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Activision’s X-Men – Captivity (The Making Of Video)

May 26, 2009 in behind the scenes, Commercials, Cool, International, videogame | Permalink

Making a commercial for a video game is hard enough, imagine having to make a spot for a game that is based on both a recent blockbuster movie release as well as a continuation of a comic-book character…needless to say Toy NYC and MJZ had their work cut out for them when they were approached by Activision to create the promo for the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine video game release. As you have probably already seen (or at least read about in trade pubs or on twitter), their combined efforts resulted in a killer POV (point of view) video that has us seeing life through the eyes of Wolverine as he escapes from a Mexican prison. Taking camera angles similar to the ones used in current video-games, this promo involved live-action footage as well as a large amount of post-production work in order to staple together :30 seconds of adrenaline rush.

The above clip is the ‘Making Of’ video that MJZ and Toy shot while working on the piece. By the way, I wasn’t kidding about the Mexican prison part, if you watch the video you’ll see that they filmed the opening ‘break-out’ scene at an actual Mexican prison! Very cool location indeed.

The original spot Captivity is shown below.
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Making Of Video For Honda’s Let It Shine Spot

May 12, 2009 in Advertising as Art, Automotive, behind the scenes, Commercials, Cool, International | Permalink

If you were a fan of that Honda – Let It Shine commercial that I posted last March (courtesy of w+k), you’ll probably be into this clip as well. It’s a ‘Making Of’ video for the commercial that gives us an inside look into the production of what I think was an extremely cool series of shots.

Director Erik van Wyk (from production company Bouffant, Cape Town) along with various members of the production team walk us through the steps they had to take in order to achieve the desired ‘headlights in synch’ effect that makes this a memorable spot. Pretty cool.

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Wakoopa Releases Web App Usage Report Q1 2009

April 28, 2009 in addicted to 1's and 0's, behind the scenes, Cool, Eye Candy, Interactive, Online Advertising, social media, twitter | Permalink

wakoopa usage
Just one more reason why I love analytical data… it can tell you so much about any given user segment if you look deep enough (though one of my favorite classes in college was ‘lying with statistics’, i’ll assume this is un-biased). Wakoopa has just released The State of Apps Report for Q1 2009. Wakoopa is a service that relies on user-installed tracking code/applications to track application and online service (like facebook) usage. They’ve got a huge following of dedicated users reporting data it seems; taken from their site:

Since we started with Wakoopa, we’ve acquired over 525 million software usage data from 75,000 members. In total, 200,000 applications have been logged on our platform so far. Wakoopa users have also shared more than 3 million application recommendations to date.

The average age of a Wakoopa user though is primarily in my demographic – 26 year old males based in the US who are quick to adopt new software and services (“early adopters”). Taking that into account, the information drawn will still show a solid snapshot of what the tech-savvy crowd has been occupying their time with.

For example, Facebook usage is pretty much consistent throughout the day (in both working and non-working hours), with a peak in activity between the 4-5PM hours. As for new applications dominating the market, Destroy Twitter seems to be the winner for the Mac with two games being the most frequently used applications for Windows – Burnout Paradise and Mirror’s Edge. Other applications to note are the just recently released Twitter application Tweetie as well as a spike in usage for the Google Chrome browser.
wakoopa twitter usage

As for IM software, Windows Live Messenger seems to be the dominant application used across all demographics, though 3rd party software like Skype, Digsby and Adium are more prevalent in North America.

See their results here, and install the application so that there will be a broader range of data for the next report!

The report was sponsored by media publishing company Pearson.

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