Creative: Crystal English, Leynete Cariapa, Animation: Sliced Bread, Music: EliasArts, Audio: Green-Shoot, Recorded at Dammit Ltd., Voice: Lawrence Sheldon, Twestival Bird: 383 Project, Video Footage: charity: water, Thanks to What Talent Ltd., Produced by Connect the Dots Foundation, Photography Courtesy of National Geographic (c) James P. Blair/ National Geographic, Gabriele Gaspardis, Justin Sangani, Brooks Walker/ National Geographic, Johannes Ehrhardt, James P. Blair/ National Geographic images

What is Twestival™?

On Thursday 25 March 2010, people in hundreds of cities around the world will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness.  Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good.  All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.  If you would like to get involved, please Register your City, Register your School, or Volunteer and we will get in touch.  Organizers will be given a handbook and invitation to our collaboration workspace.  Follow @twestival for updates.

The Innovative Schools Toolkit is an accessible and practical guide for you and your school community to begin the journey of innovation.  It’s intended to be a starting point rather than a complete solution and it offers a process that can be customized based on your unique needs.

The online toolkit is part of Microsoft’s Partners In Learning initiative and the application allows schools to asses their positioning using the multiple choice tool which displays online graphs. The toolkit also plays out video and allows schools access to download documents.

The online game 1066 won a BIMA last Thursday (19th Nov 2009) for Best Online Game, The BIMA awards  ‘celebrate the work of the UK digital creative industry’. As previously blogged we were responsible for creating over 270 animated assets in just over 2-weeks. Preloaded did all the creative and site development, and we created the Norman, Viking, Saxon and Villager character animation elements. We are very proud to be part of its success, the quality of the game speaks for itself in terms of the gaming results:

Since launching in May 2009, the game has received an overwhelmingly positive response from both the gaming community and online press.

The project has received no marketing budget, simply relying on the audience and community to seed and share between themselves. The traffic to date is testament to the quality of the game and the compelling nature of the content.

The Multi-player mode plays a large part in the distribution mechanic of the game and this is reflected in the continued and sustained and growth in traffic and game-play duration.

Effectiveness

> Number 1 search result in google for ‘1066′
> Current total game-plays standing at over 5 million
> Average game duration over 25 minutes

And the reviews:

“If half the Proper Wargames released each year showed as much imagination, style and spirit as 1066 the genre would be in a far healthier state”

Tim Stone – rockpapershotgun.com

“Pleasing to play and pleasing to the eye. Check it out.”

Brian Ashcroft – kotaku.com

Glory Days – Football in Times of War is a short film aimed at engaging teachers, students and football fans of all ages with the website of the same name at cwgc.org/glorydays

Introduced by David Beckham and enthusiastic football manager Boyce Dungood, Glory Days tells the stories of some of the footballers who gave their lives for their countries and how they are remembered. It explores how the two world wars affected football teams and how football played a part in times of war as entertainment, for boosting morale and for propaganda.

Argos have recently launched this Sliced Bread created game (client: Meteorite) to coincide with their ‘Toy Tester for Year‘ competition and ‘Big Play’ Roadshows. The game has 3 competency zones, each with 4 playable levels. Players can also invite their friends to join them in mini high scoreboards. You can play the game here.

I’m Angus and this is my awesome Toy Testing factory. It’s my job to make sure all the toys are off the Fun-o-meter scale! But there are so many great toys here, I need another Toy Tester to help me. So let’s see if you’re up to the job. Collect as many toys as possible from the Big Play Area zones – the clock is ticking!

From an initial observation the HP Dream Colour monitor is amazing, the colours are showing very vibrant and rich against our normal monitors and it doesn’t seem to reflect the outside light so much either. The Z800 machine itself is quite compact for sooo much power, its also very quiet! Working in Maya we haven’t noticed a massive change in speeding up the workflow (yet) compared to our normal machines, but we ran a few test on the rendering last night and it is comparably faster.

From a production perspective, it has been agreed with all studios, that all sequences will be kept closely under wraps until all they are all put together. A couple of frames from our storyboard are shown below but that doesn’t really give away much! Last week we worked on some preparation including the story and also rigging the character, so that we can get the animation we require during our week.

Caroline Hampstead – Copywriter (www.carolinehampstead.com) has kindly written a voice-over for us and Green-Shoot (www.green-shoot.com) has provided the voice recording (more on the voice-over artist and sound FX later). We will try and blog progress on a daily basis, so check back back here for regular updates . . .