rehabstudio – An obligatory blog
- Wonderland
- 77 East Road
- London N1 6AH
- +44 (0) 20 3384 5210
- Beau Monde
- Unit 12, 8 Cromac Avenue
- Belfast BT7 2JA
- +44 (0) 28 9050 1910
Hello!
This is what we’ve been up to the first few months of this fine year that is 2012;
Our creative teams were let loose in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, to attend the FITC event, all of them came back which was a bit of a bonus.We are still waiting for a report of some sort….
We got some Webby nods on the People’s choice awards with the Subaru First car story project we worked on with the fine folks over at Carmichael Lynch.
Backing that up with a couple of Official Honorees for the Instagr.am Music Video mash up we produced for the Vaccines, and one for the Chevrolet – Ride of your life
We have got some new faces in the London studio; Senior designer Arnaldo B – (Si, B is for Brazil), 2 x Lindas from Sweden (We call them Ericsson and Karlsson, they are both producers and make sure things happen when they should), and our homeboy designer Adam. Check out what Arnie does here and Adams stuff can be enjoyed here
Ericsson is part of the London Rockin’ Rollers crew, and Karlsson is a Hyper Island graduate, who took a detour via Spain before she decided that the British island was the place to be.
Our Belfast Massif has been joined by Rudolfs (Phyton Developer) and Chris (Front-end Developer, here’s an example of what he can do.
Also check out our This is my jam page where we’ll share some sweet music from the Belfast & London studios.
The geekiest way to start the year
The response from the www.therestartpage.com has been super awesome and very geeky.
You can reboot your system through a collection of vintage operating systems, from Windows 1.0 (1985) to Amiga Workbench 2 (1986) or Apple IIGS (1991). The restart page is a tribute to the evolution of the rebooting technologies that is part of our daily life.
The restart page was an answer to an invitation to collaborate with OFFF festival and YEAR ZERO project.
Created and designed by Barcelona agency Soon in Tokyo and produced by rehabstudio.
D&AD Annual
Yikes we forgot about this one – the Life in a Day project gets featured in book, congrats to all the guys who worked on this huge 18 month project!
We’re back!
Apologies for the lack of blogging over the past couple of months, it’s not that we don’t love you anymore – honest it isn’t – we’ve been kinda busy cranking out digital niceness.
In fact, over the past few months the rehab gang have been heads down, nose to the grind pumping out projects for some of the worlds biggest brands and most awesome advertising agencies. We haven’t even had time to pop up for a whiskey.
As proof, here’s a sample of some of the great work we’ve been involved with, we collaborated with Wiedens on Honda, built a great game for Red Bull, set about saving the world with Google Ideas, built the first Instagram music video with Anomaly- and did something super duper awesome with a West Coast Agency and a legendary American brand which we can’t talk about just yet (we’ll let you know more as soon as we can, promise).
In the meantime, we’re back for good – so make sure you check here regularly if you are interested in us, our work – or coming to work for us.
Or whiskey, obviously.
Love rehab X
Google Developer Day HTML5 Competition Finalists!
Woop!
The Google Developer Day 2011 HTML5 competition finalists are in and rehabstudio have made the cut!
The challenge: One week to ‘Doodle’ the Google Developer Day dymaxion map logo using open web technologies and incorporating a cultural reference to the host country of the GDD event we’ll be attending.
“Unfortunately there isn’t an event in the UK this year so the obvious choice was Germany”, sausage lover Tim explains.
As it was an HTML5 competition, we figured a lot of contestants would be focusing on animation. We decided to take a different approach and make use of the unsung hero: HTML5’s audio element!
Chris Kerr put his big, creative head to work and came up with Googlespiel, an interactive HTML5 glockenspiel! With cultural reference and cheesy name in the bag, we got coding. Chris G on the keys, Anto on audio loader, DJ Gary on sound effects, Tom animating, Emma motivating and Kyle to pull the whole thing together.
Finished, with time to spare, Anto added an auto play of Beethoven’s Fur Elise as a little tutorial for the users.
Click the image below to see the final product.
How we did it: The Formers
Lines and lines of code excitement across the studio today about the launch of our latest YouTube channel, The Formers, for Google Ideas.
In a tech first, our Belfast development crew have re-created the YouTube channel experience in full – which will be a first for iPad and tablet users once rolled out. The rich layered animation transition and navigation experience has been designed to be fully accessible through a mobile browser (rather than through a dedicated iOS App.)
The Formers is our first partnership production with the Google’s new think/do tank Google Ideas. The project is designed to provoke a global conversation about radicalism by bringing together an eclectic mix of former-extremists, their victims and counter-terrorism specialists. These ‘Formers’ and their survivors both tell their stories on the channel, letting consumers interact with both sides, sharing their views and experiences. The idea being to turn a complex social issue into a positive movement.
A YT iPad first
The YouTube channel is an HTML5 + Javascript-based app. We decided to make it plugin-free to showcase our work with the latest web technologies and standards. It uses CSS3 to provide smooth, hardware-accelerated effects, and makes use of recent innovative Javascript libraries (Modernizr.js and innershiv.js in particular) to ensure backwards compatibility/graceful degradation in older browsers. We also used embedded web fonts to make our typography rich and in keeping with the design, whilst staying accessible and searchable.
The content of the app is presented on a number of parallax ‘layers’ moving at different speeds when scrolling to provide a sense of depth. We chose this style because of the really strong white diagonal in the design. The parallax code itself was custom-written, using hardware-accelerated CSS3 transitions to smooth out the effect on modern browsers, falling back to a Javascript-only scroll on platforms that don’t support them. When the app loads, the page flow is dynamically restructured on-the-fly to accommodate the parallax layering.
The content is marked up using new HTML5 tags such as <nav>, <article> and <section> assisting search engines and devices.
Videos are embedded in the app via the YouTube Iframe Embed API, which serves HTML5 <video> content to platforms that support it, future-proofing the app, falling back to a standard YouTube player in other cases. Video content itself is served via integration with the YouTube Data API, which returns JSON-based video feed data on-the-fly in response to user interaction with the app. YouTube tagging is used to organize the video content according to extremism type and Former name. We used jQuery transitions in the video pages, and throughout the app, to provide a high-class experience.
The channel app also incorporates Google Moderator functionality to provide a means of feedback and discussion between channel users and The Formers themselves. We also included basic support for touch devices and hotkeys/tabbing navigation, to ensure a friendly and full-featured experience across the widest possible range of platforms.
The entire app will be deployed via Google’s own App Engine platform to ensure scalability and the tightest possible integration with Google support.
Check the channel out here.
The YouTube channel is the main consumer site for The Formers project, launched in conjunction with the Summit Against Violent Extremism in Dublin. Jurgen – our main man in Belfast – was there:
“The Formers project is a real game changer, at the summit we got to meet and discuss the channel with Formers and Survivors which really brought the importance of this project home. Working with Google products is always a delight, it’s our first HTML5 YouTube channel and we had real fun refining the interactions for touch devices. Looking forward to watching this project grow.”
The YouTube channel is soon to be followed by a ground-breaking relationships platform created by us and powered by Google’s latest social tech design solutions. Which will transform the collaborative power of like-minded activists, individuals and experts on an international level.
More on that to come.
Fancy starring in The Vaccines new music vid?
We love a good old API mash-up.
*DRUM ROLL*
We are announcing the launch of The Vaccines new site, created for Anomaly, which is also the world’s first Instagr.am crowd-sourcing video.
Fans who want the chance to have their favourite festival snaps immortalised in the band’s latest music video can upload their Instagr.am photos along with the tag #vaccinesvideo.
All images tagged correctly get displayed on http://www.vaccinesvideo.com and the best of the bunch will get animated into the video for the band’s new single “Wetsuit”.
We’ve been massive fans of Instagr.am since the start, so we’re stoked to be part of the first ever Instagr.am video mash up. Can’t wait to see the final video!
How We Did It
API Mash-Up
We used Instagr.am API to trawl for images tagged with #vaccinesvideo. Our server is then setup to search and find the latest photos every couple of minutes – we then grab the images for use in our campaign.
For those who love a bit of tech
Jurgen (our Tech Partner) says the system uses MongoDB, a document oriented database, to store the data collected.The front end is using jQuery for effects and jQuery Address plugin for deep linking and infinite scrolling plugin. The backend is running on Nginx, PHP-FPM and Memcached – all tuned to make the site as fast as possible.
Get your 15 seconds of fame
Check out the film the band have uploaded showing how to get involved: http://bit.ly/thevacc
Pics can be just of you or a bunch of mates, or stage shots. Or anything which shouts Festival!
http://www.vaccinesvideo.com/#
timnotjim not in his twenties anymore
As a lot of you will know Timbo in no longer in his 20’s…. He said goodbye to them in style last Friday with a massive party even rain couldn’t dampen!
Ladies and gents came from as far as LA to his abode in Dalston to get on it.
There was DJ GQ from the Belfast crew, Secret Sundaze DJ’s James Priestley & Ethyl DJ’s, and a lot of people donning beards and wigs to represent the main man.
There was even a dog with wings.
FYI – our hangovers are slowly clearing…
Our next level work wins Gold at Cannes Lions
We are super pumped to announce we’ve been awarded the Gold Lion in the Viral Marketing category at Cannes Lions for Life In A Day!
It was an integrated digital campaign and collaborative experiment in social film making between YouTube, Google Creative Lab, Scott Free, rehabstudio and Toaster London. Find out more about it here.
Over 24,000 enteries are made to Cannes Lions, the hardware is awarded at four ceremonies throughout the week. It’s our second nod at Cannes Lions following our Silver win for T-Mobile Dance 2 years ago.
This latest award tops off what has been an epic year for the campaign
- FWA Site Of The Day, 22nd October 2010
- Double Silver World Medal Winner at New York Festivals 2011
- Inclusion in the Creative Review Annual 2011
- Gold Winner (Media & Entertainment) at the Revolution Awards 2011
- Winner at the Tomorrow Awards 2011
- Silver Winner and In Book for the D&AD Awards 2011
- Shortlisted for the Design Week Awards 2011
- Gold Cyber Lion Winner at Cannes Lions
A very hungover Tim said:
It was our first year in Cannes, in-between the Gutter Bar, Google Beach Bar & the Carlton Terrace we watched a bunch of amazing work from around the world – oh yeah and winning gold. Love it.
Massive thanks to everyone who worked on it! BOOOOOOOOOM!
Life In A Day at the D&AD Awards
timnotjim and (Murray) The Veitch were allowed out of the office last Thursday to attend the D&AD Awards.
timnotjim and The Veitch
The suited’n'booted pair joined Tom Uglow and Ross Warren from Google Creative Lab to celebrate the nomination of Life In A Day for the Integrated Digital Campaign award.
Ross Warren
We are super pumped to announce the project has been selected to appear in book – it makes the tequila hangover bearable!
To find out more about the project check out our earlier blog post.
Murray (Mike Veitch)
Rock on.
P.S. Tim has never been to Bali.