Through the lovely blog Today and Tomorrow, I stumbled upon these French art-pranksters, prank-artists, guerrilla-dudes called  Encastrable (loose translation: built-in, I think).

This French duo (Antoine Lejolivet and Paul Souviron) uses street-art-type techniques and applies them to the über-dull world of DIY shops and supermarkets. Just using items that are on the shelves and without permission, they create these ephemeral installations that turn the supermarket into an artistic space. Nice. Funny. Critical.

Also, for some reason that reminds me of a Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder ) quote I read this morning: “Creativity is a renewable source.”
It’s a lovely day.

Augmented reality is the new buzz word it seems. The technology itself has been around for a while, but all these nerds (they’re not nerds? yes they are nerds) are starting to use it to make amazing applications. So it’s getting interesting for a non-techie like me.

The ones that are getting me interested are mobile services like Wikitude and Layar. They are basically applications that, using the phone’s camera, recognise where you are and tell you what what’s around you. A very useful little tool and I presume it will allow people and businesses to add descriptions, making it both social and commercially viable. And as the new iPhone comes with a built-in compass, I’m sure these applications won’t just be limited to the Android phone for long.

On the gimmicky side, you have things like the BMW Z4 interactive 3D game. Gimmicky, yes. Pointless, yes. But as my friend here in the studio just said: “That’s something my dad would love!”. So it’s yet another tool in the box for brands to raise awareness and to get people to create their own content.
Although the app only seems to allow you to export the final result as a still and not show the whole process, like the video this smart chap made.
Still, the BMW tv ad is a little crap, even if it was just for not pointing people to the game.

UPDATE: I forgot that @philtidy mentioned last week that the US Postal service was using AR too to let people measure which box they need for their parcels. Nice.

Not-so-well-known online book retailer wants to become more-known. Brazilian ad agency comes up with an extensive campaign that includes technology, some guerrilla stuff, social media, viral marketing and a cool product too.
This is ‘The Living Book’, a book that’s written by people and that changes on a weekly basis. 

The book consists solely of QR codes (those weird matrix-type square things that are being used for mobile tagging). And when you take a picture of these codes with your mobile phone, each one will translate into a new bit of content every 7 days. 

So far so cool, but it doesn’t stop there. The bits of ‘content’ are actually Twitter messages that include the words ‘love’ or ‘hate’. Great gimmick, nice campaign, lovely way to integrate UGC, interesting technology. And apparently, the book sold out in no time.

Creative Review has a nice write-up about the whole thing.

Does anyone have any other good examples of QR technology being used creatively?

Shocking.
Two months since my last post proper. There’s no excuse for it.
But there is a good reason for it, though. It’s all because of Twitter. It’s Twitter that made me stop blogging and twittering.

See, it was through a simple Tweet that we found out that MTV and the European Union were trying to build a social-network-type-website to support their joint campaign, raising awareness about the upcoming European Elections.
And because my social-media pal Zuluzulu-slash-wildebees and me had been saying that ‘09 was gonna be the year of collaborations, that our skills were finally going to converge, we wrote an overnight proposal built around existing social media tools like Twitter, Qik and Facebook Connect. 
And we won the pitch.
So this is what took me so long: Can You Hear Me, Europe. 

We worked our socks off (turnaround time: 1 month, in 23 languages), but it’s been a great project and we learnt a lot. Most importantly: people have been using the website in a pretty good way. And, good for us, the site has been getting mentions on BBC, Brand Republic , Politica2.0,… 

It’s been fun. So much that we’re now thinking of a company name and a positioning plan. So we can truly start collaborating.

More inventive stuff with square boxes.
To finish off the week some pure eye-candy, by animation duo Ubik.
Nothing more. Just to sooth your souls. 
It’s a stunning animation made for Motionographer’s recent F5 showcase festival.

I like street art. Bumping into cool, beautiful, silly interventions always makes me smile. The fact that someone uses the world around us as a canvas just, you know, is great.
Mmmm, feels like it’s hangover Friday today.

Anyway, this one would definitely make me stop if I saw it. German artist Jan Vormann uses Lego blocks to fill up cracks and holes in walls. Dispatchwork, he calls it.
He’s done it in Italy and Israel before, but his latest contructions are set in Berlin. 

Photo by Kathleen Waak

Here’s a cute little idea.
Finnish animation studio Anima Boutique have developed a series of episodes called The Guys. They get people to send in their home videos, which they re-interpret, import their animated characters (The Guys) into the scenes and re-publish on their website. 
They’re all short, they’re all silly, so they all have potential to become your daily 10 seconds of nonsense.  On your mobile of course .

David Lynch embraces the internet yet again. On June 1 the director/artist will launch Interview Project,  a website that will release a series of 3-5 minute portraits of people that his crews met on a 20,000 mile road-trip round America. 
Watch the trailer and Lynch’s own little Lynch-style plug on the Interview Project website. Entertainment Weekly also has a preview of the first episode.

Would have been great if Lynch himself had interviewed all these people; the extraordinary meets the ordinary meets the extraordinary. Still, this looks like a nice piece of human content being dripfed into our digital brains over the course of a year.

Here’s a great idea that breathes new life into the struggling format of the tv commercial. Get your audience to make it.
Not some competition where you ask people to create the whole film. That has been done before and generally only appeals to the more hardcore creatives. But get the public to submit small bits and pieces, so everyone can easily participate and the result is a collaborative effort. 

Belgian mobile provider Proximus are making a stop-motion tv commercial based on photos that people have uploaded. Not just any pictures; people get clear guidelines. Currently they’re running an animated storyboard as a tv ad, pointing people to a website where they can upload their pictures to match specific frames of the storyboard.

Genius! Lots of fun! Immediate result for the people who participate! A very well executed website. Very little brand pushing going on there. 
And if they succeed, they’ll get the world record for most locations/actors/directors in a tv spot.

I was checking it over the weekend and people have already gone out of their way to shoot great stills. Check out the scene where people ‘fly’ around the little park. Someone had some fun with that. 

The only thing I’m missing is some form of identifying the names/locations of the people that are submitting. And maybe leave comments. That would have turned it even more into a social event.

A few weeks ago, Berlin-based Irish animator David O’Reilly won the Gold Bear for Best Short at the Berlin Film Festival. I must admit  I was a little surprised. I’ve known his work for a while through an early music video and it’s fair to say he seems a pretty independent talent. Not really award-winning fodder. 
Yes, his winning film ‘Please Say Something’ is a heart-breaking representation of a typical love story. But O’Reilly treats it in such a clever, noisy and abstract way that I wouldn’t have put my money on him winning prestigious awards. Still, you can’t help but like it. It’s a really nice piece of film making. 

But O’Reilly is not just independent when it comes to his productions (detail: the film was made in his flat, with one computer); he also pushes the conformities of distribution.
PSS was originally released as 23 episodes of 25 seconds each through his own website. And now that he’s got recognition, he’s convinced his distributors Future Shorts (and who knows who else) to release the film online, i.e. for free, despite the fact that it probably blows up a few bridges with programmers / festivals /… and other people that could bring in money.
Instead he wants to prove that the web as distribution for (successful) animation has its place. Brave guy.

On his blog he’s asking people to embed and distribute ‘Please Say Something’. I love the film and I’m curious to see how his web-distribution experiment turns out, so I’m happily obliging. 

PS: Also, check out his Wofl 2106 piece, which was one of the few films that made you sit up at last year’s onedotzero wow+flutter programme.