Back in November, Internet Week Europe happened – many of you might better know it as #iwe11. Last year, we challenged London’s digital elite to get their hands dirty and code up a storm in an afternoon. This year, we did something altogether more warm and fuzzy.

This November, we asked people to step forward and bare their souls for TaleTorrent – a night of true stories about the internet. And step forward they did! We had a truly fantastic lineup of speakers telling stories from the funny to the sad, the professional to the personal, but all extremely entertaining. Thank you guys, again.

It was very much a night run on volunteer goodwill – not least from the guys at Kinura, who approached us a full three days before the event and said “hey, d’you want us to stream it online?”

We said an emphatic yes. And so, for anybody that missed it, grab some port and enjoy after dinner.

TALETORRENT – PART ONE

Featuring @BetaRish and @mndtrythnkng‘s ultimate answer to Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?”,@katylindemann‘s True Confessions Of A Teenage Weblogger, @documentally‘s 999-style car crash reenactment, and @claireburge‘s paean to the gods of Serendipity.

TALETORRENT – PART TWO

Featuring @jnicholasgeist‘s Zombie apocalypse night-on-the-tiles (a transatlantic special!), @simonsanders‘ pen-pal to PM saga, @mananatomorrow‘s cyberphilic daughter, and my experiences of chartroom romance, of a sort.

…and if you enjoyed that, know now that there are plans for TaleTorrentTwo, to land sometime in March. A little less rushed this time around. Details will come when they exist, but if you’re inspired by what you’ve seen and you want to have a go, drop me an email at james.mitchell@bbh-labs.com. We’d love to have you.

Photo by @saneel via @instagram, SxSW 2011

Although it seems insanely early every year, it’s time to start voting for panels at SxSW. Instead of spamming our professional and personal feeds with requests for support, we’re continuing a tradition we began last year of consolidating all of our potential panels into a single post.

So, if any of the below seems mildly interesting, we’d greatly appreciate a vote. All of the summaries below click-thru to the appropriate panel picker page at sxsw.com. Regardless, we’re quite excited to attend to hear what others have to say. We value the experience every year, and as always we digest everything with the benefit of context you all as the loyal Labs community provide us.

Skynet vs. Mad Max: Battle for the Future

In this session, our own Mel Exon (@melex) and Google’s Tom Uglow (@tomux) will discuss two possible futures of the web:

1. A highly controlled algorithm-driven web where people and brands are matched perfectly via formula and AI, in a spam-free nirvana.
2. An ongoing battle of people and brands seeking to be discovered, creating an open web with neutral techn partners and real-world spaces where tech doesn’t penetrate.

Find out more, vote and add your support here.

Chief Innovation Officers Defend Their Titles

The topic of this panel was born of conversation frequently discussed on our blog in 2011: do agencies really need someone to run innovation? In this session four innovation leaders, including our Saneel Radia (@saneel) and Labs founder (now client at Google Creative Lab) Ben Malbon (@malbonnington), will answer hard questions about the value of such a role, what it actually entails, and what makes a good candidate to play the part. The panel also includes Edward Boches of Mullen (@edwardboches), Dave Armano of Edelman (@armano) and David Erixon (@dexodexo), founder of Hyper Island.

Find out more, vote and add your support here.

The South By Shark Tank: Pitch Your Big Idea

This panel features Neil Munn, Global Head of BBH Zag, along with other ad industry investment professionals. In this session, the audience is invited to present their elevator pitches and receive high-level advice on how to prime the proposals for investment. Press coverage for the most attractive investments is built in via our friends at PSFK (@psfk).

Find out more, vote and add your support here.

Game My Brand

BBH planner Tim Jones (@timjonestweet) will outline “gaming brands,” an approach to brand strategy built on gaming principles. This approach represents a fundamental shift from building brands as message transmission devices, to building brands as behaviour change systems. This talk will feature new material built on content Tim previously covered in his TEDx talk of the same name.

Find out more, vote and add your support here.

Your Story Sucks! Saving Story in the Digital Age

In this session, three BBH storytellers (including @jamescmitchell, @writingstudio, and @depechetoad) from different backgrounds share the results of in-field storywriting experiments from standup to novel-writing to radio plays to alternate reality games. They’ve tried it all, and are going to try and explain what works. This is not a panel – think of it as a three-man show. This is a theoretical session, with practical homework.

Find out more, vote and add your support here.

My Mom Plays That: How Women Game-Change Gaming

As women play casual games in ever-increasing numbers, this session will examine what this means for the development of casual and traditional games. It will specifically look at how the psychology of women influences the psychology of game developers. The purpose of this presentation by BBH social media manager Claire Coady (@claire_coady) is to examine how women are influencing the seismic shifts underway across the gaming landscape.

Find out more, vote and add your support here.

Well, here we go again.

This past summer we tried a little intern experiment at BBH New York called the Barn (and actually wrote our very first post about the idea here).

The Barn is all about trying new ways of working and finding new solutions to old problems. We bring in six interns, put them in teams and give them a problem to solve. A tough problem. A problem that requires moxy and guts. Last summer it was “Here’s $1000, make something famous” and the funny thing is, through a great idea, lots of work and some wicked use of the web, one team actually did.

The upshot is that we had a great summer and in the true spirit of beta and chaos, we learned a lot. So we’re going to do it again. Want to apply? You can do it here.

In the meantime, we asked one of our Barn’ers from last summer, Daniel Edmundson, to outline what the Barn was all about and what he learned. His rather astute thoughts are below:

The following Barnisms, we believe, provide a valid offering of the Barn experience. As the industry moves toward a more hybrid model in mentality, specialty and creative sheen (see: Voltron), individuals with little to no experience in the ad world can contribute some pretty weird and crazy ideas while embracing the truths of technology, brands and businesses.

Here’s what we gleaned:

People are smart and all, but it’s nothing if you’re not nice.

Folks at BBH go by this axiom, and it can at first be daunting to accept. There is an innate inferiority to the intern experience, and it’s not easy to shake. But the Barn was built on the idea of integration within the agency–not just integration by discipline and interest, but by collaboration and lending new thoughts.

For us, it was as basic a learning as knowing it’s cool to pitch your early ideas to one of the creative teams, or discuss ongoing strategy with top planners. It was about access to smarts, and being comfortable saying, “I need your brain.”

Be clear. Very, very clear.

At a time when our social lives are as open and transparent as a storefront window, our communications, we learned, must follow suit. When members of the media or the ad community challenged the social relevancy and sincerity of the projects we were executing, we were immediately honest about our motivations and our associations to BBH. Not only did it help us to move forward to better develop the idea, it got the subject out early and placed the focus back on what was important.

Feed feed feed.

When consumers commit to a brand or platform, they formulate expectations.And with the brevity and ubiquity of stuff today, those expectations need to be forthright and on schedule—they must live and operate as their character does.

We learned that, especially when making a chronological or episodic product (say, 30 dates/30 days or a constant cookie delivery), content must deliver on that promise.  The market, particularly online, is one big ocean of fishes and underwater activity—there are sharks that are hungry for new feed all the time.  It’s important to keep them full.

Build dynamics from those around you.

Little was more important than realizing the crazy importance of working in a team. Put together at the start of 10 weeks with complete strangers, we had to recognize strengths early, put egos aside and move very quickly to process ideas.

Most importantly, it was designing a system with the insurmountable intelligence that we had on hand to make things happen.

Become a community manager.

Whether it was living in the online space or in the physical, both teams had to pay careful attention to what was being voiced and how to respond. As we developed each project monitoring feedback and reacting quickly became paramount—even more so, understanding how particular channels consumed and reacted to the bits of information informed our output as we moved along.

Understand and do timely collaboration.

Make it messy. Curate timelines for concepts to enter in and out, and bring everybody in. Collaboration should be like a big party, with everyone invited and all ideas honorable. The Barn is an incubator for collaboration—but it needs to be controlled and relevant to real-world happenings and interactions, or else it could be DOA.

Speak many languages, and carry a big idea.

Everyone in the Barn came from disparate backgrounds and it was very easy to simplify being very good at one thing. Whether it was coding, filming or writing copy, it was imperative that we leaned on other efficiencies to make each project work. The idea ran faster, operated better and was more agile with the distribution of skills and resources.

Question culture.

You must be curious, and you must ask why (or why not). This goes both for the culture within the wooden walls of the Barn, as well as outside in the fields and world-at-large. Be all, WTF about the workings of things, the lives of people and the wherewithal of ideas. Well-traveled—physically and mentally.

It’s like championing @kanyewest, AND questioning if the @John_Hegarty Twitter handle was a genuine or a fraud.

Beta can save your life, and your livelihood.

As many in the ad world can attest, it’s simply our nature to constantly massage, tinker with and hold close the ideas that are meant for the world. Getting them out into the real world early and often (half-dressed and really ugly, even) can pay off and help to shape the route towards the road ahead.

Make friends, be human.

While brands and businesses are trying so hard to be all the more human (and their agencies doing some of the handholding and small talking along the way), we forget too often that we, too, should do the same.  Many in the Barn joined the soccer team, celebrated camaraderie with fellow black sheep and spent quality time with our mentors, all in the hope of forming a strong kinship with the offices. It worked. So much of BBH (and I’d hope the world) is about the people you work with; it’s about getting to know them and how they’re a genius at everything.

(Internships start in January. Apply here.)

Light Drive from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.

Stop motion form and colour, using light painting techniques.
Lighting: Kim Pimmel
Sound: Tron Legacy trailers

—

From Kim Pimmel’s Vimeo site, more detail:

I’ve been interested in taking my Light Study photo series and evolving them into motion pieces. I shot a lot of footage for a VJ gig for FITC San Francisco. So I edited together those stop motion sequences, mashed up some audio from the Tron Legacy trailers, and out came Light Drive.

The video is stop motion, so every frame is an individually shot photograph. Each photograph is a long exposure photo, with exposures reaching up to 20 seconds in some cases.

To control the lights, I used an Arduino controlled via bluetooth to drive a stepper motor. The stepper motor controls the movements of the lights remotely from Processing.

The light sources include cold cathode case lights, EL wire, lasers and more.

—

via @finnbarrw (the constant source of the most magical films and special effects)

The latest in our recent series of brilliant non-digital awesomeness (see also the incredible projection show in Kharkov & Target’s spectacular light show at the Standard Hotel in NYC).

French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond created this stop-motion video showing Pac-Man being played at a movie theater in Switzerland last month. The project had 111 patient volunteers sit, shift, and change shirts over the course of more than four hours.

This is the fifth video in Reymond’s GAME OVER project, in which he recreates classic arcade games with humans as pixels. See more here (including Pong, Space Invaders & Tetris).

(via Laughing Squid, Peta Pixel & Finnbarr Webster)

And here’s a little more info on Instant, if Bob’s demo leaves you slightly confused. Apparently Google Instant will save 350 million hours of user time per year.

As the summer begins to fade in our minds on a rainy day like this, its all too easy to forget the simple joys of a day at the beach. This film is a lovely reminder and shot and scored very beautifully. Enjoy.

Be sure to watch in HD, full screen. Even more stunning.

(Image courtesy of Mother website)

This is an extraordinary piece of work. Enormous kudos to Mother NYC for pulling off what must have seemed like a extraordinary idea on paper but a monumentally tricky idea to execute (think: no rehearsals, no back-up).

Last week in NYC Mother NYC teamed up with Target to create this great installation at the Standard Hotel in NYC. Over 170 rooms were used, synced with LED lights, performers and a host of other action going on at ground level.

It’s bold, surprising and certainly contains more than a nod to the type of visual effects more usually experienced in digital formats. But executed as 100% analogue.

From Mother’s site:

What do you call 20 sensory-overloaded minutes fashioned out of 60+ dancers, an original visual program created by Daft Punk’s light designers, a new pop symphony from one-half of N.A.S.A. and 170 rooms of New York’s Standard Hotel? You could start with “Spectacular,” but even that seems limiting. This one-time-only show for Target’s original fashion lines is just about the coolest and most unique event Mother’s ever produced!

Enjoy the film (the visual treats really begin 40 seconds from the start).

It reminds us of this video, by Etienne De Crecy, one of our favourites here at BBH Labs, but done on a monumental scale.

Etienne De Crecy Live 2007 Transmusicales de Rennes from Clement bournat on Vimeo.