Weird & Wonderful Website

On Sunday, our team at Chief Productions are setting off on the first leg of a round the world shoot for our forthcoming television series, Weird & Wonderful Hotels.

To celebrate, we’ve today launched a brand new website where you can learn more about the show, and keep up with all the latest production news.

Head over to www.weirdandwonderfulhotels.com to take a look, and be sure to submit your suggestions for crazy and bizarre places to stay.

Manchester 20/05/09

Patrick Egerton (Chief Productions) and Neal Clark (Sleepydog) meet with writer,  Matt Baker to discuss the development of their latest TV project.

Kid’s Books Go Mobile

Sleepydog Editor, Lisa Hilton with author, Steve Skidmore, reviewing his first children’s book on the iPhone.

Triumph

Working for the past few months immersed in a science fiction show has been a lot of fun. Lots of work too, of course, but when a big part of the research has been revisiting shows that ran and ran such as Mission: Impossible, Columbo and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. it’s not the kind of work day that you drag your feet towards.

The great part of writing a show like Slingers is that a lot of the reference material is so readily available – for the most part I don’t have to worry too much about the future as in many ways (for better or worse) we’re already living in it. For example, the above image is taken from the trailer for upcoming apocalyptic thriller The Road. It’s a stunning image of a familiar world gone wrong, but what’s more stunning is what I read in this Esquire preview:

“When they pass through a city, there’s a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect. That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There’s a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape.”

Kinda horrifying.

A much more beautiful example was this shot of the Space Shuttle Atlantis caught as just a speck against the backdrop of the sun (uncropped image here). When you take into account that Atlantis is almost 25 years old and quite an old fashioned idea herself (often described as a brick with a stick by those piloting her back into our atmosphere) there’s something almost retro about our Shuttle missions.

One real piece of real life science fiction that touched me recently was the Phoenix Mars Mission from NASA and the genius stroke to anthropomorphise the little craft by giving it a voice via Twitter:

It was a thing of wonder to have the reports come back and see the little guy interact with its followers, but then as the mission came towards its end it suddenly became heartbreaking:

I used to think living in the future was all jetpacks and rocket ships, but it turns out it was all about projecting a little of our humanity out into the darkness…

Social Media Greenroom

Building on some initial forays into politics and social media that myself and Christian Payne made last year, the Sleepydog team have been playing an advisory/brainstorming role with Thomson Reuters that evolved into something we like to call a social media greenroom.

So far we’d used a combination of Twitter and LifeCast to pull in questions / feedback and then create a space for more conversation around the subjects that a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event throws out. When Davos came around we had another brainstorm with the Reuters team to discuss the best way to amplify their presence out in Switzerland. It was very gratifying to see the team out there hit the ground running and also be able to provide some live conversation back here in the UK as feedback to their work.

Having already broken a few barriers with the Labour party and the Conservatives (that event itself was covered by CNN because of the social media angle) we now have our sights set on Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. We hope to build upon the idea of a social media greenroom by making this next one a social media focused event rather than a bolt-on to a regular Newsmaker. This in part is thanks the success of our last SM greenroom event with Bob Zoellick, President of the World Bank, when he was in London for the G20.

Whether its working with movie stars or politicians they (or their handlers) can be very wary of new media or indeed anything that strays too far from the familiar. Describing our set up in old media terms seems to work best. So explaining that sourcing questions via Twitter and answering them live via webcam is simply another way to do a traditional greenroom interview works pretty well.

With all this in mind the Sleepydog developers have been working hard on something called Newsdeck that offers a fully integrated producer hub to help coordinate and amplify an event such as a Newsmaker. So far we’ve been asked to show it to Microsoft (which we did last week) and are still tweaking the features for use by Reuters in the near future.

For myself and Sleepydog this is all a good way to explore how the media landscape will look some time ahead. It’s a little like exploratory drilling, but rather than hoping to strike a rich stream from the past we’re actually tapping into the future.

Thanks to smart people like @ilicco, @MarkJones and @chris_parker we get to do some very cool stuff here and have a few more things up our collective sleeves. Watch this space or follow us on Twitter to keep in the loop.

Anything but Sleepy

My name’s Mike Atherton, but most people know me as Sizemore. I have nothing to do with cricket or helping Tom Hanks win World War II (but occasionally get email intended for both of those guys anyway). I have a blog over here, but this guy called me nine kinds of wrong so you may want to skip that. I’m a writer and that’s why I’m here.

I’ve been working with Sleepydog for maybe a year now. We started throwing some social media ideas around and somehow ended up in LA working on a TV show. That idea, Slingers, just skipped into pre-production and a follow up show, De-Tech, is now starting to take shape. I’d be lying if I said all of this wasn’t a lot of fun.

The great thing about Sleepydog is that the stuff I work with them on is only a fraction of what they do. The great thing about this blog is now I’ll be able to keep up with the other stuff too.

Sleepydog to me is an ideas company – that they then have the passion and ability to turn those ideas into something tangible and profitable is fantastic, but for me the real wonder here is that they take the ideas process itself very seriously indeed. They also have a knack for finding the best people to work with which leads to yet more ideas. This blog will be another place to throw those concepts around and keep an eye on what other creative companies and individuals are up to.

It’s also a good place to watch a television show or two take shape.

Exciting stuff…

LifeCast Gets A Boost

We were delighted that our iPhone app, LifeCast got top billing on Apple’s recent ‘Thanks a billion‘ campaign. Great to see our favourite blue icon was larger than all the other apps featured – who says size doesn’t matter?

We ♥ Robots

We can’t get enough of robots at Sleepydog and were blown away by this new motorbike commercial in which everything you see is CGI.  Congrats to Visual Effects Supervisor, Diego Vazquez Lozano and everyone at Glassworks for doing such an amazing job.

Daft But Fun

If you’re a fan of Daft Punk, or just looking for a new way to irritate fellow commuters then iDaft could be for you.  This free iPhone app gives you a 4 x 4 soundboard of robotic voice samples, enabling you to create your own (albeit limited) remix of Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’.

Yes it’s pointless, yes it’s limited but it provided me with fifteen minutes of free entertainment, and you can’t really argue with that.

Congrats To Chief

Congratulations to Colin Offland and everyone at Chief Productions for their recent success at the Roses Advertising Awards!

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