This Exquisite Forest – Crowd-sourced, Collaborative Animation

– Jordan

From Creativity:

Google Creative Lab has made something truly interesting coming from inspiration from “The Johnny Cash Project” and it is called “This Exquisite Forest”  It is an online art experiment that lets you collaborate with others to create animations and stories. The animation and stories grow based on which pathway users believe to be the best way to take the story which results in making an animation the best it can be essentially from a crowd-sourced perspective.

You can add a branch to an existing tree of narratives that have been started from a “seed” animation from seven artists. You can add onto those, or start your own.

You can watch a video intro of it here and the making of here.

Why I’m curious:

The trend of collaborative web is becoming a new norm. The new generation of digital users are so accustomed to this that it is popping up in app, website and even companies from Quirky to Kickstarter.

Spreading Ideas Through Hairdressers

Who’s one person you trust, see multiple times a year for long sessions, and talk to about everything? Your hairdresser! TEDxBuenosAires, who was unable to make a huge impact on the Latin community, reached out to 60 hairdressers known for their conversational skills and invited them to their 6 hour event. The hairdressers then went back and shared these ideas with their Clients, reaching over 7,500 people along the way (about seven times the audience of TEDx BuenosAires!).

Why I’m Curious: I love this idea from both a brand and human perspective. From a brand perspective, TEDx found a way to really deliver on their brand promise (“ideas worth spreading”) and literally bring it to life. And from a human perspective, I love the notion of an often ignored but powerful group really being recognized. I wish more brands thought of meaningful ways to bring in cab drivers, porters, and other individuals who see and impact a significant number of people every day.

Hidden Hashtags & Crowd Sourced Twitter Mosaics

– Kate

To announce the launch of The Dark Night Rises, viewers were sent to a dedicated website:  http://www.thedarkknightrises.com/.   A few moments after arriving to the page, I kept refreshing in the expectation that something would load, whilst wondering what the weird, eery sound track playing on the site was. On further scrutiny however, I finally identified the “rises.wav” file placed in the middle of the screen, which was camouflaged by the black color of the page.

Turns out, users who took this audio file and looked at the “audio spectrum analysis,” uncovered the hidden twitter hashtag #thefirerises. This in turn sent users to the @thefirerises twitter handle,which as more and more people tweeted about it, generated a mosaic in real time of the character Bane, played by Tom Hardy.

The feed seems to have used an automated response to direct twitterers to the mosaic when they mentioned the hashtag #thefirerises. You can see the twitter handle here, and the mosaic image here.  I’ll admit that on arrival to the mosaic, I was a little disappointed that I’d missed all the action and that there was nothing left for me to engage with.

Why I’m Curious

The challenge of uncovering hidden tweets using spectrum analysis certainly adds a compelling element of mystery to the campaign, and incentivizes people to follow the @thefirerises handle — participation which is paid off at the end when the mosaic of Bane begins to form. It also shows how online users are getting more savvy, and that programs that tailor to that by providing tools that add “game” type qualities (by utilizing twitter hashtags as a way not only to promote campaigns but to be a central part of it) leads to a more immersive and impactful experience.

If you’re still curious to experience how the hidden hashtags are revealed for yourself, drop the “rises.wav” file into Apple’s Soundtrack Pro, click on the VIEW option up top, then click on the FILE EDITOR DISPLAY drop down menu option…then SHOW SPECTRUM.