Ukoko

At Do Tank we pride ourselves on the creation of innovative and intelligent examples of digital media and, as a digital creative agency, we like to put these examples to good use. So we were massively chuffed when “White Noise“, an interactive TV application we developed for innovative Dutch broadcaster 3Voor12 won a presitigious Spin Award (the Dutch equivalent of a BAFTA) this week.

The application is a next-generation mash-up that picks-up the keywords that iTV viewers send to the TV, runs them through Flickr and broadcasts the resulting images synchronised to a Dave Clarke DJ set. We’d call it VJ2.0 but we already did one of those a few years back with a bluetooth app for clubs.

Do Tank are currently working on the next, extended and improved version of WhiteNoise ready to launch early summer.

The judges’ report ( translation stolen from Patrick Rushton’s blog! ) reads “A silver SpinAward goes to VPRO and Chellomedia for Whitenoise. Within the 3VOOR12 brand, VPRO and Chellomedia have pioneered development of interactive applications on digital television, and Whitenoise is the next step. The Whitenoise concept brings together television, interactivity and internet. Via the remote control, the user chooses search keywords from the popular internet site Flickr. The result goes further than polls or voting and the collaborative creation is a true innovation on television and is therefore worthy of a SpinAward.”
http://www.spinawards.nl/

I didn’t immediately realise why I was so shocked and affected by the news when I received a Twitter update from BBC Breaking telling me the writer, director and UK film industry evangelist, Anthony Minghella, had died following a fairly routine operation. In truth, I hardly knew the man; I had the privilege of working on one his last films, Breaking and Entering, and won’t easily forget the site of him leading the crew in song while waiting for the DOP to prepare a shot - It’s something I’ve seen many directors do. But beyond that my relationship was, officially, just one of the many crew of a film.

But then I got to thinking. In the short time I had spent in his company and the handful of times we had spoken, it was always as if I were talking to someone I had known for years. He spoke to people the way old friends speak: interested, engaged, curious and genuine. It’s rare to meet people like that and especially sad to lose one of them.

Mirage Enterprises have set-up a blog for people to leave messages for the family he leaves behind.

http://minghella.blogspot.com/2008/03/anthony-minghella-in-memoriam.html

You’d have to be living in box not have noticed Producer/Director JJ Abrams viral campaign surrounding Cloverfield. Slusho, a recurring meme in Abram’s projects, has made cameo appearances in Alias and Heroes and one viral site for Cloverfield for a bit of cross-fertislisation so he’s not just limiting it to the web. The TV show Lost (an Abrams production) also had a sucessful extended reality called The Lost Experience and, in the run up to next series of Lost, there is currently is another campaign called Find 815.

Now it seems he’s at it again with the launch of the teaser for upcoming Star Trek film. Apparently starring Chris Pine in the James T Kirk role, the teaser can be seen on the official website but if you scroll down to the “Under Construction” banner there’s a small red dot. Click it to go through to another viral website and watch the “live” video stream from the construction site of the Enterprise NCC-1701 (under construction, get it? I’m here all week, folks).

So what else might be in store for the long run up to Star Trek movie’s release? It’s certainly an audience up for another extended experience or alternate reality game and Abrams certainly earned the title of a master at exploiting cross-media to tantalise and tease his audience. We have nearly a whole year of waiting to find out.

Do Tank Digital Creative Agency created an interactive TV mash-up for Dutch TV channel 3Voor12’s weekly White Noise music show. The iTV show features a DJ set from Dave Clarke where the audience are given the ability to become the VJ by pulling user-generated images from Flickr. Our Flash-based iTV application spools the images and plays them back, synched in time with the music. It rocks, seriously.

Watch 3Voor12 on YouTube

“Missed Friendships” is the third in a series of corporate animations we’ve just produced for Genesys, the audio & web conferencing company. Written & created by Kate Dickins with character design by our very own Julian Parry, this episode tackles incompatibility problems often experienced by user of (ahem) other companies’ products, but not by the users of Genesys’ products.