For the second year I’ve had the pleasure to be invited by Matt Groves to the Fallon – Ultimate Show & Tell 2011 to present together with Roger Palà some of the latest B-Reel productions.
We were in the good company of some of the best production companies in London and had as tradition 15 minutes to present our cool shit.

This time I wanted to focus on a different kind of integrated productions, those that connect the so called digital and the real world together.

You can find the full recording of the talk here!

Last week we showed Mind Scalextric in Barcelona. And, Yes. It also works with the Spanish slot cars, a brand called SCX.
There are some minor differences in the electronic circuit compared to the UK product and with a little fix everything worked just fine!

This month’s Campaign magazine includes a special supplement about integrated productions and  B-Reel wrote an article titled Producing the Impossible .
I also had the pleasure to take part to the roundtable discussion with some very interesting people from the industry.

Ultimately, consumers don’t care where an idea comes from, and it is their behaviour and habits that should dictate communications. Riccardo Giraldi, the creative director at B-Reel, says agencies have to be more agile, as their structures quickly become dated as customer behaviour changes.

“On YouTube, there is a film of a young girl playing with an iPad. When she’s handed a magazine, she thinks it is broken,” he says. “You need to look at how people want to behave, whatever idea you come up with. What is integrated now will change – and the next thing is something that we are not even discussing yet.”

This means that necessary skillsets have changed dramatically from a few years ago.Giraldi says the production house now needs engineers and product designers on its team.

To sum it up, I believe that we should look at how we all changed our habits in the last 5 years with the introduction of smart phones and the evolution of digital technologies. The barriers between the so called digital and real world are blurring away and we can now define new ways for people to interact together.

Read about the Round Table discussion
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1107903/Perfect-Storm-Integration-roundtable-discussion/

And here is the article I wrote together with Lins and Philippa at B-Reel
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1107905/Producing-impossible/

We also produced a small adv and webpage. An ironic to-do list with of some the impossible productions that B-Reel made happen in the last years.

Production: B-Reel & B-Reel Films London
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy

The Experiment is an innovative physics-based game using pop-up windows as you have never experienced before. In line with Honda’s spirit for experimenting, you are invited to drag the windows around the screen and create surprising chain reactions.
From setting things to fire to creating double rainbows. There are thousands of fun combinations to try out!

Now it is your turn to experiment:
experimentgame.com

We teamed up with W+K London to create The Experiment: an innovative browser experience using popups in an unconventional way. Following Honda’s approach to experimenting, this production has been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work too! We started with a lot of ideas and post-it and ended up in a very nice place. Big thanks goes to the guys at W&K and the B-Reel team for the very hard work everyone put into this.
If we never venture into the unknown, how do we get anywhere new? Experiment. Try different things to see what works. That’s how the Honda engineers found the right combination for the new Civic’s rear suspension.

We created six levels that players can practice with and hid 21 “golden cogs” that can be found only by really experimenting.
Players can also try the many levels created by other users as well as create and share their own custom chains.

In a three days shoot in London we made bubbles, rainbows, crashed windscreens and set things on fire. But the star of the shoot was definitely the trained chicken which made a remarkable performance. At the end more than 230 clips have been captured and used in the online experience.

The Experiment is powered by a custom built Javascript engine that manages all the physics, animations and interface elements. Despite the many technical challenges this gave us the flexibility to created an experience that engages people in an unexpected way and slightly changes their perception of what pop-up windows could be.

The entire production has been an experiment itself, constantly working on the edge of what is possible to push the ideas to the limits.

We had a lot of fun in a three days shoot in London. We set things on fire, made bubbles and rainbows!
Definitely the most fun shoot I have done so far.

UPDATE: The Experiment is Site of The Day on theFWA 

UPDATE 2: Actually.. it is Site of the Month!!

After the success of the first experiment, here is an update bringing multiplayer and new functionalities!

The idea is simple: what if you could control slot cars with the power of your mind?
Mind Scalextric is an R&D project we developed at B-Reel that combines the latest technologies and lets people race together using their minds.

The higher your level of attention, the quicker your car goes!
If you are a pro you can also use the boost – all you have to do is to blink your eyes!

The project has been showcased at the Ultimate Show and Tell at Fallon as well as at the B-Reel London Party together with another experiment called EELS !

EELS 3D – projection mapping multiplayer game

EELS is an R&D project developed at B-Reel London. It combines various technologies into a multiplayer game experience where people can control their virtual EEL projected on a physical installation.
People could participate by using their mobile devices, using an HTML5 interface to provide direct control over their EEL.
Watching people interact with the installation and running around it during game play was great to see, and a lot of fun!

I have fallen in love with Odense. I’ve been invited by James Norwood to talk to the students of the Lillebælt Academy in Odense, Denmark.
What a nice place it is. All the education is free in Denmark, and actually students get paid to study. Whaaaat? As opposite to Italy, things are working terribly well up there!

Anyhow. More than hundred students turned up. I talked about the evolution of digital, interactive entertainment and showed some of the latest B-Reel productions!
I met lots of nice people and motivated students. Hope to see some of them in London very soon!

Last night B-Reel opened the doors of the London studio for our yearly party. We invited friends and clients to come enjoy some drinks and tunes, but also to get involved and have a play with some of our latest R&D projects.

We created a 3D projection mapping multiplayer game we called EELS. Game players joined in using their mobile device and a local wifi network. Watching people interact with the installation and run around it during game play was great to see, and a lot of fun.

We also unveiled phase 2 of the Mind Scalextric project – two headsets meaning players could race each other by using only their brain. We added a boost control activated by blinking to help you get the edge on your opponent.

We also hooked up mobile phones to the Scalextric enabling players to control the cars with their phones – Gyrotrix!

We had a lot of fun and hope you enjoyed the night. Thanks for coming everyone!

This year I went for the first time to the PWI, the Italian Web Awards. Organised in the small town of Cava de’ Tirreni in Salerno (south Italy). It awards the best italian web projects of the year. I did a talk about the future of Digital Productions presenting some of B-Reel stunning projects. Also had the luck to collect two awards, one as best Creative/Art Director  of the year, and another one for the best art and design in Lipton Exclusive Collection.

The whole experience has been remarkable, the location amazing (Amalfi is only 40 mins away), the people extremely friendly, many interesting talents. The organisation was.. well let’s say it was fun.
As part of the event there was also a football match. very italian yes. Web Designers against Actors. Final score, we won 8-0. oh yeah.
A big thanks goes to the friends at Roll Studio. They drove me from Naples to Avellino to Cava to Amalfi.. Without their help I would have never even found that small town.

Italy has a lot of potential. The digital industry is not well developed yet, but this seems to be mainly due to the lack of money and the lack of understanding by the clients of the value of investing in internet and digital. I expect in the next few years to see more and more italian production companies and digital agencies to get international attention thanks to the quality of their productions. There are so many passionated talented people in Italy looking for opportunities that sometimes I really would like to setup a company back in Florence and see what happen!

Premio Web Italia:
http://www.premiowebitalia.it/

Kaleio is a fun little app for your iPhone and iPad that transforms your camera into a kaleidoscope!

Just open Kaleio and look around you. The world will look completely different now.
Find shapes, patterns and colors. It is just fun to play with!
You can take photos and find them saved for you in your library.

I was at Arlanda airport in Stockholm when a nice little object in one of the shops caught my attention. It was a cilinder with a ball lens on a side and an little hole on the other. It looked like a kaleidoscope, but it was in fact a quite different object. It had an open view and instead of creating shapes based on small coloured objects, it was creating beautiful patterns based on the real world.

I loved it and decided to do a bit of research on it. Wouldn’t be great if you could take photos of those beautiful patterns? Wouldn’t be great if you could have a Teleidoscope always with you?
Didn’t take long to decide to make an mobile app that transform you device camera into a Teleidoscope.

We spent a bit of time in R&D and thanks to B-Reel, Teleidoscpe is now available for free on the Apple Store!
It’s very simple with its functionalities but does the job ; )

Download it and take lots of beautiful photos!