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Need 4 Speed

anthony — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:51:40 +0000

A short film about wingsuit designer Robert Pecnik and the BASE proximity flying team – Need 4 Speed. These guys are amazing.

Dublin visualised through tweets and Flickr photos

anthony — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 11:25:48 +0000

Tweets are in blue and Flickr photos are orange. Very cool. Image by Eric Fischer

Dare the Captain

anthony — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 22:06:20 +0000

I’ve talked about Captain Morgan before on the blog with the highly successful Captain’s Cup (the Irish lads went on to win the global final) back in April last year. I really admired the digital campaign behind it (85k likes on Facebook to date) and he’s coming back to Ireland for ‘Dare the Captain‘. The concept is pretty simple – all you have to do is dare the Captain to do something legendary on his next trip to Ireland on 19th April – he’ll do the rest! The winning darer gets €5,000 plus 2 runners up will get €500 each and there’s Captain Morgan hoodies to be won daily up to 16th April (enter here). Check out the video from the last ‘Dare the Captain’ competition here. He even turned up in Dublin today to launch it:

Not bad at all. Head on over to Facebook if you fancy bagging the prize.

Back to the Future

anthony — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:19:27 +0000

I *love* this. Argentinian photographer Irna Werning invited people to recreate old photos of themselves in stunning detail.

Stunning

anthony — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:15:39 +0000

Watch it in HD:

Miwadifesto

anthony — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:35:45 +0000

I’d seen this campaign mentioned in the Metro a couple of weeks ago and it popped back into my head with the budget yesterday. Miwadi are launching their revised brand and the campaign is asking kids all over the country what they would add to their world to make it a more fun place to live in. They can submit their own suggestions at miwadifesto.com and have the chance to win a grand prize of a family trip to Hamley’s in Regent Street, London. Some of my favourites submitted so far:

- “Have bumper cars on every street”: Steve (Age 11), Limerick
- “Have snakes and ladders with real snakes and real ladders”: Dave (Age 9), Dublin
- “Have bouncy castles in all playgrounds”: Karen (Age 5), Cork.

At a time when we’re beginning to understand the load our politicians will have placed on the upcoming generations, it’s nice for them to let the imaginations run loose like this and I hope the campaign is a success. Oh and the flatmate is a fan.

The So Coal Network

anthony — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:30:28 +0000

Christian posted on Digitology recently about Facebook’s new data centre in Oregon which is to be powered by coal instead of renewable energy. Greenpeace have created a video highlighting Zuckerburg’s decision to “friend” coal and the impact it will have. It’s a really smart way of highlighting the issue at a time when The Social Network is hitting cinemas. You can watch it below:

The Captain’s Cup

anthony — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 07:55:12 +0000

I’m gonna admit up front that rum isn’t something I’d normally drink a lot of. There were free samples of Captain Morgan‘s before the Blog Awards in Galway recently and I have to say, it was tasty. A mate of mine has since advised that the best way of drinking it is with the juice of a whole lime. Anyhow, they’re running a competition over the next while and I’ve entered a team – Team Black Freighter.

It’s called the Captain’s Cup and consists of a number of Facebook challenges (ie. submit a pirate chat up line, caption a photo, piratize your photo) leading to a national final with the winning team being sent to South Africa in July. There 10 countries will then battle it out for the Captain’s Cup. My team has completed a few challenges so far and with any luck we’ll be in the national final on May 20th. Entry details are here.

Pixels

anthony — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:07:55 +0000

A stunning short piece by Patrick Jean showing a pixel invasion of New York City. Watch out for some old favourites like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and PacMan. The way they’ve blended real world footage with the animation is mind blowing, especially with the taxi. Watch:

Irish Blog Awards 2010 and the videos

anthony — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:07:24 +0000

Last Sunday was the fifth annual Irish Blog Awards in Galway. I’d written up about my experience last year and this year was as good. I’ve met a fantastic group of people through both the blog and Twitter and it was a great night. Kudos to Brian Greene who allowed me attack his set of iPod decks to stick on a number of classics (Maniac 2000 and Rhythm is a Dancer amongst them). However the guts of this post is about the videos we got together for the evening. I’d been thinking about them since the Web Awards of last year but my gift for procrastination meant that it was quite late in the day by the time we got our act together.

When I say we I mean the team of myself, Darragh Doyle, Steph Francis, Jen Davis, Sinead Cochrane and Niamh Smith. Videos wouldn’t be appearing after every category so the workload was down from over 20 last year to around 5. Towards the end of 2009 we stuck up a Google Wave inviting a lot of contacts to get a few fresh ideas generated. Whilst it was a good initial base, the fact we couldn’t move around elements within it, meant that I moved back to a Google Doc to organise structure it better. Two weeks before the awards we were still locking ideas and involvement in. Darragh has a fantastic ability to go out and ask people to get involved and things were made easier with Podge and Rodge (shot & edited themselves), Ken & Ross (shot & edited themselves), Bosco and Crystal Swing coming on board. Bosco and Crystal Swing would be shot/edited by Darragh and Steph. The two other videos would be originals scripted largely by myself and then shot by Jen. Everything would be wrapped into a Keynote presentation made by Steph with all of the screenshots/titles etc. So:

The Apprentice
The first sketch I wrote was based off the Irish version of The Apprentice. I had aspirations to have it filmed on the actual set and have the real Bill involved but we couldn’t get it sorted in time (although we tried). The majority of filming on both The Apprentice and The Death of Blogging was done in one day around Dublin. We actually only committed to filming The Apprentice after talking to comedian Eric Lalor that afternoon.

The shoot involved Jason Roe joining us to play the role of Brian Purcell, Steph tanning it up to play Jackie Lavin and Niamh playing Bill’s secretary. If your wondering why Eric’s suit jacket is so big then you won’t be suprised to hear that it was actually Jason’s. Jen took us through a number of takes filming the opening couch scene and then the boardroom itself to get the footage she needed. It really came together in the edit with Jen using the voiceover, titles and end really well. Quite happy with how it worked out.

The Death of Blogging
There’d been a lot of talk in the past few months about the death of blogging, sparked primarily by a piece that Una Mullaly wrote for Twenty’s blog. I’d talked with Damien on it and agreed that a news report would a good way of opening the awards. When we saw Charlie Brooker’s ‘How to report the news‘ piece from Newswipe, myself and Jen agreed that (almost) a shot for shot homage would be attempted. The script for it was a lot looser than The Apprentice and dialogue was chopped and changed throughout filming that morning. Through Darragh’s connections in RTE we were also able to get Miriam O’Callaghan to do a piece to camera which would lead into it.

I’ve learned quite a bit from the vids this year. Whilst we pushed off early enough in the planning process, we didn’t kick in with enough practical work until quite late. As I said my procrastination didn’t help and I’d like to have had more people involved (a point highlighted by Twenty) but for a voluntary project we did quite well IMO. Thanks again to all who gave their time.

You can view the 6 videos here in full on Youtube. Thanks to @em_j_m for the photo above.