirt colour of your enemy and this is how the application recognises your foe and whether a hit has been made. It also records hits so that you can share them with friends online. Christian Zibreg has written an excellent review of Gunmen at geek.com so please feel free to go there for more in depth details.

Hiding behind trees then in real life whilst your mate tries to zap you. Great stuff. Augmented Reality has its detractors as just a gimmick but I hope that this sort of thing will open peoples eyes to the simple proposition that if you give us a screen we can put anything on it. And if this screen is showing you the real world around you then all the better for us to let our imaginations run and give you an immersive experience.

The game producers Shadowforce are apparently bringing in geo location technology to a future release. Here’s where things get even more interesting. I’d envisage that you won’t need to specifically create a game with your friends whilst all together in the same place. You can have one that never ends. It’s always ‘on’. Track your friend down via the mapping technology and blast him when he least expects it. At a restaurant when about to propose to his lady would no doubt go down very well.

iPhone Gunmen app at Apple Store.

So I liked the fact that she has used Animoto to show us her digital year in pictures:

‘Highlights from 2009 in pictures’.

Nice way of presenting a summary with some good things to look out for towards the end for 2010.

I’ve used Animoto to easily spice up presentations and to help people visualise things better internally whilst creating Digital Creative Services at Mindshare, Australia. Have a look at one of the videos here:

http://www.storybridge.co.uk/index.php/2010/01/14/animoto-photoshoot/

In the meantime, nice one Orli.

http://animoto.com

I ran a photoshoot at Mindshare Australia last year and used Animoto to create this behind the scenes video. It went down a storm with our staff internally. Bit of fun and a nice way to show them what happened on the day.

Follow this link for more of Mindshare Australia on Youtube.

There are examples for most of the more interactive formats and a link through to the actual creative on the Eyeblaster creative showcase.  Note that these links haven’t been converted very well by Slideshare so you’ll probably unfortunately end up having to search for the particular creative from the showcase home page.

So I produced this process overview to help introduce a particular staged approach to designing and building online media. It’s nothing new of course and widely used by most creative and digital agencies, albeit with different stage names and sometimes a stage or two more. My process her was originally formulated by us at Object1 way back at the turn of the century (and that feels quite strange to write!) and has of course evolved somewhat, but essentially works to keep everyone within a structured approach. yes, there are other methodologies and processes that could suit you better. Agile for one. but I thought I’d share this to help those who’d like to know how things generally work, those in need of a process and clients who could do with some more knowledge about what’s going on.

I have included example outputs for each stage, responsibilities and some key things to be aware of. it doesn’t purport to cover everything but I hope you find it of some use and happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Great idea then and certainly has that wow your mates as to how you’ve made your own movie out of digital cartoon dudes! Will have a further play around and let you know if it’s any good in reality. These movies will only be as good as your script of course.

http://www.xtranormal.com/

And I found this becuase a colleague sent me a bit of a comic skit on a conversation between a media agency person and a media owner. Pretty funny.

Agent versus media owner on YouTube.

But, coming from a digital and creative agency background, I found this one even better!

Graphic designer versus client.

So this is a great idea indeed from Volkswagon called Pianotrappan. They wanted to encourage people to change their habits and take the stairs instead of the escalator. How do you do this? easy. Make the stairs into a working piano so that people can have fun making music when going up and down! Ok, so not great music but fun nonetheless.

All part of a hopefully growing website dedicated to helping people to change by making them happy. Nice idea. The website, rolighetsteorin.se, is in Swedish but here is the English tranlation from Google.

http://www.oxy.com.au

The Oxy Academy is all about helping young males to realise their full potential in life, starting with sport as the immediate area of interest, and expanding into other areas such as music as The Oxy Academy grows.

The Oxy Academy pre-launch website

Amazing sponsorship and content deals have been created to help make this an engaging website to visit, with an exciting competition to win exclusive training sessions and lots of uniquesports content at a national level to come. More to follow when the full website goes live soon.