rehabstudio – An obligatory blog » 2011

How we made it: Google AdWords 10th anniversary

Posted by Connor on: April 11, 2011 in: + rehabstudio, Build, Design, Editorial, Interactive

Q: How do you thank your customers for 10 years of support?

A: Well if you’re Google then you’re gonna want to send them all a unique personalised thank-you video with the name of the company projected on the moon, and spelt from 10Mil Dominos & robotic bees…

And here’s how we did it!
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Creative
We choose a hand-made cut and paste style for the channel – photographing all of the interface and graphical elements in the studio before manipulating them in Photoshop.

AdWords Sketches

For the first phase of the campaign we asked the Google AdWords community to participate by uploading their own personal AdWords success stories to the YouTube channel.

We worked with AKQA on the phase 2 which contained the personalised video. They created a challenging shot-list – so we immediately started to work on a bunch of prototypes to see how far we could push the tech. We’d done video personalisation before and this time we owned it!

Here’s one of the earlier tests that we put together, we had to produce the channel in 47 languages so we had to create a text parsing system to generate the company name dynamically over the top of the video.

During the course of the development we also worked on a few easter eggs, after all this was a birthday party & everyone loves a surprise on their birthday

Motion sensitive swarm of bees

Motion sensitive space invaders
Control the crosshair with your head, space bar to shoot!
The campaign launched, sent an email to each of their customers, the email contained a unique URL linking to the channel where users could view their personalised video.

Code visualisation
This is an awesome display of what it takes to actually bring a project to life, check out the video below which shows our developers contributing to the project during its development. The animated tree places the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves.

Final result

Final artwork

Click here to see the rehabstudio personalised video!

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rehabstudio launches Eric Whitacre’s 3D video ‘Sleep’

Posted by Jade on: April 8, 2011 in: + rehabstudio, 3D production, Art, Culture, Design, Music

Its April 8th 2011- and We’re super pumped, to announce the launch of our latest project, the Virtual Choir 2.0 for Eric Whitacre. We directed and produced the digital campaign and promo for ‘Sleep‘ featuring the record-breaking Virtual Choir 2.0, the world’s largest online choir. The launch kicked off in New York at The Paley Center For Media last night, which we attended.

Eric Whitacre at live premiere

Live broadcast from rehabstudio London to the premiere in NYC

The 2,051 submissions

The Virtual Choir 2.0, masterminded by the internationally respected composer Eric Whitacre, consists of 2,051 YouTube submissions from 58 countries which beats the previous record of just under 900. Most of the submissions can be seen on Virtual Choir Google Earth View.

Motion graphics production company, Cake partnered with us to create the promo – Virtual Choir 2.0 broke down physical barriers allowing people from all corners of the globe to be connected through the song, represented by interconnected planets grouping the submissions by country.

The team used Adobe AfterEffects during the animatic stage to showcase the concept for the promo, putting together simple animation with sketches to show timings and camera movements for the video. Once the animatic was completed the elements were brought to life in 3D.

The next bit was a massive technical challenge – making sure the videos from YouTube that were being used to produce the globes in the promo were all in the same formats and sizes. An automated system was used to process the videos making them all compatible. Once all the videos were synced, the globes were built using math expressions in Adobe AfterEffects, which allowed complete control of the animation of the globes in the 3D space. The other videos of participants were then used to create static rings around the planetary structures.

The finished work is something we are all very proud of so make sure you check it out.

Congratulations and a big thanks to Eric Whitacre and Decca Records for commissioning us be involved in the project!

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rehabstudio with Google Creative Lab Win a Tomorrow Award For Life In A Day Campaign

Posted by Jade on: April 4, 2011 in: + rehabstudio, Awards

BOOOOM! – the winners of the Tomorrow Awards were announced on the 31st of March. There were 144 international entries, and in that final winning list of 5 we are very pleased to that our campaign Life In A Day, produced for Google Creative Lab, won!

Tim Rodgers said: ”We were super excited to be among the small group of Tomorrow Award winners & to have been involved in this amazing project. A true glimpse of the world on the 24th July. Happy Days!”

The full list of winners is:

YouTube Life In A Day - rehabstudio/Google Creative Lab – UK/USA

The Wilderness Downtown – Google Creative Lab – USA

4th Amendment Wear – 4th Amendment Wear – USA

Mitsubishi “Live Drive” – 180LA – USA

Pay With A Tweet - R/GA – USA

Click here if you want to see the campaign, and here if you want to look at the online case study.

Sadly we couldn’t make the awards, but the lovely Eva Blue did and has given us permission to use some of her photos:

The Awards