Storybridge

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I remember running around the streets near our home when I was a kid with a toy rifle desperately trying to find where my enemies were hidden. Peeking around the corner I’d see my best friend (and for the time being, mortal enemy) unsuccessfully hiding behind a garden wall.

‘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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Orli Yakuel is a digital consultant and social media specialist with a superb blog that I find invaluable as resource of what’s new in the world of social media and applications. And not just what’s new. Are they any good and useful? Her opinions are pretty spot on.

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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Animoto is a fantastic online tool designed to create good looking videos out of your still images. It includes the ability to add 5 second snippets from your videos and has an excellent library of music from several genres to add to the whole thing and create something pretty professional that does generally impress people.

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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The people I have been working with at Mindshare Australia really know their stuff about the planning and creation of online advertising and have been great to work with. We had a close relationship with the team at Eyeblaster and so I created this set of examples of great Eyeblaster online advertising creative to let people know what is possible and to help explain what such things as a home page takeover, overlay and even expandable banners were!

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.

Popularity: 4% [?]

During my time in Australia it surprised me how few people in the media industry actually knew how websites and other online media went from that initial wish and idea through to an all singing and dancing live website or application. And some of the agencies that I talked to did not have a web design and build process to work to either. Pretty troubling in this day and age.

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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Stumbled across this today and looks likeit’s worth exploring. They have basically created 3D characters and little worlds that you can create movies from. And you can do this by simply typing the text for the character or characters that you want them to say and they will act it out. I believe the free version is static but there are more worlds and characters if you are a premium user and these can be moved around.

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.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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.

Popularity: 5% [?]

This is coming up to about a year old but we have just been looking at it again in the studio and still think that it’s brilliant. It’s a TV ad for Barclaycard that was shown in the UK at the end of last year. Superb use of the water slide throughout the city by Bartle Bogle Hegerty.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The Oxy Academy website will be fully live very soon this month and you can already register your interest for more information at:

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.

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.

Popularity: 7% [?]

To coin an often used Aussie phrase, this is Awesome. The campaign website to promote the Subaru Forester in Canada is a work of genius:

http://www.sexysubaru.ca

The user takes the role of a photographer to shoot images of a rather large sumo wrestler and the Subaru car. It’s all done with a video of the shoot showing the wrestler getting himself into lots of different poses and you can snap and capture a photograph at any time. These can then be viewed, retouched and saved to the website as part of a competition.

Using the TV advert and an online user focused competition in this way is very engaging and the website is wonderfully designed and produced.

I wish I’d thought of this idea! Nice work indeed.

Popularity: 85% [?]