FITC wrapped a few weeks ago and the guys over at The Stock-Archive made a great highlight video for the event. Toronto is such a beautiful city and this video def. does a great job of showcasing it’s incredible skyline. I didn’t make it into the film (that I can tell) but I spotted my self in a couple of the pictures they posted on flickr of the event. Check it out
So installed the WPtouch plugin today and did a little customizing. The plugin comes with a couple of customization options in the wp settings panel but if you really want to make changes you’ll have to dive into the css pretty quickly. I uploaded a custom Iphone home screen bookmark too. At any rate, WPtouch is by far the quickest and easiest way to make your blog iphone friendly. Check it out here.
It’s safe to say Apple’s arguments towards not allowing the flash player on iphone are quite frivolous and hollow to say the least. Adobe has proven that the flash player can run on the iphone with no performance issues at all. From what I’ve read the argument for why Apple is putting up such a fight is to control online video (which of course, Flash dominates). I’d love to sit here and rant about this topic but it’s been done, and much more thoroughly then I’d be able to accomplish. So, let me just provide you with a list of sources where you can review the arguments for yourself. Enjoy
For those of you living under a rock, The North Kingdom is a small Interactive Agency of 30 or so people located in the far north of Sweden. Robert Lindström & David Eriksson, two of North Kingdom’s founders, were at FITC Toronto this past week and blew the doors off with a case study of the work they did for Adidas in Germany, Teamgeist.
The visuals of the Adidas campaign and level of detail are absolutely incredible. I can remember laughing with the person next to me as Robert and David showed artwork (of incredible quality) that was rejected because it wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. But they had a vision and stressed the importance of maintaining that vision at all costs. In the end, it paid off. Obviously.
The presentation began with a quick ‘making of’ their latest showreel and I have to say if you haven’t seen it yet stop everything and watch it below.
If you like the soundtrack, The North Kingdom made it specifically for the showreel and you can download it here
Another gem of The North Kingdom is their ‘Get The Glass’ campaign, a branch of the Got Milk campaign. ‘Get The Glass’ is built around an interactive online experience and was the 2nd most awarded interactive campaign in the world in 2008. All of the production was done in under 4 months and is absolutely stunning. I highly recommend checking out the ‘get the glass’ website but be warned that you may become seriously unproductive and crave milk.
At FITC Toronto last week I attended Keith Peters’ session title Programming Art. Keith showed off several cool programs that help to generate art with very minimal code. One of the coolest programs was called Context Free Art. Context Free Art forces you to thing of programming in a different way. Basically, the whole program works by creating simple rules and then rendering them. Here is a basic example of a circle.
startshape WELCOME
rule WELCOME {
CIRCLE{}
}
The only thing required by Context Free is ’startshape’ followed by the rule you’d like to render first. However, the real power of the program comes from using recursion to loop through a rule and make small changes to generate some awesome art. Here I’ve taken the WELCOME rule, and called itself from with-in the rule. I passed a change to the y and the rotate values to generate a circle of circles.
startshape WELCOME
rule WELCOME {
CIRCLE{}
WELCOME {y 2 rotate 2}
}
This was just a simple example and you can see how quickly things could get more interesting. The second I got on the plane to fly home I started toying with context free. Here’s a couple of things I came up with in a few short minutes.
As you can see it doesn’t take long to generate some pretty interesting results. Another cool things is that you can save your renderings as animations. Below are a the same as above just rendered as animations.
If you’d like to check it out you can download Context Free Art here.
So for those of you who don’t know I’m a recent graduate from LSU and I’m out in the world trying to make something of myself. I decided to start my own web design/Interactive biz, escArtist Media. So, if you know anyone looking for a website, custom blog, branding, etc. let me know.
Anyway, I first got interested in animation/web when I discovered Flash back in 9th grade. I was stunned at how quickly and easily animations could be made. Needless to say, I made some stunning presentations in Civics class. But, fast forwarded to 2010 and now I’m pretty experienced in AS3 and always trying to make things move. I dabble with php, java, and other languages so don’t be surprised if you see several posts that focus on those languages.
I just returned from FITC Toronto where I had an incredible time. I got to speak with a few people like Lee Brimelow, the man responsible for my love of Flash, and Steven Sacks, the man who makes using Flash for building websites a much more enjoyable experience. Daniel Schutzsmith gave an incredible workshop for new business owners, Ralph Hauwert blew people away as usual, and Keith Peters showed off some great programming art. The entire line-up of speakers is way to long to list but they were all equally talented and worth catching if you every have the chance. Speaking of that, FITC will be San Francisco with many of the same sessions and speakers August 17-19 so check it out.
College Kids Are Our Future: An Advertising Case Study
So I was going through some old files and came across I paper I wrote during college in the Spring of 2009. I thought I’d throw it on the internet and maybe it’ll be of use to someone a year or 2 from now. Oh yeah, and it got an A.
Advertising: College Kids Are Our Future
New technologies in an increasingly internet dependent world are forcing advertisers to come up with innovative techniques to reach the masses. The development of these techniques can be aided by understanding the 18-24 demographic.
College Kids
College kids are the future. Consumers between the ages of 18-24 are members of a group that have not only been exposed to all advances in media technology but actively manipulate and use it on a regular basis. Being surround by media technology from birth changes the way college students perceive new innovation. Adults commonly view the Internet as a tool for accomplishing tasks at home that previously required leaving, such as paying bills. In contrast, College students perceive the Internet as an additional media channel (Emanuel et al. 14). Consequently, the importance of understanding the 18-24 age-group in terms of growth in the advertising industry is immeasurable.
Problems arise when attempting to seek out the best way of reaching the average college student. A recent study conducted at Alabama State University stated that college students today spend nearly the exactly same amount of time using the three communication channels of reception, expression, and interaction as students polled in a similar study from 1980( college time spent com ). However, the media and vehicles used to carry out these interactions has increased drastically. Expression and interaction once accomplished in person or through use of a telephone can now be divided among time spent on cell phones, video chatting, tweeting, facebooking, emailing, texting, etc. What does this mean for advertisers? It means that there are a multitude of new ways to reach college students. Unfortunately, these new means of communication must share the same chunk of time as the previously mentioned in-person and telephone methods.
Also worth noting is that video chatting, tweeting, facebooking, emailing and texting are all vehicles with-in the same medium. This makes it tough for advertisers to decide which vehicles are the most valuable. Yet, finding the best way to reach college students now will lay the groundwork for landing the large majority of consumers 5-10 years from now. Where will consumers be 5-10 years from now? Online.
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