Last Friday in Cannes, BBH’s own Sir John Hegarty gave the following speech co-authored with co-founder Nigel Bogle (Nigel was unfortunately unable to join him due to illness).

The premise of their speech is powerfully simple: growth needs space. Space needs difference.

Of course we could simply have put the video of Sir John’s speech here on the blog, alongside the slideshare. However, as @jeremyet puts it: ‘given the opportunity to celebrate the power of difference, we wondered whether we could develop something fast that would give the viewer of the filmed speech a different and enhanced experience. Cue vidazzl, which brings to life relevant keyword searches from across the web as you watch the speech.

We’re planning on making this a platform where anyone can upload a speech and display it in a, well, vidazzled version, but for now you can view Sir John’s speech from the Cannes Festival here and, of course, let us know your thoughts on the talk, on the presentation and on the difference.’

Gabor (Creative Technologist) adds a note on the choice of technology and the time frame:

‘The oldest email I found in my mailbox about vidazzl is just a bit more than a month old. Despite the short deadline I had no doubt that it should be an HTML5 project because WebGL fits perfectly for the idea and I wanted to play with it for a while. I used mr.doob’s Three.js, a really, really cool library for Javascript based 3D and it was only a couple of hours to build the first prototype. Throughout the whole building process I used WebGL and Chrome, but according to the security issues, I finally decided to do the rendering without WebGL. The reason is that Firefox5 and Chrome Canary both block images from other domains to be used as textures and that would stopped us using Flickr images. The positive side of this change is that it now works fine in most browsers (at least in the ones we’ve been able to test so far).’

vidazzl credits:

Jeremy Ettinghausen – Creative Director

Gabor Szalatnyai – Creative Technologist

Nick Fell – Strategist

Felipe Guimaraes – Art Director

Lambros Charalambous – Copywriter

Adam Oppenheimer – Art Director

Joe Oppenheimer – Copywriter

Eric Chia – Head of Digital Design, Addictive Pixel

Keith Bone – Digital Designer, Addictive Pixel

Romy Miller – Team Director