42 days, 17 hours and 20 seconds. A conservative estimate of the amount of time I’ve wasted over the years hunting high and low, trying to identify a specific font.
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WEIR+WONG
Category Archives: production
Busy Little Bees
Well – it’s been nearly 5 months of WEIR+WONG and we’ve barely had time to take a breather! We’ve been doing some great work for these great clients (and some clients we can’t mention!) and having a lot of fun on the way. Onwards…
Facebook Open Graph
Just read about and now tried out Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol on our website. This is apparently Zuckerburg’s attempt at putting people and their recommendations at the centre of a semantically linked web, which makes perfect sense.
One of the ways that it works is by letting developers add “Like” buttons to their pages, a bit like the one above, and also on the right hand side of this page, which can then be used by visitors to sites outside of facebook. When someone clicks on the “Like” button, it then appears in their newsfeed, thus driving others to the content.
After all, if your friends like it, you might just be into it as well, and anyway, it might be more relevant than the 365 results that Google returned when you searched for “Trololololoooo”.
The links themselves contain the semantics that the protocol specifies, ranging from the type of content in question, down to things like ISBN numbers and longitude and latitude.
There’s clearly going to be a few people complaining about the fact that you need to be a member of Facebook to get this to work, but I see this as being a very useful tool going forward, especially in advertising, to get more people power behind a campaign.
I Like!
How do you learn how to do stuff? Fail!
I was talking to someone new in the industry this week when they said that they were looking for ways to understand the ins and outs of digital projects and the many technologies that one could use.
Ideally they wanted a quick way to understand technologies like AJAX and Flash. Unfortunately I had to disappoint them.
Maybe there is a quick way, but I don’t know it. I’ve spent years prototyping, testing, reading, trawling through coding forums, reading and refining my bloglists on google reader, listening to selected tweets, attending countless meetups and forums and expanding my horizon in terms of new technologies. This has literally taken years.
What I can tell you, is that most people in this industry who have progressed in their careers have tried (and probably failed at) a lot of things, and probably from the point of view of a creative, a designer, a developer, a producer, an information architect, a tester and maybe even a client.
What’s key is that people take time to try things, review what they’ve done, looked at it from different perspectives and then try to understand why things have gone wrong if it hasn’t gone to plan. This approach allows you change your methods in the future and to be more mature in your planning (allowing for risk and contingency) and responsible in your change management (doing what’s best for the project and the end user).
Try it, Fail, review, learn to do it better! Then rinse and repeat.
The Chalkbot
I seemed to miss this the first time around but have just found Nike Chalkbot whilst perusing the 2010 Webby Awards nominees. This is a great example of how a thought or sentiment can be captured digitally and then turned into something that is real. The campaign, centering around Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong charity, allows people to send a message via sms, twitter, online banners or at the WearYellow.com website. That message is then delivered to the Nike Chalkbot – a state of the art pneumatic robot that is towed around the Tour de France stages, printing out each message in turn on the tarmac. Also – people who uploaded message get delivered a geo-tagged image with their message on it. So you didn’t have to go to the Tour de France or watch every minute of it on TV to see it.
In a way it’s the same idea that you see if you go and do a charity fun-run (marathons are too much for my knackered legs). Runners write mesages on their T-Shirts for the people they are running for, the people who have been affected by an illness and sadly, quite often the people who have died from that illness. This I think is a really nice, sensitive, clever and worthwhile way of getting more people to see those messages, getting them to see just how many people’s lives are affected by cancer.
Full marks to the production team must be awarded because this idea is quite obviously one of those ‘extra’ ideas that always get presented with the usual straightforward creative stuff (“I know – lets build a robot”). It could so easily not have been made. To build all the message interfaces , build a robot, connect it up to a server, ship it to France, organise permissions to grafiti the roads, maintain the robot etc etc is a massive job, fraught with technical and physical difficulty. Hats off to the creatives who came up with it and I bow down to the producers who built it! A great effort. You’ve got my vote!
Wrangler Bluebell
Interesting take on a catalogue site. I’ve never wanted to be able to throw the models around like they were toy wrestlers but if I did I would do it here.
Hot Wheels
My son is obsessed by toy cars. He can’t leave them alone and nothing delights me more than to be able to come home with a new ‘motor’ for him. So there I was ‘researching’ some pretty cool toy cars when I stumbled upon this Hot Wheels – Custom Motors, You Tube game. Choose your vehicle, fine tune your engines, tires and weapons and race against 3 other mean machines on a variety of racetracks. Dungeons and Dragons style multi-route You Tube campaigns have been around for a while (check out Choose a different ending for another excellent example), I just thought this one was quite fun! Vrrrooooooooooooom
Fanning the flames
Imagine a one stop shop where you could create your own interactive campaign’s regardless of whether you are an ad agency, large corporation or even small business. It would be able to create sweepstakes, contests, give-aways, incentive-based surveys, publish them on your website and seed them to multiple social networks at the same time. They would be able to skin the campaign in any way you wished. You need not be a complete geek to create the campaign. You can easily monitor stats and there is a scaleable pricing model.
Imagine no more. Wildfire is here. It’s creating a lot of buzz and is indeed a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at the SXSW event.
A truly innovative idea that capitalizes on emerging technologies and turns it into something extremely useful. Competitions, campaigns and promotions tend to be seen by many agencies as ‘dirty work’ as it involves many third parties (coupon providers, mail drops, Social network’ tech teams and API’s, hosting providers) and logistical challenges. It seems that Wildfire are taking the donkey work out of this process for us all and joining a lot of the dots. Good luck to them and we’ll certainly keep them in mind for our client’s promotions in the future.
Digital Production – Ready to get serious?
Digital is still young. If the media we know and love was a family, what would it look like?
- TV would be the Dad, still trying to act cool, occasionally pulling it off, trying out email and interactive TV
- Radio would be a great uncle, whose picture would be on the wall, dressed in a World War I outfit, gone but not forgotten
- Cinema would be a great-great grandfather, a sort of viz-esque Victorian Dad, starched collars, classical but timeless
- Print would be an ancestor, immortalised in a painting, or perhaps a old manuscript, with a single page framed in the hall
What about the new generation? Digital, and it’s younger sibling Mobile?
Well they’re not even out of school yet. Digital is just about in secondary school, and Mobile? Well Mobile is still in shorts. They’re both trying to find their way, to sound more official and grown-up, but the grown-ups simply aren’t taking enough notice. Well some are, but most aren’t taking them seriously still, because they don’t know the lingo.
What if there was some way these young upstarts could somehow get recognised? What if they could become more mature?
I’ve been speaking to a lot of people in agencyland in the last 4 weeks, and something they all say is that there’s a real shortage of digital production talent, at all levels. Another problem is that Seniority is not comparable. Some producers claim to be senior after a very short period of time, which may be possible, but not with so little experience in terms of projects, technologies, platform, and people.
Agencies rely on being able to produce great work reliably to retain their clients, and they’ve been doing so because their output is being managed by a very experienced group of TV, Radio and Print producers who’ve been doing it for years in a tried and trusted way. Everyone knows their roles and responsibilities, there’s an unspoken code of conduct generally, and there’s even a spoken one in the form of accredited courses, for example the one run by the IPA and various higher education establishments. But there’s few equivalents within Digital.
The IAB run a course, but it only skims the surface, 2 days hardly qualifies you as anything other than a beginner (but it doesn’t profess to be more than this). The IPA currently offer nothing, but are showing an interest. Higher education establishments are trying, most notably places like Hyperisland, but few in the UK seem to be doing the right thing. Places like Plymouth have built up a good track record, with what was formally their MediaLab arts course, now called Digital Arts & Technology, but this doesn’t give enough focus to managing the digital arts. London College of Communications has produced some good people recently as well.
What I’m interested in is an industry-driven accreditation though. I’ll be speaking to some Heads of digital production over the coming weeks and putting together a plan for an official course for those who do want to hone their craft and be recognised for it. Any course worthwhile won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but it will be useful, and it’ll help this industry evolve into what it needs to be so that Digital and Mobile can stand side-by-side with all the other members of the media family.
What will a course look like? Well I see 3 levels, much like the scrum alliance format.
- Beginners | aimed very much at Juniors or those with less than a year of experience | a foundation course run over a few days, reinforcing the basic concepts and perhaps introducing some new ones. Digital platforms, their associated workflows. Roles and responsibilities. Media plans. Budgeting and Risk Management. Differing methodologies. Tools. QA.
- Intermediate | for those with between a year to 5 years experience – skilled practitioners | A system of peer-review could help strengthen the value of this rating. Applicants might be required to carry out some recommended reading and write an essay on digital production to demonstrate their knowledge and experience. This would be backed up by references from team-members, and details of a broad spread of technologies and technologies (successful ones). One could consider having a points system, or using Professional Development Units to ensure sufficient experience is gained.
- Advanced | for those wishing to engage in training and management of other producers | Again, this could be a points based system, perhaps with tasks aimed more at helping people to understand best practice. One could have more in-depth training over a period of weeks with practical and written tests.
I’d be keen to hear your points of view on this. What do you think? Would you invest some time to make this happen? Maybe take a quick survey on what’s important for digital producers?
Suburban Superbia
Disclaimer: Arcade Fire are my favourite bestest best band ever. So I’m likely to be slightly biased about this!
Have you had a go at this yet? Go on give it a go… I really enjoyed it and found the experience quite moving. Given that I had grown up in the relatively protected ‘burbs of Newcastle, the overlaid streetview images fitted very nicely with the sentiment of the song and the album. Not sure how well it would work if you were brought up in Streatham though, or at the other end of the scale, a luxury pile in Monaco.
The whole experience has a feel of a ‘final project at university’ or something (in a very good way), where they’ve just decided to sod the taboo of having multiple pop up windows running at the same time. Ok so it struggled with runtime a bit and made my laptop slow down to a snails pace if I tried to do anything else – but it’s an immersive experience and one that warrants a bit of artistic license.
The things I liked about it;
1. The use of multiple windows
2. The integration of streetview and google maps
3. The ‘unexpected’ 3d animation at the end
4. The text animation/effects on the ‘Postcard’ section
5. The fact that they’re using up loads of your processor power but just don’t care that much – even putting a processor disclaimer warning for you to shut down other programmes. ‘Ok so it might be inconvenient to watch this but hey – who cares!’
It’s also probably one of the most high profile HTML 5 experinces out there at the moment, passing the test as an interactive experience, although I think I’ll reserve judgement on the technology for a while yet! Would love to see more HTML5 experiences like this – send them to me if you have any…