When Clare and I decided to tie the marital knot we wanted our invitation to reflect the playful nature of our relationship. We decided everything should be made by hand, from scratch (not in the Sagan sense of from scratch of-course) and also teach us something new.
Mobile Mobile - an interactive installation by James Theophane
Brief: Create a Christmas experience that actively demonstrated Lost Boys core value of collaboration.
We took this as an opportunity to reinterpret the Christmas tree and its role as the traditional focal point for a communal space. 'Mobile Mobile' is a six metre circumference interactive sculpture, and signature piece for the entrance of the Brick Lane studio.
Mobile Mobileupcycles fifty old agency cell phones (available after an agency-wide upgrade just two months prior). Each phone is individually addressed by a computer to cofunction and create a choral arrangement. Assigning each phone a tone, the mass is transformed into an aural form that appears to come alive, shimmering and flirting for onlookers.
To add a little xmas spice to the mix, anyone can visit our live stream and serenade bystanders with their keyboard dexterity: xmas.lbi.co.uk
Credits and acknowledgments Mobile Mobile is a product of hard work and collaboration. There was blood from our COO, also a qualified carpenter. Sweat from our Creative Teams: set design, build and animation. And tears from our IT Department, who not only made the phones do things they never should, but also hit upon the score. "Carol of the Bells" (also known as the "Ukrainian Bell Carol") is a choral miniature work originally composed by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych. The mobile score was arranged by a classically trained musician and pianist from Finance.
Good Cause: One of the largest problems facing the developing world is a lack of trained physicians. MoCa, is a health screening system for developing countries using mobile (cell)phones and open source technologies. See mocamobile.org
Mobile Mobile has been made as a semi-permanent hanging (exhibition) space. In January the mobiles will be replaced with another hanging media, then updated month in, month out. Mobile Mobile is one in a line of many great lo-fi art/build concepts; from the Design Museum's Aquarium, Digital By Design, Troika and The Cloud, the Printer Bleeping Thingy (I can't remember who did it), all the great work by W+K and, of course AKQA's wonderful microwaves from last Christmas. Hopefully there'll be many more to come.
Concept: James Theophane (Creative Director) Promo director - Yanni Kronenberg Design: Bobby Rayit, Jasmine Hays, Pete Talbot, Filipe Lima, Hannah Drury, Trevor Thomas (Creative teams) Programming: Oliver Dewdney, Keith Newton, Adrian Le Grand (Sys Admin) Build: Mike Mulligan (COO) Marcus McDonnell (Office Services) Streaming: Jon Russell Score arrangement: Vicki Simms (Finance) Production/Editing: Peter King (Agenda Collective)
Special thanks to Magnus Larsson for all his help and inspiration
The Technology - by Oliver Dewdney The plan was to make 50 mobiles to each play a different note of a Christmas carol, and flash in time. We set up a test mobile phone - an HTC Touch - to connect to a wifi access point whilst being powered by a charger.
We 'ping'ed the IP address of the phone for two days to verify that it would remain contactable. The phone did get a tiny bit warm, but it worked. We noticed that the ping time changed significantly between different power modes on the wifi of the mobile - from 100ms down to about 2ms on 'performance'.
The plan was to write a small program that ran on the phone that understood a small set on instructions and have a controller running on a PC sending the commands. The basic list of commands was: light on/off, change colour 'wash' and beep.
The first challenge was turning the backlight off - WinMobile is a multitasking OS running WindowsCE as the kernel. The power management subsystem allows you to suggest power settings, but the OS takes into account all the running programs needs.
Turning the backlight fully off proved problematic in the project timescales (a matter of days). Next was beeping. The PC has always had a speaker that could beep - it was connected to the chip that controlled the keyboard - so has had a corresponding function e.g. in windows the MessageBeep function.
WindowsCE was designed for a range of platforms and embedded controllers and it looks like beep was not a core function. Luckily the Microsoft developers included some sample code on how to implement a MIDI sound system expecting hardware manufacturers to license third party full musical instrument libraries. It looks like the manufacturers kept with the simple sine wave sample code implementation.This was good enough for our mobile phone beeping musical rendition.
The program on the phone was written in Microsoft .Net C# and consisted of two parts: one registering with a web service - logging the fact that it was still alive and its current IP address, and two a UDP listener - listening for commands from the controller over the network.
The controller was written to read the midi file of the Carol and send the individual notes to individual phones at the right time. Using UDP instead of TCP and the 'performance' setting on the phone meant that the commands arrived promptly on the phones.
Brody is giving his D&AD President's Lecture this Wednesday (November 25). Titled Neville Brody: Wanker or Genius?I'd say genius...but I'm biased.
"[Lost Boys and] Creative Review readers can claim the dubious distinction of being responsible for the title for Brody's Lecture: it comes from some of the personal and somewhat vicious comments aimed at him following [Dan & my work for the] D&AD New Blood campaign and his recent Wallpaper* cover."
Been a bumper week for awards, two LIA's, a BIMA and a CRESTA. D&AD New Blood - BIMA Red Cross - LIA Electrolux - LIA Gen Green - CRESTAwork @ Lost Boys
Work asked me to contribute a piece of art for our reception. I decided to hack an old replica painting from Spitalfields Market, London (an old flea market on Thursdays). I built a motor using one of those kits you can get from good electronic stores, painted acrylic on canvas and cut out a spinning beach ball of death glued to mounting board. I work for Lost Boys, an Interactive Agency, so I thought it was apt: a relatively new problem in an old setting.
So the Sony campaign I worked on during the planning stage (before joining Lost Boys) has finally gone live. The project was huge and meant working with Fallon, Dare (I got to work with Paul Donohue, producer again who I seem to be crossing paths with quite alot), OMD and Naked – oddly enough we all got on real well. The brief, The Power of Sound (written before “The Power of ...” wasn’t so passé) based on an insight in which vision is only 50% of your entertainment experience. Fallon were torn between two concepts: weird and wonderful large scale experiments with sound , culminating in taking over a small town called Seydisfjordur, and a cacophonous rhapsody of madness directed by Jonothan Glazier in which we had monkeys beating drums on top of trains speeding into tunnels (Mike Leigh shot this, but it got canned as it was too bizarre). Here's the work they produced:
The Soundville campaign was developed at Fallon, London, by executive creative director Richard Flintham, creative director Juan Cabral, agency producer Gemma Knight. Filming was shot by director Juan Cabral via MJZ, London, with producer Nellie Jordan and director of photography Alwin Kuchler. Post production was done at The Moving Picture Company. Editor was Neil Smith at Work Post. Sound was produced and supervised at A-Bomb. Audio post production was done at Wave Studios by Parv Thind.
A brave repositioning for NiQuitin smoking cessation patches. We proposed they not only change the way they do advertising, but change the way they do business. The proposal shifted the client’s business model to a Service Design proposition. A consumer would sign up to the Start program and follow the steps through to completion with the guided hand of a chosen communities, or grass roots initiatives suited to their personal tastes. To put it another way...a bit like weight watchers.
This is the vision for the NiQuitin is about re-branding quitting and focusing all communication, content, products and services on the act of STARTING something instead of QUITTING. It’s about replacing smoking with something better. It’s an ambitious change of position for the brand but one that will reap rewards if they commit to challenging the category.
During my time as the Art Director and CD on Rankin account we received this amazing brief from Rankin. Originally we were discussing calling it Rankin Live(s) - The Great British Portrait week.
At it's heart the idea was simple: shoot, instantly project, print and hang a portrait of each subject, creating an ephemeral and amorphous exhibition space documenting the lives of Britain today. This morphed into Rankin Live a massive retrospective, a live shoot, an interactive gallery and magazine all in one.It was quite an ambitious ask, but quite lot of the original thinking made it through to the exhibition. Initially we were thinking of partnering with JCDecaux Innovate, using their street furniture to take the exhibition beyond the confines of Brick Lane. We had also floated the idea of mini interactive installation booths dotted around the country and at festivals. The resecession kicked in and I guess this bacame a little too ambitious. The Rankin Live tent did make an appearance at Big Chill festival up in Eastnor though.Work @ Tonic
James Theophane, or Theo, is a dilettante residing in London. When he's not dabbling, he's a Creative Director for Lost Boys, generally spending most of his time getting along and just getting on.
He has worked with Tonic, Grey, Publicis Modem, Framfab, Wheel, DNA and GT.
He has created work for Toshiba, Rankin, D&AD, Chelsea FC, Electrolux, Sony, Ericsson, PlayStation, Sega, Channel 4, Oxfam, Canon, Brahma, Marks & Spencer, Wired Magazine and Audi.
