So we made a film with Dentsu London called Making Future Magic: light painting with the iPad. “Making Future Magic” is Dentsu London’s big creative statement.
The film was crazy popular, a million views in 2 weeks, and played out on national TV.
It showed a novel technique mixing light painting and stop animation. And it’s beautiful to watch!
More than the film…
If you’re a fan, you can get the music from iTunes (and read the liner notes).
Or you can buy the print-on-demand book, which collects the best still images, and adds behind-the-scenes photos.
Now if you want to get involved, meet Penki! Penki is an iPhone app to help you create the same light painting you saw in the film. There’s a Penki Flickr group so you can share photos. Or you can use it in your personal projects.
Beyond these, there are two other films: Media Surfaces: Incidental Media and Media Surfaces: the Journey. Where the light painting film communicates a brand through technique and aesthetics, these are video sketches that put forward concepts as discussion points.
And there’s been a lot of really good discussion.
What’s going on here?
A communication film. Music and a book for fans to purchase. An iPhone app to do it yourself, and a place to socialise. Two video sketches, and a broad discussion.
What I think we’re doing is designing media.
It’s not like the old days where you just had TV or radio or newspaper, and you were stuck in a “broadcast” world or a “visual” world or whatever.
Now every element of this Making Future Magic project contributes to a brand space which has been designed to be a beautiful spectacle but also inviting to fans and people who want to join in, with a sprinkling of conversation starter.
Instead of thinking about a film, what we’re really thinking about is the relationship between Dentsu London and its audience/friends/coinhabitants-of-the-world!
And given that relationship, we consider what artefacts can we drop in and what media we can use to build the relationship, create a conduit for conversation, and demonstrate Dentsu London’s very particular brand of Making Future Magic.
We create content and create media all at once.
Mix and match! It feels like cooking up a potion. Designing media.
3 Comments and Trackbacks
1. john miles said on 25 November 2010...
matt, i’d be interested in berg’s response to tim berners-lee’s criticism (as it was reported in tuesday’s guardian by josh halliday) of ‘companies that opt to build mobile or desktop applications, such as smartphone apps… rather than create apps that sit on the web alongside other websites’ a development he regards as moving towards ‘closed worlds’. a discursive post on this would be very welcome. go well. john
2. Timo said on 29 November 2010...
This just cropped up on my radar:
Designing Media
Bill Moggridge
MIT Press, 2010
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12249
3. Carolina Vallejo said on 1 December 2010...
Funny, cause I got to this article while searching for Moggridge’s book.