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
WIP+
As some of you might know we are one of a handful agencies who’s been invited by Google to take part in a two week hackathon to work up some cool stuff for their Google+ hangouts project -Really exciting stuff!!
For those of you who don’t know what we are talking about, here’a s a link to Google’s official blog where they released the news about their latest API end of last week.
This API has a bunch of new features and possibilities to build upon, the ability to respond to facial movements in real-time inside an app for example, and new sendMessage functionality that we’re trying out as we speak.
On that note; We are’re working on a table Foosball game, a game that will take advantage of as many funky features of this new API as possible, you can follow our work in close on our rehabstudio Google+ hangout .
What exactly is an API you may ask? In short, its the interface where development and new code is written. Simple!
Our Fossball game is WIP - Its going well, we’re well excited and … well, we have until 29th May, then we will send our work to Google for a final review, followed by launch 1st June.
This is where its AT rehabstudio G+ hangout page, come hang out!
Laters, rehabstudio
x
Ps. Here’s some more information about this API thing we keep going on about.
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!
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.
Book your seat for Life In A Day’s UK cinema launch
Life In A Day is out in UK cinemas from Friday June 17th!
The project has already rounded up some pretty sweet shiny trophies, so we’re super excited that all of you will be able to see it on the big screen. It was great working with Kevin MacDonald and Ridley Scott on the project with Google Creative Labs.
If you missed January’s World premiere streamed from the Sundance Film Festival, nows your chance to catch the full feature when it opens in cinemas.
It’s been one of our favourite projects to work on. The final cut documentary, shot by a small army of filmmakers all over the world, is an amazing snapshot of Life on Earth on a single day, July 24th 2010. We watched the original live stream over a fine bottle of whiskey in the studio and there were a few misty eyes when the credits rolled.
Don’t miss it – it’s a beautiful piece of work!
Check the channel for the full story.
How we made it: Google AdWords 10th anniversary
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.
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
Click here to see the rehabstudio personalised video!
rehabstudio launches Eric Whitacre’s 3D video ‘Sleep’
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!
Interview with E-Biz, Google AdWords 10th Anniversary
The Google AdWords 10th Anniversary has been a super huge amazing success, we’re going to post up our how it was made post soon, we’ve been really busy this year already. In the meantime here’s a copy of an interview with E-Biz about the project;
By Simon Fuller. Google knows how to say thank you – and how to say it in plenty of languages, to boot. The Net giant was looking for a way to say cheers for the support of advertisers using its AdWords product, which recently celebrated its tenth birthday. And so production company PostPanic together with digital creative outfit rehabstudio and ad agency AKQA San Francisco came up with a nifty short film themed around a bunch of Google boffins working out a way to say thanks.
In the film, directed by Mischa Rozema from PostPanic, a crack team of Google scientists trial a few ingenious methods of delivering a thank-you message to the AdWords advertisers, including using a huge swarm of bees which attempt to spell out the message. In each case, things go awry, eventually resulting in the scientists getting the boot in favour of a simple but heartfelt thanks from the assembled Google team.
“In terms of the concept development, the Google style is very handmade, very cut and paste,” explains Tim Rodgers, creative director at rehabstudio. “And our own process is hand-built digital, it’s a mad professor style, like a test lab.”
What sets this film apart is the way in which the message can be personalised for each advertiser. Rehabstudio put together a system which altered the content in the film based on the advertiser watching it. So, for example, during the scene with the bees, the insects will form the name of the company viewing the film. Google then sent invites to its advertisers, giving them access to a YouTube channel specially-created for the film where they could watch the version handmade for them.
“There was a lot of work to do in terms of how to optimise the video experience to reach as many people as possible,” says Rodgers. “[We worked in] 47 languages as AdWords has a huge numbers of customers, so we had to develop translations. The personalisation was going out to AdWords customers literally from America to China.
“We’ve actually been doing personalisation for a while, the first use was for a first person adventure movie, which made use of Facebook Connect to pull in a user’s info, friends, pictures, and superimpose them on top of a video,” adds Rodgers. “The AdWords film is the next level, we’ve achieved a professionally composed video for each user.”
And rehabstudio predicts that the level of personalisation seen in the film will soon become more commonplace.
“Personalised content is not like TV, it’s not like broadcast, it [allows] a changing storyline,” says Rodgers. “It’s much more engaging than standard industry stuff. Over time, it will become more ingrained.”
Originally posted on http://brand-e.biz/personalised-thanks-from-google_10915.html
We’re big in Korea..
We got our copy of w.e.b. magazine this week – the guys out there did a feature on the studio and our work to date.
Nice!
Originally posted on http://www.worldweb.co.kr/web/overseas/list.asp