Team Rubber BlogTeam Rubber talks on the Internet in a blog

TedXBristol was awesome. A really inspiring selection of speakers and performers sourced from Bristol and the surrounds. Here are my highlights:

1: It was very slick and well organised. Well presented, well run, and well curated. Well done to @khbelizaire and the team who put it together.

2: Sir Richard Noble was just incredible. He reminded me of John Cleese if John Cleese were an unstoppable force hellbent on a lifelong mission to drive cars insanely fast. He was a natural raconteur who was simultaneously inspiring, funny and informative. I could have listened to him talk about his exploits all day. And the way his team is running their Bloodhound SSC project as an open data programme everyone can learn from is fantastic.

3: Arthur Potts Dawson from the People’s Supermarket gave a great impassioned speech about how he created the UK’s first not for profit people run supermarket. A real inspiration for the potential to change the current supermarket power battle that we’ve all seemingly resigned ourselves to. Find out more at http://www.thepeoplessupermarket.org/

4: Professor Mervyn Miles of Bristol Universities Nanoscience and Quantum Information Centre gave a talk that kept surpassing itself in the sheer scale of incredibleness, as he explained how he and his team used a contact based microscope to feel atoms, then wired this up to an ipod inspired multi-touch input screen allowing the atoms to be moved around, and then wired that up to a feedback glove so the relative forces required to move nano-particles around could be felt by the operator. I mean that’s just nuts (in a good way). He wasn’t sure what it was exactly useful for yet, but its so mind blowingly incredible I’m sure we’ll know what its useful for sometime soon (like Steve Jobs said in his amazing Stanford lecture, sometimes the logic of these things only makes sense in the rear view mirror).

5: Imogen Heap’s performance using Thomas Mitchell’s interactive musical gloves was brain-fryingly cool. None of the individual elements of this project are wholy new. The gloves are like the 3 generations more evolved child of some scratch mitts that were being demoed in Bristol about 8 years ago, looping the voice and instruments has been done brilliantly by many people including the awesome TuneYards, and Imogen Heap has been brilliant before, but somehow they’ve taken all these elements and brought them together with an elegance and panache that makes it look like they just stepped out of the future to show us how they do music back there.

Here’s the only bit of video of it I can find yet:

There were loads of other great bits. Tony Bury of Mowgli talking about the importance of Mentors. Dan Efergan and Gav Strange from Aardman talking about playfulness. Chris Chalkley from the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft explaining recapping on how the area had evolved over the last 5 years.

But the great thing about an event like TedX is how it exposes you to things you didn’t expect, and so the things I enjoyed the most were the things that I didn’t go there to see. A brilliant and rewarding event.

I went to a fantastic panel today at SXSW in which Gaby Brink, Eric Doversberger and Ingrid Kopp discussed a new open source tool they have created called the IMPACT DASHBOARD.

Although not launched yet, the tool aims to allow anyone who wants to to monitor the outreach and effects of content they place online. The tool can track most of the stuff you’d want to (video platforms, facebook, twitter, and many more) but given its open source the community will be able to extend this as people work out exactly how they want to use this tool.

The concept of this is not wholly original, but the execution means it looks hopeful this is a major leap forward, especially for content creators and storytellers in general – for two reasons.

1: Ease of use. Its designed to be set up by anyone
2: Visual appeal. It has been designed to be easy to engage with by the non-technical.

It turns the outcome of things your content achieves online into something easy to engage with and active (you can link to direct action from the visualisations it delivers)

This is especially powerful for storytellers working in issues based or social change areas, where they can monitor (and show to their community and their funders) the results of their activity, and engage them with further action off the back of it.

Whether or not the tool lives up to its promises, it opened a whole can of interesting worms in my mind in showing how data around your action can be used very publicly to open, increase and deepen the conversation between storyteller and audience. It makes seeing what’s going on online because of things you’ve done, fun, shareable, and easy. And that’s a whole new layer of conversation right there.

The awesome Sustrans, who have built a network of cycle tracks across the whole of the UK, just launched their My National Cycle network campaign which challenges people to make a film about their use of the National Cycle Network. Entry is easy (you can make a film on your mobile if you don’t have a video camera) and prizes are great:
- Under 11′s: Behind the scenes tour of Aardman
- 11 – 17: 4 VIP tickets to the Relentless Extreme Sports festival
- Adults: Four night UK holiday for four in a log cabin.

Check out My NCN here >>

And check out the film we made to promote it here:

We’ve loved the work of Sustrans for years. The organisation started in our building, and as pretty much everyone working for Team Rubber cycles to work, and some for pleasure too, they’re always people we love to work with. So enter their competition!

So Cornelius had an adventure today as planned. But unfortunately it was of the damp kind. Cornelius’ voyage of human discovery will now happen on revised dates, starting next Monday, in Bristol.

Bristol May 3rd << Click for map
Birmingham May 7th << Click for map
Cardiff May 8th << Click for map

Keep up with his adventures on his blog: www.crosscountrycornelius.com

For the next three days, we’re going to be out and about on the cycle tracks of Britain with our own time travelling tweed clad alien, Cornelius. He’s going to be being chauffeured around the country interviewing people in his cosy private cinema.

The lovely chap is working with us on a film project for cycle charity Sustrans , celebrating 15 years of the National Cycle Network. Cornelius has a high def camera built into his single cycloptic eye, and asks questions every time you hold his hand. We’re hoping the cosy environs of his interview booth will allow passers by to open up to him about their feelings about cycling and walking on the national network of car free tracks.

Cornelius’ itinery is as follows. COME AND MEET HIM!:

Thurs April 29th: Bristol << Click for a map!
Fri April 30th: Birmingham << Click for a map!
Sat May 1st: Cardiff << Click for a map!

...and he’ll be blogging about his exploits at www.crosscountrycornelius.com

So we’re in the final 6 of the fantastic iFeatures scheme in Bristol. Phew, and thanks to lots of hard work from writer Carol Noble and producer Nick Pitt. Our film “The Bristol Job” will tell the story of an 11 year old girl who frustrated at her family’s poverty (exacerbated by her father losing his job at the Keynsham Cadburies plant) faces the prospect of not being able to afford her final school trip, so decides to rob a bank with her two best mates. Its a heist movie with a difference.

You can keep up with “The Bristol Job” team blog here.

You can follow our heroine Billie Diamond on twitter here or click on the image below.

You can see the other finalists here. I didn’t intend to be quite so prominent in this photo. But it appears I am.

Is your Keynote programme being a big fat c*ck pain in the neck?

At Team Rubber most of us use Mac’s all day every day. Ever use the Shift + Apple + 4 screenshot function? We all do. Ever noticed how sometimes Keynote presentations suddenly inflate in size to make you think “Have I accidentally embedded the Beatles back catalog?”.

Well this seems to be one of those ridiculous quirks of macs. It seems to be because the screenshots on a mac create PNG files. And when you embed PNG files in Keynote they for some reason become huge. Upwards of 30Mb. Bit rude to e-mail.

So the solution is to make your mac take screenshots as JPEG’s. And its really easy.

1: Go to Application -> Utilities and open Terminal.

2: Copy and paste this line of code (minus the arrows) in and hit enter.

>> defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

3: Restart your computer.

Voila – your computer takes screenshots as JPEGs and Keynote stops being such a pain = <10Mb presentations.

That has to be my geekiest blog post ever. I hope its useful. To balance the internet Karma here is a picture of Keith Richards.

Keith

The iFeatures blogs (which we’re in the finals of) have launched over at the iFeatures website. Check out our team blog here and all the teams in the iFeatures final here.

Our project is called “The Bristol Job” and is a family heist movie about an 11 year old girl who discovers her parents are too poor to pay for her last school trip so decides to rob a bank with her two best friends.

The last few weeks have been a little busy! I entered the iFeatures competition months back but wasn’t aware I was on the scheme until last week when I got a call asking me to meet a writer and producer who had got through to the final 12 without a director. I had had a project in the final 25, which didn’t get through, but the panel wanted me to meet these two (Nick Pitt and Carol Noble) to discuss whether I would be suitable for their project. After a hasty meeting and a weekend of phone discussion I was on board.

I’ve just returned from the kickoff of the iFeatures development process. Two days of intensive workshops in Bristol with much more experienced industry writers, directors, producers and distributors coming in to give feedback on our projects and advice on how to get them to the next stage. These workshops can be a bit gruelling. The teams in the final 12 all have hefty experience in the film world (albeit in very varied guises) and I think there was a general sense of apprehension at the start of the two days as everyone must have experience of similar “development” workshops that can either be tiringly spirit crushing or annoyingly useless.

We shouldn’t have worried. It was great. In fact a number commented that if this two days was all they got out of the project, having had some great advice and tips, that would probably make the effort worthwhile.

But there’s lots more work to do. So it was to the organisers and speakers (including Laurence Coriat, Asif Kapadia, Lawrence Gough, Peter Ettedgui, and David Shear from Revolver) credit that everyone was left feeling charged and energised, as we’ve all got a lot of work to do getting our projects in shape for another round of pitching in mid March.

It seems there is a terrible threat on the rampage round Bristol. Our Snowzilla has been destroyed, and only the most formidable snow creature would be able to win a battle with something as “Roar-wsome” as Snowzilla, so this is a hysterical public service announcement to be on your guard…We feel it most likely it is a snow King Kong or a snow Pterodactyl that could have surprised the Snowzilla from above…



Snowzilla Slain...