Khoda

“Khoda” is a fantastic animated video project by Reza Dolatabadi using 6000 paintings that were specifically created for the 5 minute film. Each time you pause the video you see a new painting.

Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film that would meet high personal standards. Khoda is a psychological thriller; a student project which was seen as a ‘mission impossible’ by many people but eventually proved possible!

Calvin Flakes

Last week Calvin Harris tweeted about a gift that arrived for him from Kellogg’s.

Basically Harris had been doing a lot of tweeting recently about his breakfast preferences, about his choice of cereal. Picking up on this, Kellogg's sent Harris his very own breakfast cereal with the strapline ‘50% cornflakes, 50% branflakes – the perfect mix’. This is superb marketing. Simple, low cost, and yet highly, highly effective. Instant Brand Ambassador!

The Web In 5 Years, According To Google

Revolution Magazine carried a great article last Friday about an interview that Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, gave at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

While the interview is initially about Google, where it's come from and where it's going, Eric Schmidt also gives an overview of how Google sees the web changing in the next five years time. Schmidt outlines a 'radically different' internet that will be dominated by the Chinese language and Social Media content, and delivered to us by super-fast broadband.

By far one of the most interesting points that Schmidt raises is that brands should be listening to youth consumers when planning their marketing strategies. He simply points out, "Talk to a teenager about how they consume media and remember in five years they'll be your employee".

This is an overview of Schmidt's vision compiled by ReadWriteWeb:

1. Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
2. Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
3. Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
4. "We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.
5. "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
6. "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"
7. It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

This is the interview:

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles

Last Thursday saw the trailer go live for the new Capcom "Resident Evil" game. Essentially this is the lastest in the popular zombie killing series of games, featuring all the blood, guts and gore that would be expected.

What wasn't expected was the takeover video ad that turned an otherwise normal webpage into a zombie rampaged mess. Allowing users to both watch and play the new game. This is seriously cool...



Mona Hamilton, VP-marketing at Capcom, said "This is the first time users can interact and actually play the game inside the trailer, it really allows people to experience that surprise horror and fear. ... It was designed to take the experience to the next level."

GameTrailers.com, part of the MTV Networks entertainment unit inside Spike Digital, and JVST, San Francisco, worked with Capcom to create the interactive trailer. Unfortunately the interactive nature of the trailer means that it is only available on the GameTrailers site, however, there is an impressive advertising suite backing up this element of the campaign across the US market. Unusually, all this advertising is driving users to GameTrailers.com rather then a dedicated campaign microsite.

Brad Winters, general manager for GameTrailers.com, said "It's a captive audience with people coming to the site for nothing other than to watch game videos. ... This engages the audience more than just watching a video and if you can get them involved in the content, it's going to make more of an impression."

This is the first interactive trailer that GameTrailers.com has hosted, and while Winters doesn't see it taking over the traditional trailer, he did say "I think we'll see this kind of interactivity more and more as part of marketing plans. ... And not just for video games and movies, but it's an opportunity for anyone creating video content [for their brand]."

Augmented Reality: Esquire Magazine

Last Monday Esquire revealed that they would once again be pushing the boundaries of print. As I'm sure everyone will remember, Esquire's first foray into enhanced print was with their ePaper 75th Anniversary issue, and following that they did their brilliant split cover. This time, however, it's Augmented Reality that is their enhancement of choice.

For their December issue Esquire have developed an Augmented Reality cover featuring none other then Robert Downey Jr.. Downey introduces the issue and does a brief plug for the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie. The real fun comes in with a host of bonus content that is accessed and controlled on the Esquire website by installing an app and interacting with the Augmented Reality marker.

In the following video, Editor-in-Chief, David Granger, runs through the features. An example given is for the issue’s fashion features, which, by tilting the magazine in different directions, allows you to adjust the the weather in the shots with the model's changing to suit the new conditions.