We’re putting on a tour with Orange. It’s part of the whole ‘I am’ thing. The Unlit Tour is about an artist going on the road and creating his own ‘I am’ story as he goes. The tour is going to be ‘made by everyone’. From the people who open up their houses to act as gig venues and the bands who’ve offered to support to the strange and wonderful randoms that Jont and Dave meet on their travels.
This video basically tells the story better than I could. It’s the film of their first few days on the road.
My particular highlight is a band called Hedluv who played in Penzance. They’re kind of like The Mighty Boosh meeting Goldie Lookin Chain in the keyboard section of Toys R Us.
To see them live watch about halfway through the video above.
It’s a different thing doing a different job. But I can see how one would perhaps make you think of the other. For sure.
Now I’ve no idea if Tim’s comment is a thinly veiled jibe or just a simple statement. I don’t know Tim. Or his intentions, so it’s really hard to tell.
He could be saying:
YOU ARE THIEVING FUCKTARDS WHO HAVE NICKED THE IDEA OF USING A GUY WHO MOVES FUNNY AROUND AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT FOR ADVERTISING PURPOSES
Or he could just be saying that he really quite likes this video and there’s just something about it that reminds him of the above Spike Jonez directed ad from the year 2000. But there’s something about the use of the word ‘version’ that makes me think there’s a hint of jibeyness about it. Or I could be suffering from blog-comment paranoia…
Ah well.
But it does relate to something that happened to me earlier on today. I met up with some lovely creative chaps who I’ve known for a while. They wanted to chat about an idea for a project. It just so happened that we’d already done exactly the same thing 4 years ago on the internet. Like totally exactly the same. So we laughed about it and moved on to chatting about some other ideas instead.
But if they’d talked to someone else about it there would be an identical thing being conceived and made at this exact moment in time. And at some point in a month or two people would be saying: “Oh my god, they ripped off that thing from 4 years ago”. And I’d never have known any different, apart from the fact that I really like these guys and I know that they wouldn’t intentionally have done that. But in another time-space scenario I’d have probably been dead cynical about it. For sure.
The Tea Buddy shenanigans a few months ago is yet-another example of a similarish thing being spotted and jumped on.
It’s tough. And it’s only going to get worse as we get more connected and more people see more stuff that they can make more connections between.
I guess the only answer is to try to have seen everything in the world ever. Or perhaps the creative industries should try to set up a global panel of idea guardians who can check all concepts at an early stage and make sure they don’t remind them of something else?
But for what it’s worth, as far as I know, no-one involved in the making of the David Elsewhere stuff has ever seen that Spike Jonez ad (at least not that they’re admitting).
EDIT: I just remembered another thing! My brain must be working OK-ish tonight. This point made by James Cooper ex-of-Dare now of Anomaly NY on Scampblog.
2. Be original. Same rules apply to when all you lot who moan about whether Bravia or Guinness or John Lewis was original or not. Poke’s nice unlimited site looks a little like a Motorola site, our nice Bravia site looks a little like a Pioneer site. The point is it’s not such a leap to imagine that creative brains come up with the same things. An amount of copying goes on, but these things right themselves in the end. No one is going to make a serious career out of being unoriginal – apart from The Chemical Brothers. There are trends in digital in the same way there are in TV. If you really want to stick out then you have to do something different and we all know how hard that is these days.
After lots of late nights and hard work by lots of valiant people at Poke the Orange Balloon Race is finally live and running. And it seems to be working like a dream (fingers crossed). You probably saw it obscuring the front of the site when you first arrived…
The servers are getting hammered with about 14 Trillion Terrabytes a second. But I guess that’s the price you pay for doing some kind of distributed, fancy-pants thing. You live and learn. You live and learn.
Just got back from the Webbys in New York. We were over there to pick up a People’s Voice for the Orange Never Ending Web Page. There’s evidently no photo of me picking up our Webby, so here’s a picture of Richard from Moo picking up their Webby instead, well done Moo chaps.
It was all really well put together and a lot of fun. Perhaps a little too much fun and there might have been too many refreshments on offer. But anyway.
I had a much better time than I normally do at that kind of thing. I think it’s because everyone was well, webby. So being the geek that I am I could easily get to common ground with folk about stuff I found at least a tiny bit interesting.
So sorry for not blogging. Got into a bit of a spiral of working. Partying. Sleeping. Hanging Over. Eating. And back to working again. And so the circle of (the last week of) life goes.
There’s been some really good comments about the Orange Balloon Race. Including a couple of people mentioning some issues with explanations and UI on the site. We’ve made a bunch of improvements and hopefully iit’s getting better all the time…
It’s great to see the balloon widget working so nicely (see below). Thanks to the Gigya widget platform you can get support for your balloon on loads of different types of sites.
When the site goes live this widget will show your progress – where you are in the race – and allow friends to give you a boost. All good stuff.
It’s all getting really exciting. I can’t wait for the main thing to go live. In testing it’s all looking pretty spiffy. I hope people like it…
Basically we’re going to set off loads of balloons across the Internet. The one that goes the furthest in 7 days wins – and the prize is a £20,000 VIP trip to Ibiza including everything that you and 7 friends could hope for, ever. That’s it in a nutshell.
Oh and there’s all kinds of stars and bonus doo-dahs along the way – collect 5 stars and win stuff. Hit rainbows and get warped into the future and all that kind of thing. You know, like they do in games and stuff.
Sign up for the race
Visit the site now and get a balloon. Then when the race starts in 3 weeks you’ll be right up the front. Well you’ll be in the race anyway.
The course is made up of sites that have agreed to be part of the racecourse, or are about to agree to be part of the racecourse. That’s right folks. If you’ve got a blog or a website you can add it to the race by simply adding a small snippet of widgety code to your site. You can visit the site to sign up, but if you’re impatient and really want to add your site you can bust straight there using this URL: http://www.playballoonacy.com/account/sites
What’s in it for sites that take part? Well in hard terms it’ll drive traffic to your site. There’s going to be people visiting your site to see their balloons pass over it. And if the race passes over an interesting page people might just stop by to have a look. In softer terms it might just be a bit of fun.
Orange’s Spot the Bull is back. And this time it’s bigger and better than before. Now featuring:
team play allowing you to win up to 8 tickets per group
live multi-cam video streaming from the field
real time stats and bull-tracking enabling strategic play
and much more besides
If you want to win Glastonbury tickets this is officially the biggest ticket givaway competition in the world – so get stuck in. Today is the first day of it going live so if you get in there fast you’ll be in with a good chance of winning tickets.
Play Spot the Bull now. And get your friends to play with you, you’ll get increased chances of winning more tickets, honestly :-)
If anyone wants more info on the project just give me a shout and I’ll be happy to furnish you with what I know.
There’s one unfortunate things about Interactive TV ads, not that many people really get to see them. Which is a shame when they’re sometimes as lovely as this:
Thanks to YouTube ‘ordinary’ people without Murdochian Red Buttons can now see it too. Nice work by the Weapon 7 folks.