Scrabble: The Beautiful Word
Scrabble has just reached it 60th birthday, with 100 millions of boxes sold throughout 121 countries in 29 languages, it is the most sold letter game ever. Despite this success, Scrabble is mostly seen today as an elitist and outdated game.
Scrabble is starting a new advertising campaign to dispel the notion that Scrabble is an elitist game. Here is the principle of the game: “Different words accidentally encounter during a Scrabble game, giving by chance birth to a world as unexpected as enchanting. Picture a board of Scrabble at the end of a game: words that have nothing to do with each other are crossing and overlapping, to the point that they sometimes tell a crazy story ! Our creative idea is to turn this fabulous potential into images.”
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ul3q1PexA]
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NThCPpyoW7U]
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kr0QEwfZBk]
Advertising Agency: Ogilvy&Mather, Paris, France
A Bike Journey, as a 3D game
lb to sf via bike from vince mckelvie on Vimeo.
What will become of 3D gaming engines when in the hands of new digital artists? You’ll get plenty of surprises and unexpected artwork. This is no ordinary California bicycle trip: it’s a trippy, Magical Mystery Tour in 3D, played as a game from a (real) stationary bike.
Reader Bince McKelvie writes to describe his project:
Lb to Sf via bike is an interactive installation/game that documents a bike trip my friend and I took from long beach to san francisco. The user rides a stationary bike through a the 3d world by pedaling forward and steering with the bike handle bars. The world consists of three mini games and a huge chunk of the california coast. I am going to be releasing a version that is playable on a computer without the hardware soon. It is made with the blender game engine, a bit of processing, a wii controller and the makingthings board.
By the way, if you happen to be near CalArts in Valencia, the piece will be exhibited there May 2-15.
With the exception of the (very affordable) Wii controller, this is all free and open source technology in the toolchain. In addition to Processing [site | cdmo tag], it’s a fascinating use of the Blender Game Engine. Not satisfied with being just a hugely-powerful, free and open-source, triple-platform (Mac/Windows/Linux) 3D design tool and video composition tool, Blender also has a real-time engine built in – something well worth considering if you’re looking for a live 3D performance and installation environment. That’s already gotten attention for this piece from the excellent Blender blog BlenderNation.
The 3D models and physics are sometimes a bit rough around the edges, but I actually rather like that effect: in a world of look-alike, big budget 3D creations, I can imagine a renaissance of “outside art” for 3D.
Slow Motion Sneezing. Aahchooo!
The Government of South Australia Have released this slow motion video of people sneezing. All about slowing down the spread of Influenza. I love slo-mo videos.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLPYqwnnrig]
good stuff is at around 52 seconds
What do you do with all your old computers?
You might remember the awesome video James Houston created for a Radiohead competition last year? He missed the deadline, but it’s a must see all the same.
skip to about 1 minute to see whats going on
On what i feel is the back of that video comes this video, of ancient computer equipment playing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4]
Here’s what you hear, and see.
Please note no effects or sampling was used. What you see is what you hear (does that even make sense?)
Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound
Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar
8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass
3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong
HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals. Please note I had to record the HP scanner 4 seperate times for each voice.
Parkour For Bikes
I remember last year, some time seeing a video of some amazing trials bike riding. I had some friends back in Spalding that used to do this kind of thing, and it always impressed me.
These last few days a new video has been doing the rounds, and it puts the last to shame.
From YouTube
Filmed over the period of a few months in and around Edinburgh by Dave Sowerby, this video of Inspired Bicycles team rider Danny MacAskill features probably the best collection of street/street trials riding ever seen. There’s some huge riding, but also some of the most technically difficult and imaginative lines you will ever see. Without a doubt, this video pushes the envelope of what is perceived as possible on a trials bike.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z19zFlPah-o]
Music by Band of Horses – The funeral if you care. I liked it
If this guys not sponsored, someone should snap him up fast!
The Internet Was Closed..
Reads: “The internet was closed so I thought I’d come outside today.”
Nice simple but t-shirt from Threadless that you can get me here
Film the Blanks
Films the Blanks is ‘An ongoing experiment to abstract and/or reduce film posters. Some famous, some not so famous but all cool in their own way’. A new poster is posted Mon-Fri at 15.30 GMT, and you can start guessing what you think it is in the comments, a clue will be added from 16.30. First 5 correct answers get a point. The site says there will be special prizes to the highest score at each 100 blanks posted.
Is a nice idea, with some good posters posted so far, take a look, see how many you can guess without sneaking a peek at the comments.
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